“Being a couple and managing the company together is our great competitive advantage,” explain Olga Llopis (42) and Javier Velilla (44) who, in addition to being managing partners of the branding agency Comuniza, have been together for almost thirty years. “We are very complementary and we are super aligned. We are very clear about our roadmap. Furthermore, we have a lot of space to talk,” they tell La Vanguardia in their offices located in Poblenou.
In a survey by the Infojobs job portal last year, 14% of workers declare that they have or have had a romantic relationship with a person in their work environment. More than half (56%) of those declared relationships still exist. When this same consultation was made in 2018, in a pre-pandemic context, that percentage was just over double (31%). What happens when work and love mix?
“It can be very nice because you share the same passion, the same goal. This means that they can have a lot of complicity in their daily lives and a very strong understanding. In most cases, they do not need to communicate as much to be able to understand each other,” says Júlia Pascual, founding psychologist of the Strategic Brief Therapy center in Barcelona.
In this type of couples - indicates the expert - there may be harmony and mutual understanding regarding logistics, schedules and peaks of stress or increased workload. “If both of you are healthcare workers, for example, you are not going to ask your partner to disconnect from work while you have a patient admitted or an important surgery the next day. She's going to understand. This makes it a lot easier. You feel supported,” says Pascual, although she clarifies that the other side of this is that they are both under a lot of stress.
“We have to travel a lot to Latin America for work. They are trips of more than ten thousand kilometers. Me telling Olga or her telling me, who can understand each other perfectly, is not the same as having to explain it to someone who works for someone else,” says Javier Velilla, co-CEO of Comuniza.
“Our vital moments at home and in the company are the same. If you've had a bad day, you don't need to explain it to me, because I already know. This makes it much easier for the personal to be in tune with the professional and vice versa,” says Olga Llopis, his partner.
Like those soccer teams that seem to play from memory, they don't need to explain things to each other to know that the ball will be on the right foot, at the right time. They can read each other and make decisions at “hyperspeed.” They have their own language; So much so that one of his biggest challenges is training his managers so that they can follow that ball and not be left out of the conversation.
That well-oiled tiki-taka is what surely explains his victories. “It gives us a lot of agility, it makes us able to be more decisive and get where we want more quickly and reliably,” says Olga. During 2022 alone, they reached 1.5 million euros in turnover, of which 30% correspond to international projects. In its twelve years of experience, her company has accumulated more than 800 projects in eleven countries.
Paula (24) and Juan (28) have been running the travel platform “Veteporahi” together (on Instagram @veteporahi.viajes) for a year. He studied tourism and she studied journalism. “They are two worlds that converge very well,” they say. Before they met, both already had very similar projects in mind. They didn't imagine that they would end up doing it, but in pairs.
“Contrary to what is often believed, which is that working together is exhausting, it is also very enjoyable. It is very satisfying to see how we both put a lot of effort into something and have it work. That strengthens you as a couple,” says Paula. For them, their project is more than a job. “It allows us to do what we like most, which is travel. It is not only sharing a job, but also something that we have both always enjoyed doing,” says Juan.
“There are couples where the members are very secure, have a lot of maturity and great self-knowledge, very good communication, and they separate the personal and the professional very well. In those cases, it can be a great benefit for the couple,” says the Founder and Director of the Clinical Psychology Center in Badalona Mercè Rovira, although she warns: “Many companies do not want to have partners on their teams. It can be difficult to carry. If it doesn't work, then they have to continue working, projects can get pigeonholed and a bad environment can be created.”
In his experience, the mix between work and love “is usually complex, because fears, ghosts, insecurities and expectations can appear that destroy everything. They can function very well as a couple and then not be complementary at work, or vice versa. When it comes to a couple that undertakes their own project, there are even more difficulties. The smaller the project is, the more complicated it is to be able to separate and say: 'Today is Sunday, let's enjoy it.'"
The main problem that Júlia Pascual observes in her consultation, “is when there is difficulty separating personal life from work life. They bring work home. If they are also two very passionate people who really like what they do, it is difficult for them to disconnect. If you have children, this can affect them greatly. In therapy, we want them to start leaving work at work.”
“If you don't plot plots, the work tends to take everything. Furthermore, in a case like ours, where we are both partners in a company that continually grows, there is no limit if you don't set it,” says Javier Velilla. “When we come to work together, on the way we talk about work things. When we return home, we only talk about things from home,” explains Olga. “This helps us a lot, because when we pick up our daughter from school, we have our heads where she touches. In front of her, we don't talk about work,” says Javier.
For Javier Velilla and Olga Llopis, having a single common agenda helps them maintain a clear line between the two worlds they share. “We have everything together, the personal and professional aspects of each one, so we can both see how to balance activities with just a glance,” they indicate. When one of them has to travel for work, take training or teach a class, the other covers the household chores and caring for their eight-year-old daughter.
They work like a perfect gear. “We even thought about our training plan in such a way that the sum of their abilities and mine would be as broad and complementary as possible,” says Javier.
According to the Infojobs report, 73% of relationships occur between coworkers, while relationships with managers are 14% and with subordinates are 8%. By gender, men report more relationships with subordinates (12% compared to 4% of women) and women report more relationships with superiors (15% vs. 12%). How do couples manage this hierarchy at work?
Carla (this is not her real name), 33 years old, started working with her partner when they had been dating for five months. He was the owner and CEO of an industrial machinery company and she joined the company as a general assistant. “From the beginning, everyone knew who I was,” she says.
“We really liked going to work together every day. We complemented each other very well and when he traveled for work I was in charge of everything. She was his most trusted person, his eyes. “No one was going to take more care of the company than him or me,” explains Carla.
Working in the same company had many advantages. “We had lunch, went on business trips together and then stayed on vacation for two more days. If I felt bad or had to do some paperwork, I stayed home and didn't have to tell anyone,” she says and indicates: “We worked together for six years until our baby arrived, two years ago. After maternity leave, I decided to become a freelancer, a little to manage my time and also to change the atmosphere of the family a little. Today, he asks me to come back, but I am very comfortable with my new job.”
Sharing the work environment also posed challenges. “In the hallways, he always heard the typical criticism of the boss. When I found out about a problem, I had no choice but to tell them about it,” says Carla and adds: “From day zero, we made it a rule not to talk about work at home, although many times it was impossible and we ended up bringing work problems home. “We have argued about work issues at home and we have moved issues from home to the office.”
“I always recommend that there be a pact of silence at home. When you get home, you don't talk about work and the use of cell phones is limited. That should be the norm, with minimal exceptions. If you need to talk about a pending work issue, you can ask your partner and set a specific time and place to do it. You have to have good communication and establish very clear limits,” says psychologist Júlia Pascual.
“We have had some discussions about how to do the work, which we would not have had if we did not work in the same place,” says Rafael Lozano (43), who met his current partner, Ana Gálvez (24) at his work, almost two years ago.
Both are emergency health technicians. He has eighteen years of work experience and she has little more than the time they have been together. They see the fact of being able to spend more time together as something positive and Rafael likes being able to offer work advice to his partner.
The fact that the rest of their classmates knew that they are a couple has led to some resentment. “People sometimes talk about her, some think that it could have favored her in some way. It's not like that, everything she achieved was because of her good work,” says Rafael Lozano.
“If the couple has the same position, there is no problem at the group level. The problem is when one has a lower position. Many feel observed and judged as the 'protected', the 'connected', as if there was favoritism towards them; They feel that what they do is not valued because it is believed that their partner has done it and they can suffer a lot of insecurity, anxiety and feel like they have imposter syndrome,” says Júlia Pascual.
Another disadvantage of combining love and work that the expert observes is that one of the members of the couple may feel overwhelmed by spending so much time together. “You have to organize very well so that both can have their time and space of privacy, of life without each other,” says Pascual.
“If I need time alone, I make it clear. I am more of a person who needs an individual, independent space. I say it, I go out for a run and that's it,” says Juan. The project that he carries out with his partner Paula means that they are often together “24/7”. Both are clear about the best way to carry out their daily lives. “The more communication, the easier everything happens,” they say.
“At first there were more problems, but we talked among ourselves and tried not to take our work home. Our strategy is to talk everything,” says emergency technician Rafael Lozano.
For Paula and Juan it is also important not to commit too much to their point of view. “You have to learn not to get stubborn. There is no need to argue about things that lead nowhere. The other person may have a different thought, but he does not mean that it is wrong,” explains Paula.
For the CEOs of Comuniza, it is also important that their perspectives do not compete, but rather complement each other. "We don't have this 'I'm right' or 'I want to do it this way' thing. It's not that my idea has to succeed, I don't care who it is. The important thing is that the client has the best response,” says Olga Llopis.
“This communication is essential and also that both people can understand that, in a football team, who scores the goals is just as important as who scores them,” says clinical psychologist Mercè Rovira.
“He is more about looking for ideas, solutions, exploring paths…” explains Olga Llopis about her partner and partner, Javier Velilla. “And you get us to the place,” he completes.
