Sex in the workplace is far more common than we thought…or hoped. Everybody is at it and the upcoming Christmas party is when it’s most likely to happen, discovers a shocked James Ford

I have been thinking a lot about Aerosmith lately. They are America’s bestselling hard rock band, apparently. Their canon of songs includes many hit records, especially that iconic power ballad from the movie . Over the past 50 years or so they have undeniably shaped the popular zeitgeist. However, I had never really considered their impact on corporate culture. Why would I? Big hair and loud power chords do not really overlap with a world built around spreadsheets and hot-desking. But it seems that one of their lesser-known hits – 1989’s “Love in an Elevator” (which only reached Number 13 in the UK charts) – may have inspired a legion of frisky office staff. According to a 2018 survey for SaucyDates.com, no fewer than five per cent of office workers have bonked in a lift at work.

The lifts are not even the most popular office location for a bit of work-based naughtiness. More than a quarter (26 per cent) of employees have had sex in a private office (the survey did not reveal if it was their own office or their boss’s). About one in seven have opted to shag in a storeroom whilst 13 per cent have bumped uglies in the bogs. Overall, a whopping 90 per cent of workers said they had had sex at the office. Given that a survey earlier this year found that only 68 per cent of workers think its ok to wear shorts in the office, we have to recognise that more staff think it is ok to bend a co-worker over a photocopier for a bit of how’s-your-father than are happy to bare one’s knobbly knees at work. Even allowing for a certain bias in the figures (those who complete surveys on a website called SaucyDates.com are almost certainly more sex-positive than the average), we have to accept that a lot of workplace rumpy-pumpy is going on. Far more than we – or your poor, oblivious HR department – knew.

‘Co-working’ space?

And the temptation to copulate during office hours is only set to increase. In an, ahem, innovative approach to the modern office, a new co-working space in Dalston is blurring the barriers between sex and work even further. Stück is a collaboration between Playbody, a collective that fuses partying with design, and Klub Verboten, which describes itself as a “provider of contemporary pro-pervert spaces” (because ‘traditional’ pro-pervert spaces are so passé, clearly). Stück is a sex-positive workspace that doubles as a fetish club by night. There is a café on the ground floor with free wi-fi, desks… and an examination table equipped with stirrups and restraints which, according to the Evening Standard, looks “like something David Cronenberg would dream up”. For £45 a month members can gain access to a second floor furnished with large bed-like cushioned blocks (we should probably call them banquettes, if only for the double entendre) and handles on the wall. Good luck finishing your next marketing report with all that going on around you!

But Stück is just one co-working space (for now). The real threat to your office’s productivity (and, seemingly, human decency) is the office Christmas party.  Whilst one survey found that 84 per cent of staff don’t like to participate in Secret Santa, according to a study for Anne Summers some 39 per cent of workers have had a sexual encounter with a colleague at the office Christmas Party. The IT department are the worst offenders, with 63 per cent reporting having kissed or bonked a co-worker during the annual knees-up. And it’s not just the single staff members that managers should be worried about. A survey for Wild PR estimated that some 2m Brits have cheated on their partner at an office Christmas do. In a separate survey by YouGov, whilst only 14 per cent of Brits thought that snogging someone other than their partner was not cheating, this figure shot up to 25 per cent if that snogging occurred at the office Christmas party. Mistletoe, it seems, erases all sins. (Though perhaps we should ask why so many people are conducting surveys on this!)

The office is clearly not the cathedral of professionalism that we might have thought. Whilst we might have considered kinky co-working spaces like Stück to be a novel aberration – very much the outlier rather than the norm – maybe its founders are on to something. It is certainly something to think about next time you are waiting for an unusually slow lift to arrive or hear strange, muffled noises coming from the stationary cupboard.

James Ford was an advisor to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson