Any time of the year, HR is among the toughest jobs out there—psychically, anyway. But the holidays, as they are collectively called in PC land, might be the worst time of year for the profession: It’s raise time, bonus time, spend-your-vacation-days-or-else time and, perhaps worst of all, office party time. I can’t begin to count how many press releases we get at Workforce Management about how HR should prevent and police bad party behavior. Lucky you.

One office party press release I got was connected to a new book, Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding–and Managing–Romance on the Job. The blurb on the back of the advance reading copy (but not the final version, interestingly) says: “The best place to find a guy could be the watercooler.”

Don’t you want to gouge your eyes out just reading that? Then imagine the reaction among HR people at the American Red Cross, or Boeing, or any of the other companies that have seen their morale, fundraising and maybe even stock price brought low by such romances. (It’s interesting to me that this book is very much geared to women. Maybe the men don’t need the tutorial. Or maybe they’re just looking for playmates, not office mates.)

To their credit, authors Stephanie Losee and Helaine Olen have a chapter called “Don’t Go There,” explaining why sleeping with a married colleague is a bad idea. Chapter 2 is all about HR and is subtitled “Why you should love and adore human resources even though they’re always sending you all those annoying memos.” I’ll let you be the judge of the authors’ “takeaways” from the chapter:

• Human Resources, in Office Mate-ese, translates to “matchmaker.”
• Human Resources professionals are rarely opposed to interoffice dating, contrary to popular opinion.
• As invisible as they seem in the process, your friendly neighborhood Human Resources person is the first person you should thank when you find love at the office.

Anyway, in the spirit of the season, the authors are offering employees tips on how to pursue romance at your holiday party. They give 10 pointers—I’ll edit it to five:

• Don’t indicate your interest in a colleague at the office holiday party. An average happy hour on an average Friday night when the work gang heads to a bar together is a much better time. The entire firm isn’t present. And if you’re rejected, you can leave.
• That goes double for your boss. No, triple. Your boss is there to relax with colleagues, not fend off requests for raises or juicy assignments or—heaven forbid—advances from a subordinate who has decided the time is right to reveal a long-simmering crush.
• Don’t dress sexy. There’s no conceivable benefit to showing more flesh than you would on any other day. Dress up; don’t wear a neckline that’s, well, down.
• Don’t go home with a co-worker. Your career is at stake here. The office is a great place to meet your partner in life. Not a sex partner of the one-night variety.
• Don’t be the last one to leave. Be an adult. Dress beautifully but demurely, stop drinking after you’ve downed half of whatever someone hands you when you walk in the door. Don’t close down the place.

Not bad advice, really.  If your employees listen up, the tips might save you from having to clean up after a failed-romance debacle—either literally or legally. But I can’t vouch for what might happen at your organization in 2008 if your employees all read Office Mate between now and the end of the year.