Husband’s female colleague’s issue being taken very seriously.

@CautiousLurker2 and @AtomicWedgie you both sound in a very similar place to me. As long as his employer is ok with it absolutely go for it. I’m empty nester with dc at uni and am really enjoying this phase of our lives, also a longstanding marriage over 30 years.
I have a full time career (wfh and generous leave plus opportunity to buy leave) and hobbies and volunteer role too.
It’s obviously sector and role dependent but very much norm in his situation to have a tag along. At conferences lots will have a spouse or partner with them, mix of men and women accompanying it’s not Stepford wives. Work time is work time. I don’t impose. If he needs to be at breakfast meetings or work dinners I’ll sort myself but on longer trips they do get downtime or a dinner that has plus 1 tickets.
I sightsee alone or join organised tours, I like get your guide.
We are scrupulously careful with expenses it’s not difficult.

Totally normal in my workplace to bring someone on a trip, it's very the-more-the-merrier - not just husbands and wives, some people bring a friend. It wouldn't be appropriate for a closed company event of course, but nice European cities are not private venues! It's not a small company either, it's somewhere that most people reading this would have heard of.

I'm surprised some on here think it's unprofessional - I don't see why, when we still spend the trip working. Usually we have dinner as a big group in the evening, occasionally someone will opt to do their own thing. It doesn't cost the office anything as double rooms are booked anyway and the non-employees pay for everything else themselves. It's not as if they tag along to the conference with us!

Because it’s not going home. Everyone is in another place. If you are doing an audit you are there to do the audit, which is quite a consuming task on what is usually a short intense trip where in my experience people prioritise the task in hand, and/or the client. Having a spouse waiting to go to dinner changes the dynamic.

Context is also important. The Op goes on all of these trips so much so that her & other wives have built a social life around it. Someone who doesn’t work for the company talking about contributing positively to the company is concerning from a HR perspective.

Going on a longer trip, or a trip every now and again is different.

Pandering is one of my least favourite words in the English language. It certainly doesn’t apply to someone who’d rather spend their free time at a work event with their spouse. We have friends who work for Big Four companies and they pay for spouses to accompany their employees and arrange day time activities for them.

The only real insight I've gained from all 608 posts so far is just how many people don't like their partners!

What? Spouses live together year round. Why would an employee be "pandering" to their spouse in a hotel room but not pandering to them in their shared home? No one gives their job their full attention if by that you mean 24-7 365 days a year. They go home and relax at some point, whether on a work trip or not.

You'd prefer to catch up with colleagues over having a relaxed dinner with your spouse?

I don’t think this is the case. I think the complaint brought something to the attention of management that they were unaware of or, alternatively, so used to they hadn’t consciously thought about how odd and unprofessional it was, and they woke up to a situation that was laughable and decided to put a specific policy in place to ensure their employees aren’t regarding work trips as some kind of spousal social gang.

I can't speak for everyone but I'm self-employed and work100% from my laptop, so I can do so from wherever. DH travels a lot so I tend to join him if he's in a nice touristy place.

I disagree. There is an impact because the employee is going to be pandering to the spouse’s wants and needs and not giving the job and company their full attention - which is paying their expenses and time.

They’re still doing it though, because they are nt willing to carry the risk.

And we know nothing about this woman, or the job, or the context. Maybe the two lads are great workers & great colleagues, or maybe they’re not and bringing the wives along is the icing on the cake.

It’s a work trip not a mini break with family. Any professional should be able to cope with a couple of hours in the evening with Colin from Accounts. Sound like the colleague felt excluded from cliquey evening plans, and that’s unprofessional.

And has been apologetic about it. There was no issue until some fuckwit someone complained.

And yet this company has decided it’s now policy for spouses not to tag along.

She says he works on audits. I have been on the type of trips she describes, they are usually quite short as the OP describes. They are also quite intense. You go on site, you meet new people, you are there to get a specific task done.
A dinner with colleagues could for some be a chance to catch up with them as you haven’t been with them alone all day. And it doesn’t have to involve discussing state secrets loudly in a restaurant.
Ive never come across the type of socialising with spouses the OP describes, I wouldn’t have the energy for it after those kind of days.

They don’t have to be. There’s zero impact on the employer when all that’s involved from their point of view is another person in the hotel room. If they were expected to pay for travel and food for that extra person it would be different but they’re not.

but it doesn't sound like a successful 30 woman something at work type of thing to say! To me it sounds more like something that the company boss who's handling this quite badly might say.

It doesn’t really sound like something anyone would say.

Why did the husband and other colleague receive direct phone calls about it? Did she mention them by name? Why just them when presumably other employees have their partners stay as well?

Or look at it another way — someone’s spouse’s employer isn’t interested in the bucket list of the wife of someone who works for them?

Ok, let’s look at it a different way.

So far this year my DH has travelled to;

Oxford
Rio de Janeiro
Los Angeles
Japan

Why on earth would I want to sit at home alone, go to work, and do my hobbies (yes I have them) when I can tick off 2 of my bucket list destinations at little cost to myself in a 5-star hotel?

The only madness here is if I didn’t go when I had no ties.

Yes. So you're expected to do your job but that's it. Nowhere in the OP does it say that dinners are work-related (networking events or client-facing) so then they are not part of their contracts and are not paid, nor in any way considered part of their role.

Not sure why you're assuming all jobs involving work trips function the same way yours does. There's a huge variety.

I am a teacher and go on overnight school trips quite often. I'm not paid overtime, it's considered part of my job. There it really is 24-7: I am expected to always be available, even in the middle of the night. Therefore I couldn't possibly go out for dinner with my DH or whoever when I'm supposed to be safeguarding the students.

But my dh's work trips are him at an international office from 9-5 and yes, I could absolutely tag along if I wanted to.

I’m a bit on the fence here. I would feel a bit odd if I was the only person on a work trip when everyone else had their partners with them. It does feel a bit exclusionary.
Perhaps the company has now decided to adopt a clearer policy.
However, what I find very hard to believe is that this colleague has complained about being made to feel that she might be ‘inappropriate’.
It seems like a bit of a stretch especially from someone who is new. Are you absolutely sure that this hasn’t got lost in translation or exaggerated or dare I say it, misunderstood by your husband and colleague.
It feels like a bit of a pile on to this woman if it has and that’s really not fair on her if she hasn’t implied that at all but rather just feels uncomfortable being on a work trip and feeling on her own.

Maybe you should get a hobby if the only thing you can think to do when your DH works is stare at a wall for weeks on end…

“Super disturbing”

fucking hell 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

OP doesn't specify her DH's role, but a lot of 9-5 jobs involve work trips. In my small circle there are IT specialists, engineers, and doctors who have all travelled regularly. The first two are very much 9-5 jobs and the doctors have varying hours but don't have to attend work dinners as part of their contracts.

You seem to be assuming these dinners are some sort of client-facing time or important networking events, but nowhere does OP even imply that.

The company wouldn't have been happy for spouses to tag along for years if they were expecting their employees to be on office time all day including evenings.

Not the point. Many people don’t have the luxury of telling their employer they dont want to do X.