What you miss about the office is gossip

Allison Rand used to work in a university library in central Illinois, and when she started her shift, she’d always get the gossip about what had been going on that day.

“One time I came in … and they were like, ‘Just so you know, we're dealing with an octopus problem,’” Rand said.

Not a sea creature. Eight undergraduate students dressed up as an octopus. 

“‘They just keep coming in here and running around the library as one giant unit, as an octopus.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay, cool,’” Rand said. 

Rand loves gossip, and she immediately texted her friends to tell them this might be happening. 

“I just couldn't keep it in,” she said.

Workplace gossip, as defined by academics who’ve studied it, isn’t necessarily malicious. It’s any time you talk about a third party who’s not present. There’s research that shows certain kinds of office gossip can have some surprising benefits. Sometimes colleagues will bond over silly stories about an undergrad octopus. Other times, they’ll gossip in an effort to protect a colleague, to find emotional support, or to get a sense of office culture. But in an age of remote work, there are fewer spaces where gossip can take place. 

Some gossip is shared in order to feel seen. For example, Rand said at another job, there was a lot of gossip between her and her coworkers. They’d have secret meetings about how to deal with their supervisor.

“It was so cathartic,” she said. “It was like ‘Oh my God, I'm not alone. I'm not the only person who's having this problem. I'm not the only person who is coming up against these issues.’”

This kind of venting can help workers find emotional support, according to Stephen Lee, who researches gossip as a professor of management at Washington State University. 

“They want others to validate their feelings, and they want to be able to express and vent their emotions, and that is beneficial for the person sharing that gossip,” said Lee.

What’s not helpful is when people share stories meant to tear someone down. But often, Lee said gossip is shared in order to protect a coworker. “This is where someone might say, ‘Hey, you might want to double check so-and-so's work, just because I've noticed they've had some issues lately,’” he said.

In Lee’s research, he found that people who hear this kind of gossip tend to be grateful.

“That kind of shows, ‘Hey, this person trusts me to share information that might be a little bit sensitive,’” he said. 

Lee found that this can strengthen relationships between colleagues and lead to more cooperation in the workplace. 

Peter Cappelli, who studies human resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said gossip can also help people learn what it takes to get rewarded or punished at a company.

“If people get fired, it is really important for everybody else to know why,” Cappelli said. “That shapes a lot of the culture of the organization. What are we holding people accountable for? Most employers don't want to send a note around saying ‘Peter got fired for this.’ But word does get around, and they kind of know it will get around.”

Cappelli said gossip can help people learn what a company is really serious about. For example, reigning in workers who are abusing expense accounts.

“How would we know whether the company wants to tighten it up? Well, you might get a memo saying that, but what will really get people's attention: if somebody gets fired for abuse,” said Cappelli. “It tells you that the culture of the organization has changed.” 

But spaces for those conversations are disappearing. About a quarter of us now work from home either some or all of the time. That means a lot of the communication is over company software, and it remembers what you said. 

“In most technology-savvy companies, there's a lot of recording and transcribing and analysis of conversations and emails going on,” said Josh Bersin, an HR industry analyst and consultant.

Employees may know their communications are being monitored, but it can be easy to forget that. Say you’ve got an AI notetaker in a virtual meeting with a bunch of people in it. Most of them leave, but two stick around, and start saying what they really think. Then, when the meeting’s over, the AI notetaker sends out the notes from the meeting — including the gossipy part at the end. 

“I think that's happening all the time in companies,” said Bersin. “I think people are tripping across this a lot.”

Jenna learned this the hard way. She works at a tiny consulting firm that’s fully remote. (We’re not using her real name because she still works at the company, and she doesn’t want to lose her job.) At her firm, they use Slack, a messaging software. She had a private Slack channel with two coworkers she was especially tight with.

“A lot of the gossip was not bad intentioned. It was more so observations about, ‘Why are we all feeling stressed or burnt out?’” she said.

Jenna said they were also sometimes critical of their boss, the CEO. Then, one of Jenna’s colleagues who’d been in the channel left the company, and her boss pulled Jenna and the remaining coworker into a meeting.

“She was just like, ‘I don't like the attitude you guys are bringing. I don't like that you guys have talked to each other about things,’” Jenna said.

Jenna doesn’t know for sure that her boss saw the messages. But then, her boss also started bringing things up that were mentioned in the Slack channel. Jenna said she learned never to put her opinions on company software like that.

“So now we just keep our group chat on our phones, iMessage. It's really become a safe space for all of us,” she said. 

Even in the remote world, gossip finds a way.

But researcher Stephen Lee also pointed out that not all gossip is about bad behavior. People could be sharing about something good. Say a colleague totally nailed a presentation or ran a marathon, and that news is spread around. That nice kind of gossiping can be contagious.

“I see someone say positive things about another coworker, and I'm inspired by that, and I might reciprocate similar types of information,” he said. “So that's where that positive gossip can have a positive spiral type of effect,” he said.

So, my Marketplace coworkers: Want to share something with me? I’m here. I won’t tell anybody.