HOT GOSSIP – AND WHY A RETURN TO THE OFFICE WATER-COOLER MIGHT BE A GOOD IDEA (2024)

If your employer is pulling you back into the office at the expense of working from home, you might still be thankful for the opportunity to plan some informal learning around water-cooler gossip.

You might love a bit of gossip; or you might (claim you) try never to get involved. You might have been glad to be done with office politics if your post-Covid pandemic work option was to work from home; or you might have missed the opportunity to swap juicy titbits of office information in those ‘water-cooler conversations’. Now even employers like Zoom are calling in ‘the work-from-homers’, like it or loathe it, it could be wise to plan a return to water-cooler conversations in any case.

Researchers from China and The Netherlands created a series of hypotheses about gossip and its effects. They tested these in a study involving 383 full-time employees and their supervisors in Chinese industries – including IT, construction, and finance.

Gossip is a widespread phenomenon. It’s been defined as communication between people about a person who is not present to hear what is being said. And it can be either positive or negative.

Negative gossip conveys information about people’s ‘norm-violating’ behaviours or poor performance. Positive gossip conveys information about people’s desirable behaviours and good performance.

Both types of gossip can contain valuable lessons to help you either avoid undesirable outcomes experienced by others or, alternatively, achieve similar levels of success. Hearing gossip can help you identify gaps in your knowledge, skills or abilities and may help direct your attention towards role models in your social environment you could learn from.

Importantly, the researchers in this study paid attention to how the personal characteristics of people hearing gossip influenced their response to what they learnt.

If you have a ‘prevention focus’, you are more likely to be alert to messages about others’ improper or inadvisable behaviours to avoid personal loss. If you have a ‘promotion focus’ you are more likely to be alert to messages that indicate the kinds of self-improvement activities you should take to reap the rewards of success.

The results from the study provided robust evidence that gossip acts as a learning opportunity indirectly associated with good levels of workplace performance and helpful behaviours. How this learning opportunity is used is dependent on the focus of the person hearing the gossip – avoidance of harm or positioning for success.

So, you might enjoy gossip, or it might something that drives you mad. But whereas gossip is often seen as a destructive behaviour, it could be in your interests to pay attention to it.

If you find the prevalence of gossip in your workplace stressful then it might help if you reframe its existence as a learning opportunity. If you’re someone who works from home, it might be worthwhile thinking about how you can get exposure to gossip. In either case, find a water-cooler that works for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alan Hayes is an Association for Coaching accredited training trained career coach helping mid and early-career professionals in the UK and overseas. For over twenty years he has been helping people and organisations create inspiring visions of their futures and present the best of themselves in pursuit of their goals. He’s a Certified Business Psychologist, holds an MSc in Organisational Psychology, and is on the British Psychological Society’s register of Personality and Ability test users. To relax and appreciate the world around him, he runs.