Yes, it’s easy to condemn gossip at work, whether it’s personal gossip or business oriented. However, it is also a part of workplace communication for a reason – it fills in the gaps.
As humans, we all want to understand what’s happening and why. And since we rarely have all the facts, we speculate. In other words, we try to guess at both facts and motivations. It’s as if we’re staring at a jigsaw puzzle and trying to mentally fill in the picture. We can’t help but try to guess what those missing pieces might show us.
A lack of facts or information makes us uncertain, and prompts us to extrapolate from known facts, or to guess at them. After all, if we knew all the facts or all the motivations, we would be certain and confident of our knowledge.
Because we’re uncertain, we compare our ideas with each other, and that’s where gossip originates. “Here’s what I think….” you say, and the person you’re with counters, “No I think…” Or perhaps, the person with whom you’re speaking has discussed this issue with someone else, and counters, “Jane told me….”
The latter brings us to the informal networking aspect of gossip within the context of employee communication. Others share our uncertainty, and so our speculations begin to circulate widely and interact with other speculative ideas. Over time, the ‘best’ of these ideas coalesce and an ‘institutional’ view emerges.
Bottom line: Gossip doesn’t just exist because of mailicious people. Instead, let’s come to see it as a natural inclination among all of us to try to understand the personal and organizational situations in which we find ourselves.
Still, if you’d like to curtail the gossip in your workplace, you’ll need to start by eliminating information gaps. That’s relatively easy for organizational matters: Normal workplace communication vehicles such as meetings, newsletters, and memos can provide information that either fills the information void or at least steers opinions in the right direction.
Dealing with personal gossip is a much greater challenge. It’s up to the target of the gossip to respond with the void-filling information, and few among us want to do that. After all, why should we be held hostage to misinformation, whether malicious or well intentioned?
In summary, gossip is a natural organizational communication phenomenon. It is more likely driven by a lack of information, a desire to fill information voids, and uncertainty than by maliciousness among coworkers.
