Gossip in the workplace: why it’s happening and how to stop it
We all know that gossip in the workplace insidiously undermines maintaining a healthy team culture, and we’ve probably all been negatively affected by it at some point. But so often, we have no idea how to stop it because it seems simply endemic to the culture. It doesn’t have to be. To eradicate it, we need to first understand how it started in the first place and why it keeps happening.
Gossip, whether in a school, a neighborhood, or the workplace isn’t always meant to be cruel. It usually starts as a coping mechanism, as a way to:
obtain needed information or participate in decision-making when formal channels don’t exist or aren’t working,
gain social capital when the culture is putting value on exclusivity,
create tight circles of trust when trust is in short supply, or
protect one’s self or friends from a problematic colleague.
Gossip can easily become cruel, of course, and it can certainly start that way too since there are people who fundamentally driven by selfish cruelty and want to eradicate kindness, empathy, and trust from the culture. But those people are few and far between. Today, we’re focusing on the rest of us.
Once it takes hold, gossip becomes habitual, simply the way things are done. To break the habit in the workplace, we have to acknowledge that it’s a problem to begin with.
If any one of these examples sounds like your workplace, your team might have a gossip habit:
Work-related information-sharing and even some decision-making is happening in side conversations in the hallway or at Sunday brunch.
There are cliques. (If your closest group of work friends/colleagues often discusses how your group is different from everyone else or different from a specific other group, you’re in a clique, even if you see yourselves as the “good guys.”)
Specific people who shouldn’t have a piece of information yet often have it first.
Text, Slack, and WhatsApp messages, eye rolling, and hidden gestures feature during every meeting, or during specific meetings regularly.
After meetings, small groups surreptitiously grab a coffee outside the office to debrief.
It seems that, to gain cultural cache at work, you have to participate in after hours activities, often involving alcohol.
People vent to their work friends about disputes with another colleague, rather than working it out directly with that person.
There’s a lot of complaining about a certain boss, but no one has directly tried to address it with said boss.
It feels like the boss has favorites, even if one of those favorites is you.
People regularly vent to their work friends or closest colleagues about decisions or other workplace matters they didn’t like — i.e., in general, there’s a lot of venting going on.
And this is why gossip can so easily mask as just normal, every day functioning at work, becoming engrained as habit — usually, none of the above is explicitly called out in Employee Handbooks or performance expectations. And because the gossip is being used to get around broken habits, systems, and processes, it starts to feel necessary. Even more problematic, it’s de rigeur in so many workplaces that some employees just chalk it up to . . . “that’s just the way it is”. Plus, without a full-staff, Executive Team, and Board acknowledgement of the problem and a collaborative plan to eradicate it, proving that any of the above are specifically happening and who is involved can be really awkward, confrontational, and nebulous.
Put another way, if the CEO or Executive Team as a whole is a progenitor of the gossip problem or if they benefit from the gossip, they can get away with it pretty easily until and unless they realize the problem and their role in it and genuinely want to make it better . . . or . . . they leave the organization. If there are rigorous 360 reviews of the CEO and a Board that is genuinely interested in and understands how to build, maintain, and repair workplace culture, then a CEO can be forced to acknowledge and repair the gossip-riddled culture they built, encouraged, or ignored. But a CEO that is not held accountable by the Board and isn’t interested in holding themselves accountable for a broken culture is extremely unlikely to change. It is important to acknowledge that so that you don’t set yourself up to fight a battle that might only drain your emotional energy, with little return. Sometimes, the fix, for individuals, really is to leave.
For the rest of this article, we’ll proceed as if the CEO and Board do acknowledge that there is a gossip problem, and they want to collaboratively build a repair plan with the rest of staff.
1 Acknowledge the problem and investigate it.
The CEO should acknowledge that there is a problem and let the staff know that they are committed to collaboratively repairing the culture. This may include anonymously surveying staff (we recommend using an external facilitator if budgetarily possible) to assess the scope and details of the problem. The goal isn’t to assess blame (except in the case of wanton disregard for ethics by a specific individual or pervasive implicit or explicit bias and bigotry), but rather to make sure that the underlying reasons for the gossip problem are understood.
2 Invite staff to self-reflect.
Individuals need to be honest with themselves about their role in the gossip culture before folks will feel invested in fixing it, especially the folks who have benefited the most from cliquishness and exclusivity. One idea would be to create an Anti-Gossip Commitment that everyone drafts as a team and then individually signs. For example:
I commit to bringing my disagreements with a colleague or my boss mindfully and openly to them in a spirit of mutual accountability, rather than discussing with their boss or other colleagues.
I commit to using the relevant HR processes and policies when a dispute must be escalated.
I commit to not participating in gossip and shutting it down when I encounter it.
I commit to moving information and decisions through the formal policies and processes, not through side channels.
etc.
3 Get training for the whole staff.
Training for the whole staff puts everyone on the same starting page and provides common language. Training should include:
The differences between gossip, venting, and seeking advice; how to recognize gossip when you see it or are participating in it; and common underlying causes for why it happens.
How to improve and make more transparent your organization’s decision-making and information-sharing.
Overcoming conflict avoidance.
Implicit bias, bystander intervention, and other Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, Accessibility, and Belonging (DEIJAB) training as relevant to your organization’s situation. (Even if bias or bigotry haven’t been called-out as a major underlying factor or even if gossip isn’t a problem, the first two trainings are fundamental for every organization).
If you can’t afford to pay for a trainer, research free, trusted sources of information online, share with each other, and discuss as a group — much like a book club.
4 Create a plan, collaboratively.
Use the training and the survey to create an actionable, tailor-made Culture Healing Plan. How will you involve everyone in the creation of this Plan, as appropriate? How will you avoid both Action Bias and Paralysis by Analysis?
For the Plan itself, who will do what and by when? What is the role of the Executive Team, Board, and staff at each level? How will you hold yourselves and each other accountable? As much as possible, weave solutions into the everyday fabric of people’s work days — the more all of this feels like an extra to-do on an already overloaded plate, the less it’s going to work.
But what goes in the Plan?
Getting too much more specific in this article won’t serve much purpose because underlying causes and solutions will be different for every organization. But to give you an idea of some examples:
Start using RACI matrices for decision-making (map out who needs to be Responsible for implementing a decision, Accountable for making the decision, Consulted before the decision is made, Informed that a decision will be made, and Informed what the decision was). Use these for every single decision, religiously and transparently.
Prepare for decision-making meetings: When a decision will be made at a meeting, let people know that in the agenda, well ahead of time. And hyperlink relevant documents. Even for a brainstorm — not everyone like to show up and think by talking — some want more prep time and thinking alone.
Close your decision loops! — After every meeting wherein a decision (no matter how small) was made, send notes to everyone at the meeting (and everyone in the “I” part of the RACI), making clear what the decision was, what the next steps are, and who is implementing the next steps by when. So often, people leave even 1:1 meetings with entirely different understandings of what happened, sometimes not even agreeing that a decision was made, much less what it was.
Keep your social invites inclusive — whole staff, everyone on a specific team, etc., especially if you are a supervisor — during work hours, and with information-sharing or decision-making off limits. Inviting a bunch of people to something when most or a predictable subset can’t come doesn’t count.
Make sure your whistleblower, grievance, and anti-harassment policies are DEIJAB-aligned and enforced, even against the CEO, your top fundraiser, your Board Chair, etc.
Examine whether decision-making is actually being delegated, rather than performatively delegated (wherein every decision has to be approved by the next level up). Corollary: if you have more than 5 staff with the CEO the only one with decision-making, hiring/firing, and/or spend authority, your decision-making likely isn’t distributed enough.
