Office gossip hasn't gone away just because our days in the office have. It has simply migrated to screens.
Proving, once again, the power of the old saw: If you don't have something nice to say about anybody, come sit by me.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, to whom that quote has been attributed, and Olympia Dukakis' Clairee in "Steel Magnolias," who famously repeats it, were speaking for millions of others who have a weakness for juicy, interpersonal information.
According to a 2019 meta-analysis, we spend an average of 52 minutes a day gossiping, which the researchers defined as "talking about someone who is not present."
But that gossip is not always negative. In fact, as the study found, most of it was neutral. (Contrary to stereotypical images of a conniving older female info-hound, young people and men tended to be more snarky, according to the study.)
Which has made gossip, in a workplace, both omnipresent and useful. As the other saying goes, information is power — and sharing information can help spread the power around.
This is a strong human impulse, according to Robin Dunbar, author of "Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language" and professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. And it's an urge that we shouldn't necessarily fight.
"Its primary purpose is to allow us to keep track of what's going on in our social circle when we don't have time to keep track of things" on an individual level, he said. This is not to put others down, he added, "but to make sure we don't say the wrong things when we do get to see someone."
But with fewer opportunities in physical work spaces to idly chatter, being an office busybody requires more effort. Lacking serendipitous office encounters, one needs to be a bit more proactive about finding ways to communicate.
For Amy Larkin, 40, an after-school youth development educator in Richmond, Va., this meant starting a group text chain for colleagues to discuss work issues.
For Becca Nelson, 26, who works at an education startup in Denver, it has meant putting one-on-one meetings on the calendar to get to know co-workers (recruiters are great for finding out what's going on in a company, she said).
And in the case of Jenny Ma, 40, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, she has multiple happy-hour Zoom groups — which have been known to meet back to back — to decompress.
The different kinds of digital interactions, according to Larkin, have changed the nature of interoffice conversations since her company went remote. Perhaps even for the better.
"I think there's less gossip — like, being feisty about individual people — and more communication with people the same level as you in an organization about your frustrations," she said.
This jibes with what Dunbar said about the practice as a whole, which has gotten a bad rap as being emotionally destructive, especially in an office setting.
Until the 18th century, when it gained more negative connotations, gossiping meant "chatting over the yard fence, passing time with neighbors, which signals that you think them worth your time," he wrote in an e-mail. "Bad vibes at work arise not from gossip as such, but from relationships between the people; gossip simply mediates these."
Digging out the dirt
Of course, without actually seeing our co-workers, we might be forced to find new sources of gossip-worthy material. Nelson pointed out that many workers have public calendars, often full of juicy details (a meeting with HR; manager training for someone newly, and not publicly, promoted to manager) viewable to anyone inside a company.
"It's an open secret — well, not even a secret," she said. "If you want to know what's going on, look at their calendars."
Online meetings are ripe for side conversations, but beware: Company work spaces are the property of the company, and no conversation is truly private once you put it in writing. Nonetheless, workers easily can be enticed into passing the time during boring meetings by trading private messages or texts.
Beware: Nelson pointed out that Zoom has a private messaging feature that is frighteningly easy to mistake for the public messaging tab during a meeting, news that certainly will keep some people up at night.
Not that anyone is likely to stop on account of that. After all, what is gossip to one person may be career-saving intel for another.
"We have Zoom meetings, where we text while we're in the meeting," Larkin said. "It's not just gossip — it's also for morale. I said something in a meeting that I was afraid was overreaching, and I looked at my phone and there were all these messages of support."
You can't be too obvious about it, however. A manager of a law firm said she has seen her colleagues looking down and laughing at the same time during staff meetings, and it is obnoxiously clear what they are doing. She texts them, "Cut it out."
Clairees of the world, you've been warned.
