Workplace Gossip

Dec 29 2011

Workplace Gossip

Posted by Thomas Taylor in Financial Consulting

Tags: Gossip, Workplace Gossip | No Comments »

My name is Workplace Gossip. Everyone loves me; however, I am nobody’s friend. I maim without killing. it is I who cause breaches in trust and lowered morale levels within a team.. I am responsible for lost productivity and wasted time. I break hearts and ruin lives.

I am sly and malicious and gather strength with age. The more I am quoted the more I am believed. My victims are helpless. They cannot protect themselves against me because I have no name and no face. To track me down is impossible; I’m definitely not on a corporate blog. The harder you try, the more elusive I become. I make headlines and heartaches. I hurt feelings and reputations. Once I tarnish a reputation, it is never the same. I cause increased anxiety among employees as rumors circulate without any clear information as to what is fact and what isn’t. As an outcome, good employees leave the organization because they find the work atmosphere to be unhealthy. I can ruin careers and cause sleepless nights. Remember my name, its Workplace Gossip.

From CEO to Office-Boy, from COO to an Executive-Trainee and from CTO to Team-Managers, everybody finds me irresistible. Some consider me merely a pass time but some find me totally entertaining. They all want a piece of me but I do no favors and I have no favorites. I am nobody’s friend. Some call me evil but I am better known as workplace gossip

Every pack of cigarettes comes with a warning, “Smoking Cigarettes is injurious to health”. Along the same lines I, workplace gossip am asking you to be wary of me. I will tell you all about my influence on your career, developing a hostile workplace culture and my influence on your growth. At the end, you can choose to love me, hate me or ignore me but remember I am nobody’s friend. If today you love me today, someday you will grow to hate me. If I am helping you today to ruin someone’s career, on another day I, workplace gossip, will turn on you just as viciously or even worse. The choice is yours.

Do you see it, workplace gossip is everyone’s mistress, and everyone wants a date but not really publicly. There are many different reasons why people at an office just love workplace gossip. I help satisfy their needs. Some of those needs are:

There is a old saying that “an empty vessel makes more noise”. People whose lives revolve around gossiping about a fellow co-worker are more often than not the under achievers in the company. Therefore, they are resentful of employees who happen to be achievers. Workplace gossip is their way of painting themselves in a relatively positive light (by maligning others) thus drawing attention away from their own non-performance.

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