Hilary Freeman
Come over here a second. If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to tell anyone? Good. We’d better keep our voices down because you’ll never believe what I’m about to tell you …
Gossip makes the world go round – and keeps your office ticking over. I know it’s true because I have it on good authority from an expert, a professor of social psychology at Oxford University, no less. For years, Nicholas Emler has been studying what we all talk about in quiet corners. He’s reached the conclusion that gossip is what makes us intelligent, what separates us from the animals.
This is what he told me: “Most of the things that you and I rely on [technology, medicine] aren’t the products of high-level intelligence, they’re the products of trial and error. It’s adapting to our social environment that’s intellectually demanding.
“One of the ways we solve this problem is by relating to other people and influencing them through language. We’re able to accumulate information about our social environment indirectly, through gossiping about other people. Other species are limited in this.”
So why do gossips have such a bad reputation? “Gossip isn’t intrinsically a bad thing,” said Emler. “It’s a fundamental thing, wrong only when it is motivated by malice.”
According to Emler, the office is like any other community. “It’s populated by people with different virtues, vices and abilities, some allies, some enemies. We need to keep track of all of this. Organisations which function effectively are organisations where there’s an active gossip network,” he said.
I thought this sounded interesting, so I pumped Angela Edward, policy adviser at the United Kingdom Institute of Personnel and Development, for more information.
“You only have to look at the children in Romanian orphanages to see what happens if people don’t have any social interaction,” she told me. “It’s the same at work. Teleworking projects often fail because people need physical and social contact.
“Creativity thrives in environments where people can mingle and interact. This was proved when public sector organisation Scottish Enterprise got architects DEGW to design a pilot `workplace of the future’, an office space in which people were `forced’ to bump into each other and talk. Productivity increased.”
But what do people gossip about? “Gossip tends to be about people towards the top of an organisation, because they have more power,” said Emler. “We need to understand them if we are to thrive at work. A new recruit needs to find out who’s who, who’s got power and what they do and don’t like.
“Gossip is a trade: you won’t have much to offer when you start a job. Just be a nice, likeable person. But proceed cautiously: you’ve got to be good at persuading people to confide in you, but not seen as the type of person who’ll leak confidences.”
Don’t just take this from me. Emler said it’s unwise to rely on a single source of information: everyone has their own take on things, so you need to figure out the bias of a particular “informant”. You have to cultivate different sources and compare versions.
We’d better stop: I’m getting funny looks from my boss. Just one more thing. One day, when you’re interesting and important enough, someone will gossip about you.
“Your reputation depends on what people say about you behind your back,” said Emler. “You won’t get ahead just by doing a good job. You need to ensure that you make yourself visible and that people are saying nice things about you.”
So gossip all you like, but never be bitchy or critical – you’ll just make enemies.