You Can't Stop Gossip in the Workplace

Working It

You Can’t Stop Gossip in the Workplace

About 90% of workers admit to gossiping—and it sometimes helps them.

July 01, 2026

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people,” said Eleanor Roosevelt—publicly, that is.

Privately, she had her own coterie of brilliant friends with whom she most likely traded gossip. Their talk (or “tea,” as gossip is currently called), would have naturally featured tidbits about power players in Washington, D.C., although probably not about the main player and elephant in the Oval Office, her husband, Franklin.

Between the secrets of his declining health and his longstanding paramour Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd (the woman with him when he died), it’s understandable why Eleanor would prefer the public think of her as a lofty idea person (which she was)— that is, someone high above the fray of mindless scuttlebutt.

Nonetheless, as New Yorker staff writer Andrea Schwartz said, “We all gossip, and those who don’t are either lying or dead.”

In her recent book You Didn’t Hear This from Me, writer and podcaster Kelsey McKinney mounts a furious defense of gossip, both among friends and in the workplace. Defining gossip as “one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present,” McKinney chronicles the guilt and shame she felt as a young girl who loved to gossip. Raised in a very religious home, she was constantly admonished with biblical quotes about “unwholesome talk and loose lips.”

McKinney tells how she escaped from gossip guilt, arrived at acceptance and now has literally profited from gossip. The popular podcast she founded is called Normal Gossip. In her book, she analyzes gossip phenomena through the years, including the Real Housewives reality TV franchise, Britney Spears, the original Gossip Girl TV show, and even Walter Winchell. He was a 1940s-era gossip columnist, known for his biting wit, who wrote about Hollywood. (One of his lines: “Their separation was caused by illness. She got sick of him.”)

McKinney’s strongest analysis, however, centers on the workforce tendency that any complaint or criticism by employees, especially about their bosses, should go straight to leadership. In that environment, she argues, the company is seeking complete control over what is said about it. “Prosocial gossip,” such as what occurred during the #MeToo movement, illustrates her point that “gossip seeks to hold people to account for their actions. It fights against secrecy.”

Many in human resources continue to advocate for companies to literally ban all gossip because, as a recent Forbes article put it, “gossip isn’t merely water cooler talk—it’s a deliberate act to harm reputations and create an environment of suspicion and fear.”

In a March 2025 article, “Office Gossip is a Weapon,” author Jason Walker urges taking on office gossip because of “what it really is: a pervasive form of workplace bullying.”

While citing a respected research study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that found 90% of employees admitting to gossiping at work—with 27% of those surveyed agreeing that gossip encouraged team bonding—the article nevertheless concluded that its readers should “act now to silence the whispers eroding workplace culture.”

A different perspective emerges from research on why people might gossip about their co-workers for non-nefarious means.

In an April 2023 study from the Department of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Hamburg, academics again cited the 90% workers’ gossip statistic and noted that 20% of all work emails are entirely devoted to gossip.

Here’s their practical definition of workplace gossip: “a specific form of informal communication, gossip is a vessel for fast information exchange and for making sense of ambiguous situations, establishing or maintaining social norms, creating or increasing social bonds or coping with stress.”

The Hamburg scientists acknowledged, and their research proved, gossip can have detrimental effects—calling it “reduced organizational citizenship behavior.” As a complex social interaction, however, gossip is not only powerful, with potential downsides for office harmony, but more importantly, is inevitable.

Although people love to gossip, few want to be labeled a gossiper.

Euphemisms abound when people try to justify their gossiping as the tattler or the “told-to” person. Spreading gossip is somehow even less sanctioned than listening to it in the first place, perhaps because we assume the story will become more fantastical with each retelling.