![]() ![]() ![]() Sometimes gossip “is a harbinger of something that’s true, and it makes you aware of something, as a manager, that you need to work on,” she added. You have to be really observant to know when that happens.” “But if it’s starting to hurt someone’s feelings or affect morale or attitude, that’s when the line’s been crossed. ![]() “It shows camaraderie among your team,” Lesonsky explained in a phone interview with SHRM Online. TLK Healthcare, an Austin, Texas-based health care recruiting company, includes among gossiping employees those who tattle to the boss with no intention of offering a solution or speaking to co-workers about a problem.īut some amount of workplace gossip is actually healthy, according to Rieva Lesonsky, CEO of GrowBiz Media, a media and custom-content company for small businesses. Still others consider “gossip” to be any talk of a person’s or institution’s affairs-whether personal or professional, innocuous or slanderous.įor instance, Peter Vajda, an Atlanta-based speaker and author on speaker on business coaching, defines workplace gossip as a form of workplace violence, noting that it is “essentially a form of attack.” To some, it refers only to malicious or actionable talk about someone beyond the person’s hearing some believe that gossip involves just untrue tales, while others think it can include truthful remarks. “Gossip” is endowed with several meanings. “The judge concluded that someone could read to say, ‘We can’t talk about how much we make or how the supervisor is working us too many hours or about what’s going on with our jobs at work.’ In layman’s language this means the law protects workers’ right to talk about wages, hours and other employment conditions. Jon Hyman, a partner in the labor and employment group at Ohio-based Kohrman Jackson & Krantz PLL, said the institute’s policy violated Section 7 of the act, which addresses “protected concerted activity” of employees. The judge concluded that the policy violated the National Labor Relations Act. It also prohibited “making negative or disparaging comments or criticisms about anyone creating, and sharing or repeating, a rumor about another person and discussing work issues or terms and conditions of employment with other employees.” The school had a restrictive no-gossip policy that banned talking about someone’s personal or professional life when the person or his or her manager wasn’t present. The institute had fired Joslyn Henderson because she discussed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint she had filed alleging sexual harassment and retaliation by her manager. In a December 2013 ruling, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Administrative Law Judge Donna Dawson struck down what she called an “overly broad” no-gossip policy at Laurus Technical Institute in the Greater Atlanta area. When does gossip cross the line from innocuous, garden-variety conversation to something so potentially hurtful, harmful or liable that companies are within their rights to forbid it? Is it gossip to speculate whether Carol in accounting is expecting her second child? Is it gossip to spread the news that Ted and Rachel are getting married before Ted and Rachel have announced so publicly?
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