Everyone At Your Office Gossips Constantly (And Maybe About You)
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People like to talk, and that’s no secret. But nevertheless, we try to keep our secrets anyway, despite the sheer amount of inappropriate or otherwise none-of-your-business intel that gets circulated not just among friends but at our places of employment. And the amount of intel we’re talking is all of it. Some of it about you, even.
You’re bound to have your own stories in this arena. At one place I worked, the boss accidentally left a printout on the copier listing everyone’s salary. Oops. At another place, we all came back from lunch to find a one-page summary of our life insurance coverage, which also matched our salaries, left face-up on everyone’s desk. Oops again. I’ve had bosses who have freely told underlings why our colleagues were out of the office—surgery, hangovers—and I’ve worked with many a colleague who dished on another colleague’s miscarriage, so-and-so’s unhappy marriage, what’s-his-face’s affection for late night office visits involving porn.
Everyone at your job is up to something; everyone knows what that something is. We know you got a raise but that it will be distributed quarterly. We know you are having a thing with the guy in design. We know that you quit in a huff and then tried to get your job back but the boss was like, ha, nope. We know you were almost fired every week during the year 2008 to 2009 but somehow escaped that fate by knowing when to dodge out early. We know this because there is no such thing as a workplace free from a leak.
Recent research shows that often, and quite unsurprisingly, the first leaks involve support staff. Over at CNBC, Kelli Grant reports on a CareerBuilder.com survey of some 500 such workers, like custodians, administrative assistances, receptionists, security guards, and the like. Fifty three percent were accidentally privy to intel about upcoming layoffs, salaries, office affairs, and other assorted juicy goods. Some 10 percent surveyed had dirt that could get someone axed.
Grant writes:
Another 10 percent said they’d seen something incriminating in the trash or around the office. To highlight just a few: Stolen event tickets, a letter from the boss’ mistress, an employee’s tax return, a picture of a partially dressed coworker and a pregnancy test.
From a USA Today report on the same survey, we learn that other found items included a boss’s ex-wife’s bank account statement, a diamond ring, breast job info, and an employee’s response to a personal’s ad. Some 18 percent overheard lying to the boss, while 11 percent overheard plans to set up another coworker to fail.
Better angels of our nature, indeed.
Back at CNBC, Grant speaks to a career advisor who clarifies that these delicious tidbits which make us all look like horrible jackals are not being collected maliciously against us.
“Absolutely [support staff] are not out to get you,” said Michael Erwin, senior career advisor at CareerBuilder. “They are stumbling across these conversations in the hallway, or finding that paper at the copier.” The issue is more that busy employees can get careless, he said: Who hasn’t printed something but then forgotten to grab it at the printer? Or had a water-cooler gripe session about the boss?
I’m sure that in some cases, some people keep their heads down and stay out of the fray, but most of us know things whether we want to or not, and of course you need to know some stuff to get ahead. And you don’t have to be support staff to realize and accept that at work—or even outside of work over beers talking about work—pretty much everything is leaked.