Goodbye to the days of having a quick gossip by the vender or in the toilets as a recent study has revealed that one in seven emails sent at work are now gossip related. But should people be gossiping by email in the office, especially if they are talking about the boss?
600,000 emails were gathered from Enron, an energy firm which ceased trading in 2001. American social scientists analysed the emails and found that the average office worker sent 112 emails a day and 14.7 per cent of those were written about fellow colleagues, which equated to gossip. Also the less senior the worker was, the more they engaged with gossip emails.
Speaking of the findings, Eric Gilbert, from the School of Interactive Computing, said: “I was a little surprised that it turned out to be almost 15 per cent. But then again gossip is something we all do in every aspect of our lives.
“Gossip gets a bad rap. When you say ‘gossip,’ most people immediately have a negative interpretation, but it’s actually a very important form of communication.”
But saying that, in the study ‘bad’ gossip was emailed around 2.7 times more in commercial properties than positive gossip. People forget that emails are stored and can be retrieved at anytime if the boss wishes to do so. As Tom Stewart, who is an Executive Chairman of a System Concepts company, stated: “If you’re going to gossip by other methods, then you’re bound to gossip using email. But people forget it’s a broadcast medium, once it’s written down in an email the chances are it can be retrieved.
“The important thing is never to write in an email what you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of a daily newspaper – it’s not likely to remain a secret, just like other kinds of gossip.”
Do you find yourself gossiping in email rather than face-to-face? Or do you still prefer a good old chinwag at the vending machines at work?
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