If the employee purposely shares false information, it could be considered harassment, discrimination, retaliation, slander, or defamation. Investigate the problem to see if the employee has violated your anti-harassment or discrimination policies. Super Lawyers is a service for qualifying outstanding lawyers from more than 70 practice areas that have achieved a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievements. The patented selection process includes independent research, peer nominations and peer evaluations.
The number provided represents the number of lawyers in the firm who have been selected for the Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists. For some, it refers only to malicious or actionable conversations about someone beyond what the person can hear; some believe that gossip only includes false stories, while others think it may include truthful comments. The National Labor Relations Board has ruled several times against companies that try to prohibit all types of gossip. TLK Healthcare, a healthcare hiring company based in Austin, Texas, includes employees who gossip with the boss with no intention of offering a solution or talking to co-workers about a problem.
However, some workplace gossip is actually healthy, according to Rieva Lesonsky, executive director of GrowBiz Media, a media and personalized content company for small businesses. For example, Peter Vajda, an Atlanta-based speaker and author of a paper on business coaching, defines workplace gossip as a form of violence in the workplace, and points out that it is “essentially a form of attack.” In general, defamation occurs when false statements are made about someone, which are presented as true, and result in injury to the subject of the gossip. As eager as you are to mitigate (and ideally eliminate) the harm that workplace gossip can cause, be careful if you plan to address it in your employee handbook. The school had a restrictive no-gossip policy that prohibited talking about a person's personal or professional life when the person or their manager was not present.
First, the policy must explicitly state that it is not intended to limit the right of employees to talk about wages, hours or working conditions; rather, it aims to gossip about topics not related to work, Hyman said. When gossip gets out of hand or your assistant reports that employees are actually afraid of gossip about themselves at work, it's obvious that all that idle talk has taken an unpleasant turn. Like other small business owners, you may feel ambivalent about one of the most obvious effects of gossiping. Writing policies that prohibit gossip can be complicated enough that companies prefer to focus on educating employees about the dangers of talking about their co-workers behind their backs, Hyman said.
Corporate email can be a particularly dangerous method of spreading gossip because messages can easily be forwarded to unwanted recipients.
