Gossip can be dangerous but also can be informative

About a year ago, the human resources department at the Brand Consultancy Inc. in Washington came up with a rule: No more office gossip.

Er, um, make that no more "anaconda."

The company likens gossip to an anaconda, because, well, "what it does is wraps itself around people and literally sucks the wind out of them," said Vickie Hann, director of human resources.

Soon after she came up with the gossip-as-anaconda simile, the office was bedecked with Beanie Baby snakes, posters saying "No Anacondas!" and even a skit put on by Hann and several colleagues for new recruits and training sessions, illustrating what happens to a workplace when gossip (or an anaconda) runs rampant.

Hann swears it works.

"You hear people joking around here: 'Uh-oh! Someone's starting a rumor! No anacondas here!'"

For many workers, it's hard to imagine a workplace without regular everyday gossip -- who is interviewing for which promotion, why the manager has been in the CEO's office all day, and did you hear the one about ... ?

There's no question gossip can be a dangerous thing.

But offered or taken in the right way, it can also inform.

Buffering reactions

Blake Evans, a senior strategist and consultant at the Brand Consultancy, said he has seen instances in the past where gossip didn't seem so anaconda-like.

"It can buffer the reaction of a supervisor," he said. For instance, when a manager gets fed up with a co-worker of yours who doesn't seem to be pulling her weight this week, it's sometimes helpful for you to mention why that person has been late to work or early to leave -- if you think the boss is going to be sympathetic. And if, especially, your co-worker won't mind that you spread some "gossip."

Evans has different views on gossip depending on the subject matter and how it is handled. He believes that what a lot of people call gossip, he calls intelligence. But it depends on what this "intelligence" is.

When, for instance, a co-worker gives him a bit of information he or she heard about a competitor, it's intelligence. When it's an employee coming to him to talk about someone else at the organization, it's quibbling, or unnecessary gossip.

"Yes, it can be used to benefit," he said of some kinds of gossip. But when it comes to worker-on-worker gossip? "I have a personal problem with it myself, from an ethics point of view. I ignore a lot of it," he said.

However, when one is a direct victim of not-so-lighthearted prattle, the lenient attitude toward office gossip can fade. Kim Lysik Di Santi, founder of Total Strategy, a career-coaching firm in Reston, Va., is an anti-gossip by both necessity (her profession demands it -- she's a counselor) and personal conviction.

Before she started her own company, she had a boss with whom she didn't get along. It was fairly apparent to others in the organization, she said.

"I became, for the first time in my professional life, the brunt of gossip," she said. "That cured me."