Work Culture - how to stop gossip and maintain a positive environment

[Butterfly8091]

I work in a small tech company and support management on the HR side of things, I am not an HR professional as we are still small. I do have a passion for positive work culture after experiencing very toxic behaviors with previous employers. Management are keen to keep it positive as wellbeing is one of their top priorities.

Staff are well paid, have access to a very comprehensive benefits package (potentially one of the best in the city, if not the best), have lots of flexibility and trust.

We recently had 2 occurrences of office gossip that we have had to manage. They didn’t go to their line manager nor discussed with people involved so heard from other sources.

We want to prevent something like this from happening again. How do you manage office gossip effectively? We are asking senior managers to disengage and send them to discuss with those concerns but what else can we do? How do we get the senior managers to model this positive behaviour when some of them don't know themselves how important is it to protect it.

AIBU to expect people to understand the importance of openness and honesty and trust they do the right thing - they'll learn one day?
AINBU - it's up to management to model positive behaviour but also be clear on expectations with senior management and ask them to explain it to their team.

Without knowing more about the nature of the gossip it's really hard to say?

What do you mean by this -

We are asking senior managers to disengage and send them to discuss with those concerns

It's hard to comment on this without knowing what you mean by office gossip.

For example, I have worked places where there were affairs going on and pretty much much everyone in the workplace knew about them. Are you expecting staff members to discuss this with the people having the affair?

There's also usually talk about so and so has been promoted, so and so didn't get that client etc.

What was the gossip? Something light like Brenda stayed over at Bob's at the weekend- oooh err. Or Brenda is having an affair with the MD and she is having his twins but his wife doesn't know?
I think if you try too hard to keep things positive you might have the opposite effect, essentially you will be the Polly-anna of the office and you will start to get on people's nerves!
Unless someone is on a mission to take someone down with gossip just leave adults in peace to talk about what they like. I am sure that will feel more positive than having their speech policed.

I think on the whole with office gossip the best policy is to ignore it. Especially if it's hearsay, you can't act on that.

What you can do is make sure there are appropriate avenues for people to use to bring up issues, suggestions, complaints etc in a professional way.

Sometimes people need to know how to give feedback constructively and that's an art in itself but one worth training people on.

You can’t stop people talking, be aware that in your crusade to wipe out “toxic” behaviour you may create an atmosphere of toxic positivity 😀

Your post is very unclear.
You can't stop gossip. It's idle chit chat. Unless it's targeted,deliberately putting people down etc.
Are you saying it in some way has impacted on people so needed to be stopped?
As others have said, chatting about "did Mary look sideways at Madge at that meeting?" vs "I heard Mary lied to a client and then she got promoted for it and got a bonus" are vastly different levels of gossip.

Its very difficult to know without knowing what gossip it was and about whom as different types call for different (if any) actions. For instance you're never going to stop the gossip that Martin from accounts is dating Emma from sales or how Geoff gets on everyones nerves eating KFC at his desk. But if you're talking about staff complaining to each other about management or nasty gossip that crosses to bullying that's different.

Some level of gossip is going to happen whenever you get a group of people together. I don't know what you're trying to manage? I mean, yes, obviously, anyone in a management position should avoid gossiping about their staff, but staff are going to talk amongst themselves. If the gosip is actually mailcious or demonstrative of bullying behaviour, that is something to manage and why you should actually hire a HR professional to write your Company policies, processes and provide management training.

As soon as I saw this bit ‘Management are keen to keep it positive as wellbeing is one of their top priorities’ I knew it was going to be something weirdly controlling. You can’t stop people talking. If people are friendly with their colleagues and hear something interesting they are going to discuss it with each other, that’s completely normal behaviour. Unless it’s particularly mean gossip or outright lies then just leave well alone.

Gossip is very normal and generally harmless. As an hr professional there's a couple of areas I would expect a company to exert any kind of management over it
1 - if it steps into bullying or harassment, there should be policies to deal with this, even in a small company (you can get examples from acas etc)
2- If senior managers share inappropriate/confidential information with either clients or other, normally more junior, employees (e.g. the companies plans for future changes/redundancies, salary or performance data of their teams), it should be clear what is/isnt confidential but you can easily apply document classifications if you need to and there should be a communication plan for big news about company performance/changes/redundancy that senior leaders follow.
If the gossip you're talking about doesn't fall into these camps then you need to leave alone, there's literally nothing worse than a company where everyone watches what they say at all times or feels the need to be faux positive about everything. If you genuinely value wellbeing then people need to vent to one another about a colleagues weird slurping, or that they saw two colleagues hook up at a party or that they think the sales team got taken for a free lunch last week.
If people are gossiping about company issues then the organisation need to look at their communication approach, clear info on strategy, business performance, future changes in an appropriate way, will stop any gossiping/worrying about redundancies/no bonus this year/why are we doing xyz/why are they advertising a new job etc.

I don't really understand what you're asking?

You'll never stop people from gossiping in a free world but you can definitely stop senior managers from joining in, if you catch them.

Is that the problem? That the senior managers are just as bad?