3 Methods for dispensing with Work environment Tattle

Work environment tattle is conceived out of vulnerability and information voids. At the point when representatives don't have exact data about a choice, methodology, or organization occasion, they will quite often make presumptions. In associations, office reports are much of the time side effects of irritating issues. They signal an absence of correspondence or questions in conventional channels. Some of the time, they're simply a way for representatives to communicate their dissatisfactions without defying them.

In this article, we share three ways to prevent and address workplace gossip. More than one year ago, our leadership needed to communicate a major announcement to the employees: the intended acquisition of Slido by Cisco. With such important changes affecting the whole company, it was critical to ensure that the reasoning behind and the impact of the acquisition were explained properly to the team and that we listened to their feedback or concerns.

Slido crowdsourcing questions on all hands meeting Peter then addressed all the questions during a special Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. It was a special one-hour-long meeting dedicated solely to answering employee questions collected via Slido. But that was just the first step toward an open discussion with the team about the changes.

During the next couple of days, our CEO, our People's office, and the Cisco team ran several meetings and special Q&A sessions to answer all our questions. To make sure we really uncover people’s main concerns, we ran an internal barometer – an extensive survey to check the pulse of our team members. In the Slido survey, they could rate how confident they felt about the new structure and share their comments via an open text poll.

By giving people the chance and means to express their opinion through a trusted channel, we signaled that we valued their feedback and were open to suggestions to make things work for everyone on the team. It allowed us to open further discussions and make sure the whole team is aligned and understands how they individually bring value and fit into the big picture.

In a nutshell, these three steps allowed us to prevent unnecessary kitchen talk about the new organizational change: 

Crowdsourcing questions and addressing them at the AMA session with our CEO Your team members usually don’t have time to address the large-scale problems that emerge during day-to-day operations. Yet, people start noticing things that don’t quite work according to their expectations and start complaining, both in and out of meeting rooms.

The best thing to do in this case is to give people a chance to raise all their concerns officially – in a meeting. Whatever frequency makes the most sense for you and your team, running them regularly helps you uncover, openly discuss, and fix any problems or unresolved issues that people could gossip about. 

Our teams at Slido use retrospective meetings for reviewing the pain points of the previous season and come up with ideas for improvement so they can operate more smoothly in the upcoming one. They crowdsource ideas before the meeting via Slido. In the meeting, they decide on the most burning ones together and turn them into summer improvement initiatives, each led by a different team member. 

How To Run a Great Retrospective With Your (Remote) Team Open discussion forum:

Kill the rumors by taking the time to explain You might not always be able to prevent office gossip. One of our clients came up with a simple yet effective idea to address the office gossip. The leadership called a meeting and asked their employees to bring up the rumors they’d heard about the company or the leadership. 

Later, the leaders encouraged everyone to submit the rumors to Slido (using Ideas) and upvote the ones they had heard or those they wanted to be addressed. The leadership then went from the top of the grapevine and explained which rumors were true and which were not true, correcting false information and re-establishing trust in the company and its decisions. Build trusted channels for the discussions to take place and address the issues out in the open.

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