Most professionals spend more of their waking hours in the office than at home; we see our office collogues more and interact more with them than our family members. Naturally, we get more drawn to our office colleagues.  While our general philosophy of friendships may be “the more, the merrier,” making friends in the office has a distinctive set of pros and cons. While regular friendships depend on sharing trust, confidence, sharing our personal secrets, and confiding little or big problems in our friends, getting this close at work place with somebody has its drawbacks.

It’s a bit tricky to get close to somebody at workplace. We cannot hide away from competition, creation of new alliances, breaking of existing alliances, dependencies, backstabbing and gossiping. We become vulnerable if we are not aware of what is going on in the office politics. Often, our nonworking selves and relationships are significantly more casual than is warranted for a professional situation. And, if we try mix the two, the result may be messy politics and dynamics that can complicate our life both at work and at home. Another common problem can arise if you get promoted and your ‘friend’ is not – or your friend gets promoted and you don’t: promotions usually change workplace friendships.  People start resenting friends once they get promoted to higher positions.

Many researches show that people get attracted to their co-workers at the place of work; it is where the mainstream of couples meet. And, there’s a reason for this: unlike online dating, newspaper ads, singles events and speed dating, the office gives you a chance to actually get to know and even bond with a person before you assert your interest. Working side by side with someone daily, seeing him or her under pressure, sympathizing over problems and congratulating over wins gives you a portrait of the person on the inside as well as the outside. It’s the core of the person that matters in love and hence workplace provides the “best infrastructure” to fall in love. It’s the most ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ place for falling in love. These relationships often last for longer time, because they’re reality based then online dating or seeing a matrimonial ad.

Unfortunately, the same ingredients can make office connections tempting even to bond in extra marital affairs; this is the disadvantage and a concern. The reason so many people date in the workplace, even though it’s often terrible, is that it’s easy. You get to know someone well by working alongside them, observing them interacting with others, seeing them under stress. A lot of these relationships do work, and several end up in mess.

Mutual dependence on each other for work, working in a team on difficult and challenging projects, facing the same challenges and knowing the same set of people with their strengths and weaknesses helps in deepening the friendship among colleagues. Also, in big cities and  metros where usually workers stay alone in PG accommodation, and they feel homesick do in their initial tenures cling on to their coworkers;  it’s easier to go out on Friday evening to chill together directly from office with colleagues than make plans with people who live in different parts of the city. It’s quite normal.

Office environment becomes lighter and much healthier during lunch and tea breaks. Workers come together to chat, share jokes, discuss news, views, personal problems, personal news etc which relieves them from stress. It’s fun to be around friends and colleagues. Friendship benefits employees as they are able to give vent to their feelings and their stress levels become low. This automatically increases their productivity. The best places to work are the organizations which have open and friendly work cultures. Having friends at work makes individuals feel at ease and being themselves.

Though politicking cannot be avoided at workplace where betrayal of trust, competition, partiality, bias, jealousy and a sense of unfairness, money and power equations keep brewing, it is observed that employees who are friends are able to handle these differences in a better manner, thus, preserving a peaceful work environment. It is important to deal with problems straight away and avoid causing further conflict.

And, what about bosses being friendly with their subordinates – Is it good or bad? People like to work with people they like, and if you can develop a friendship with your subordinates, you’ll see more productivity. Your people will want to worker harder, and they probably might take on more challenges and cross their limitations for you. Do you tend to create such relationships? Think of your people one by one and ask, “If his performance slipped and didn’t improve, would I be able to terminate him? If she made repeated serious mistakes in spite of careful coaching, could I cut back her responsibilities or tell her she won’t get a raise?”

There are no hard-and-fast rules that govern how close a friendship should be between a boss and an employee. But there’s a general rule of thumb that boundaries must be created and respected; because the friendship can hinder the professionalism. There’s no question it can be lonely at the top, and making friends in the office when you’re the boss can be a nice solace. Just like there are pros to being friends with your employees, there is also a downside if the relationship isn’t managed properly. Managers have to be mindful of getting too close to one of his or her reports because it can make it hard to give out orders or worse appear inappropriate or unfair to the other employees in the office. That’s why experts say bosses have to set boundaries and stick to them. Yes it’s ok to go out for one or two drinks with staff after work but it’s not a good idea to stay out until 2:00 a.m. downing shots. Too much closeness with subordinates might bring in awkwardness in relationship. You might feel uncomfortable to give instructions. You might want to take a step back. Instead of being their drinking buddy, instead of hanging out with the regularly, you may use the friendship as a way to mentor them.

As a boss makes sure you are in control of the relationship. You should be in position to make tough decisions, give constructive feedback, keep sensitive information confidential, and be objectively alert. Ask yourself this question that as a leader are you effective?

Even a well-managed friendship can have some bumps along the road. Make sure that there has to be that defined line. Too often if you get friendly favors can be called in or expectations are going to be made. It can create a situation where other employees see it as favoritism. It’s ok to chat with employees and to ask about their family and weekend. It’s good to care and it’s important to show you are interested in who they are and what they are becoming as an employee and their personal growth. This doesn’t mean you don’t have great relationships with your employees. I just think you can do that best without being their ‘friend’.

 White lie is not dangerous, in sense it doesn’t harm anybody; it’s a trivial lie, especially the one told to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. The average person tells 4 lies a day or 1460 a year; a total of 87,600 by the age of 60. Isn’t that scaring? These can be white lies, big lies, and serious ones spoken to cheat, to please, to get favor anything. And, we ignore the amount of energy we waste on lying. Think of it. Cooking up stories for reaching late for a function, to office, to school, college; complimenting somebody’s dress even if it doesn’t suit the person; praising somebody when you don’t want to….the list is unending.

We think that relations last only if we don’t always say exactly what we’re thinking. We have to disguise our feelings, to trick, to smile sometimes when we want to shout, to be polite when we want to punch. In short, we keep lying. I think people who find themselves most deceived by the lies of lovers are the ones who have the most unrealistic and impractical expectations about truthfulness. And the people who are most inclined to believe the lies they shouldn’t, are the ones who tell themselves the biggest lies….

When we say the truth or talk factually it does not require us to remember anything; it requires no further work on our part. When we tell the truth, we don’t need to keep a track of it. On the other hand, lies need to be protected. And, the truth is lies beget other lies. Wisdom says once you stop telling lies the universe starts believing you. The universal energy starts caring for you because every word out of your mouth is truth.

But, we live in a society that conditions us to lie by telling us that in many situations lies are justified. The secretary tell visitors that “boss is busy” when in fact he is yapping with a friend on phone; the firms exaggerate the qualities of their products; job applicants fake their SWOT analysis; doctors give false diagnosis to their patients for heftier bills; lawyers lie in the court blatantly to save wrongdoers in society. And, governments promises new hope to its citizens while continually deceiving them. Leonard Saxe, a PhD and a polygraph expert and professor of psychology at Brandeis University, says, “Lying has long been a part of everyday life. We couldn’t get through the day without being deceptive.” Polygraph is a machine designed to detect and record changes in physiological characteristics, such as a person’s pulse and breathing rates, used especially as a lie detector.

Check this out: while talking to a close friend, how many of us tell only our part of a story? Do we even once bother to tell the other side of the story? Don’t we rephrase the conversations we had with third parties? Do we even think once what impressions we might create about the third persons in our friend’s mind? Basically, while lying so many things, don’t we manipulate our friend to say what we want to hear? And isn’t it foolish when we control a response by shading the truth, inadvertently we create an alternate, a false reality between us and another person.

We talk lies in many ways; by omitting facts, by exaggerating, lying to protect self, gossip, or sometimes lying for the sake of it.

People tend to exaggerate to hide their insecurities about themselves. By exaggeration, a person may try to preserve a certain image of him for the sake of seeking approval from others. However, when you exaggerate or don’t represent yourself honestly, you are left feeling like a fraud, which further hurts your self-esteem. When people exaggerate their skills, their talent, contacts, qualifications, happiness, reputation, it only leads them in deep trouble because their actions fail to match their words. It’s difficult to hide results; it may be a broken promise, a missed meeting or poor performance. Exaggerating reckons a person’s dishonesty.

We all have an inner critic in us who coaches us to say things which we don’t intend to. This inner coach makes us apprehensive. This critic often damages things instead of setting them right. It makes us vulnerable. It makes us downplay our role for trivial things. It makes us act sometimes rude, sometimes generous, and sometimes overtly friendly. It drives us away from our real goals. Keeping the little ghost (our inner coach) in check is necessary.

When people gossip they are full of white lies, serious lies, big lies, foul lies, and gossip has no limits. We don’t really think when we gossip and it’s everywhere. In every household, office, gym, school, college, coffee house – go anywhere somebody or the else is busy gossiping. We don’t realize that gossip breeds pessimism and distrust. It destroys goodness in the world. Why can’t people communicate directly? Gossip is infectious.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth” this has its origins in an actual Buddha quote. You can take chances on the people you care about by being a lot more honest and direct with them. You can find healthy and considerate ways to express yourself and to be sensitive to the other person’s sense of reality. The truth may not always be easy to hear or said, but in the long run it might save elegance and serenity. And, you will earn a lot more trust and respect from the people whose opinion matters to you the most. Finally, this world may not be perfect, nor is the truth always easy to take, but you can find peace and freedom if you take a chance and create a world around you that is real.

Communication is the foundation of all human interaction. We speak to so many people every day. With our relatives, employees, employers, neighbours, peers, grocer and so many more. It’s of great significance to us to carry out minimal adjustments within the method in which we converse with each one, depending on what the transaction is. While interacting with others don’t we all try to make our communication more efficient and effective?  It’s worth learning how one specific phrase of assistance, one specific declaration of apology, just one mild touch or maybe just one laugh can effortlessly enhance our relations with others.

Frequently, we communicate our unconscious feelings, our profound requirements as well as our inner desires verbally or non-verbally. We certainly would not like our feelings and words misjudged or misinterpreted. It’s therefore very important to take control of what we are sharing with other people. We should make sure that we do not hand out the incorrect information. Though this is gospel truth, rumour-mongers are there everywhere and they are busy running their rumour mills.

There are two types of communication – formal and informal. Informal communication is also known as grapevine communication because there is no definite direction of communication for sharing information. In this form of communication, information congregates a long way by passing from one person to another person leaving no indication from which point it started. The term grapevine can be traced to civil war days when vine like telegraph wires were strung from tree to tree across battlefields and used by Army Intelligence. The messages that came over these lines were often so confusing or inaccurate that soon any rumour was said to come from the grapevine. Precisely that’s what happens in grapevine – we don’t understand from where the rumour comes and where it would end. Grapevine stretches throughout the organization in all directions irrespective of the authority levels. Man as we know is a social animal. Despite existence of formal channels in an organization, the informal channels tend to develop when people aimlessly interact with other people. It exists more at lower levels of organization.

Grapevine commonly develops in organization due to a variety of reasons. One of them is that when an organization is facing slump, the employees sense uncertainty. Also, at times employees do not have self-confidence due to which they form unions. Sometimes the managers show privileged treatment and favor some employees giving a segregated feeling to other employees. Thus, when employees sense a need to exchange their views, they go for grapevine network as they cannot use the formal channel of communication in that case. Generally during lunch breaks and tea breaks in cafeteria, the subordinates talk about their superior’s attitude and behavior and exchange views with their peers. They discuss rumours about promotion and transfer of other employees. Thus, grapevine spreads like fire and it is not easy to trace the cause of such communication at times. People badmouth others on account of jealousy, insecurity, anxiety, or nervousness and sometimes even due to stupidest reasons.

Social media and social software have become an integral part of the post digital business landscape and they are the breeding grounds of the grapevine. Do you know it is an important medium for communicating with customers, increasing brand awareness, and promoting innovation and collaboration among employees? Social business is typically viewed as a tool for external-facing activities, and is considered particularly useful for managing customer relationships. Increasingly, its relevance to innovation and competitive differentiation is also being recognized. At the same time many companies consider social media as a barrier because they consider it risky.

According to a 2012 survey of 192 executives conducted by Deloitte & Touché and Forbes Insights, social media was identified as the fourth largest risk, placing it on par with financial risk as numerous corporate social media debacles over the last few years have brought attention to the phenomenon of brand sabotage due to compliance and legal risks arising from potential violations of or non-conformance with laws, rules, regulations, prescribed practices, internal policies and procedures. There are no ethical standards; information leakage happens because of friendliness of social media which allows employees to speak to broad audiences and insufficient controls could lead to the disclosure of sensitive information, such as personal accounts, health information, intellectual property, customer data, personally identifiable information, etc. Information leakage may result in loss of competitive advantage and brand damage. Outsourcing social media activities can expose companies to substantial risks, particularly copyright and trademark infringement and lack of governance.

The marketing manager and two supervisors of operation department play tennis every day, and they spend time together in tennis court, there are high chances of exchange of official information through this informal set-up. Another example is the finance manager discloses business development plans during a trek to one of his old school friend who in turn passes on the information innocently to his friend in the rival organization.

But then there are some advantages of grapevine they are: grapevine channels carry information rapidly. As soon as an employee gets to know some confidential information, he becomes inquisitive and passes the details then to his closest friend who in turn passes it his best friend and that one passes to other. Thus, it spreads hurriedly. The managers get to know the reactions of their subordinates on their policies. Thus, the feedback obtained is quick compared to formal channel of communication. The grapevine creates a sense of unity among the employees who share and discuss their views with each other. Thus, grapevine helps in developing group cohesiveness. Also, the grapevine serves as an emotional supportive value. However, the grapevine is a supplement in those cases where formal communication does not work.

Thus, the grapevine is useful as a supplement to formal channels of communication. It often travels more quickly than other channels and is usually more direct. The grapevine is present within all levels of staff. It exists because of a natural desire to know things and brings a sense of belonging to employees and managerial staff alike. It can create corporate identity and build teamwork.

The disadvantages are: The grapevine carries only partial information at times as it is more based on rumours. Thus, it does not clearly depict the complete state of affairs. The grapevine is not dependable always as it does not follows official path of communication and is spread more by gossips and unsupervised report. It kills the productivity of employees as they spend more time talking rather than working. The grapevine leads to making hostility against the executives. It hampers the goodwill of the organization as it may carry false negative information about the high level people of the organization. Therefore organizations should take care of all the disadvantages of the grapevine and try to minimize them. It is also humanly impossible to curb grapevine completely, hence we need to live with them by ignoring it as much as possible.  The blatant fact is that gossiping is a universal pastime.

The obsession called Gossip

We are obsessed with gossip. From items like who’s doing what, who’s wearing what, who’s dating whom, who’s making how much money, who’s eloped with whom, why somebody is in the job, why somebody is out of job, why somebody got promotion, who is suffering from which disease, we want to gossip without break. People visit social functions like marriage, engagements, parties, etc just to meet friends and opportunity to gossip. We all forget that while words have the power to destroy, they also have the power to heal. It all up to us whether to destroy or heal!

Gossip is casual or unchecked conversation about other people, typically involving details which are not confirmed as true. It is idle talk or rumor especially about personal or private affairs of others. Gossip has been researched in terms of its evolutionary psychology origins. This has found gossip to be an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is defined here as “I help you and somebody else helps me.”

Gossip has many synonyms such as chat, yak, scuttlebutt, gab, dish, and chewing the fat. It is also called the grapevine. We describe it as ‘the word of mouth’ – sometimes straight from the horse’s mouth. All those TV channels, news papers gossip columns, social sites flourish on the pedestal of gossip!!

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist views gossiping as an aid to bonding in large groups. Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar’s original and exceptionally appealing studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, letter, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our elemental need for face-to-face contact. Now isn’t this a fact? Don’t we crave to meet our friends personally, so to catch up with all those news? What happens when we meet in person the facial expressions and body language fill in the gaps, those in between lines which are not spoken deliberately.

With the advent of the internet gossip is now widespread on an instant basis, from one place in the world to another what used to take a long time to filter through is now instant – in a jiffy that it. Things go viral today. The small video clips (at times morphed), emails, sms, networking sites like WahtsApp, Twitter, face book you name it; if you love gossiping things are at your fingertips these days.

And why do we gossip? When people are feeling bad about themselves, they sometimes think they’ll feel better if there were people worse than them. The easiest way for them to make sure someone else is on the bottom is to make up a rumor that puts somebody down. And, if everybody else is gossiping or spreading rumors, you might feel you have to do the same thing in order to fit in the group; because we all need this “sense of belonging”. When you’re “in the list of people knowing the secret,” you’re in the group. Sadly, the person who the gossip or rumor is about is obviously left out of the group.

Gossip hasn’t always been considered a bad word. The word gossip first meant godparents or a familiar acquaintance and was used to describe someone who told of a family’s news and developments. In Shakespeare’s time, a gossip was also someone who sat with a woman through childbirth, perhaps to talk, offer comfort, or to help her pass though the labor pain.

Gossipers always want attention. Their attention seeking need is so high that they can go to any extent – may be criticizing/maligning somebody’s image. Some people always want to be in control and at the top of the ladder. When people are at the top of the popularity scale, or are determined to climb higher, one way they do this is by reducing the popularity of the person, the so called “status” of him/her to pull them down. Spreading rumors and gossip is one of the main ways people reduce another person’s status. These days, we see men are leading women in spreading rumors. Marilyn Monroe said “when it comes to gossip, I have to readily admit men are as guilty as women”.

Another reason to gossiping is jealousy. If you’re jealous of someone’s looks, popularity, or money, you might gossip about that person in order to hurt him or her. If you feel that someone’s done something bad to you, or deserves to be hurt, making up a rumor might satisfy your sense of justice.
Some people get immense happiness in spreading rumors especially sometimes, a period where everyone is happy and getting along just seems kind of-dull. Spreading some juicy rumors might shake things up a bit. All those tabloid newspapers and TV shows full of celebrity gossip are pure proof that rumors are a popular form of entertainment.

Can we stop gossiping? Most people would be horrified at the idea of being called a ‘gossip monger’ and terrified to be caught talking behind someone’s back. We usually don’t mean to talk about others but we do because we aren’t thinking! The first step in ridding your life of gossip is to be aware of it.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys. – Joseph Conrad.