The office that banned gossip

Say hello to the silent office. It has been reported that Ray Dalio, head honcho of Wall Street hedge fund Bridgewater Associates has issued a diktat banning office gossip. Staff get just two warnings; for the third offence, anyone caught nattering about their bosses or colleagues behind their backs will be fired.

Dalio claims his staff love his new rule, but then they would presumably have used up one of their warnings if they said otherwise. After all, who could possibly want to work in an office where no gossip was allowed? Half the fun of any office is having a moan about how useless your colleagues are or who they went home with. A conversation limited merely to neutral observation is not a conversation worth having.

My guess is that staff will merely dream up new ways of gossiping to conform with the new guidelines. So instead of, "I can't believe the boss has helped himself to another giant bonus while the company is losing money hand over fist," they will learn to say, "It must be tough for the boss to be making so many people redundant in these recessionary times. I'm delighted he has taken a bonus to tide him over." And the format for "Anna got well pissed last night" will change to "It was so interesting to hear Anna repeat herself 10 times last night." Who knows? In an office that humourless, you might even get away with it.

Most offices in the UK, though, would grind to a halt if everyone was fired for passing on three items of gossip. Half of us would be gone before we'd made it to our desks. But maybe that's the point: maybe this anti-gossip rule is just a modern variation on a compulsory redundancy policy.