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Tattletale

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While both waste inordinate amounts of time, the tattletale is more pernicious.

Gossiping does have its drawbacks, but generally, the topic of the noise is fairly innocent. And while gossiping can have the flavor of tattling, when it crosses that line, it is no longer gossip, but tattling.

Gossips are fairly easy to deal with. As a co-worker, just tell them you don;t want to play anymore. The boss can stop gossiping rather quickly by telling everyone to just knock it off and get back to work. Or else.

Tattling requires the company do do something. The nature of the beast is someone says someone else did something wrong, like pilfering supplies or leaving early or taking long lunches, or worse. The company has to investigate before simply telling everyone to knock it off, they cannot simply let it slide because to do so could allow a problem to go unchecked. This can be extremely time wasting with a chronic tattler.

It's like the boy who cried wolf. You never know when something is truly wrong.

In a deeper sense, the chronic tattler has issues. Perhaps they feel they are being treated unfairly (or more likely, someone else is getting a better deal than they are entitled to). Instead of looking inside and trying to find out why they are not getting the same thing and improving themselves, they want to tear down others.

In the end, the way to handle this is to set up a procedure for letting the bosses know what is going on, like an anonymous whistle-blower system. Most companies with more than a few employees have such a system in place. If they don't, they should.

After setting up a system, the answer to chronic tattling outside the system is the same as for a gossip: knock it off already.

Bosses don't like chronic tattlers or gossips, but the tattler creates a bigger headache.

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