Published on: May 8, 2025 at 8:12 pm
Small talk is crucial for employees to bond with each other and form a cohesive organizational culture—and hybrid and even fully remote work arrangements don’t change that.
Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who coauthored an Academy of Management Journal article on that topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College, Patrick Downes of the University of Kansas, and Allison Gabriel of Purdue University—said that they collected the data about why and how small talk can be an effective method for employee bonding before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A lot of the conclusions that we drew about the impact of small talk on employees were seemingly turned on their head when everyone started working remotely,” Methot said. “The questions people asked us were, ‘How do we do this if we’re working remotely? How do we reconstruct these work relationships if we can’t just bump into each other in the hallway?
“It was a great challenge for us to think through, “How did small talk change during Covid, and what does this look like now in the post-Covid age?” she said. “It is so prevalent that we wanted to understand what was happening in organizations: Was it good? Was it bad? Is this something that we should be encouraging? Do we have any control over it whatsoever?”
Small talk can be a polarizing topic. Some people love it, while others hate it.
“It’s also sometimes cultural, where having chit-chat feels superficial and condescending and unnecessary, where others feel as though, if you don’t chit-chat with them, you’re not even acknowledging their presence, and it’s rude,” Methot said. “It makes up a really large chunk—about one-third—of our conversations, and it’s the social glue of the workplace.
“Small talk with our colleagues is a social ritual that many of us had built into our days,” she said. “We come into the office; we greet people in the morning; we chat with coworkers to pass the time; we take a break to grab a coffee; we reenergize before getting back to work.
“We make small talk in transition periods—we have small talk before going into a meeting, before negotiations, before performance evaluations, and so we also use it to grease the wheels.”
A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:
