Sharing Too Much Information in the Workplace

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Sunday, August 19, 2012

Sharing Too Much Information in the Workplace

By PEGGY KLAUS

LATELY I’ve been hearing a lot about 20-somethings who are too eager to tell all at work. Whether they are recounting their drunken exploits or their external job searches, their tendency to provide too much information is leaving many managers scratching their heads.

A human resources manager for a manufacturing company told me that several young workers had asked her how many times they could be absent before she fired them. An H.R. manager at a health care business was taken aback when an employee casually told him she was looking for a new job that should take six to eight months to land. And a senior manager, asking a direct report how he was doing, was treated to this: “Well, I haven’t had sex for five years, so I guess I’m not doing so good.”

Granted, as a card-carrying baby boomer, I have an opinion on this topic that might be more than a little skewed, but I honestly can’t recall a time when I’ve walked away from a conversation with someone of my generation or even a decade or two younger and thought, “Whoa, did you really say that?” Mostly I see this happening with young people who seem to have lost all sense of boundaries and decorum. Recently, however, I’ve heard a lot of professionals complain that the problem increasingly crosses generations.

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