Published on: May 8, 2025 at 7:23 pm
While there is some evidence that employees who go overboard making small talk can be less productive, occasional nonwork chats with colleagues can boost workers’ sense of well-being, belonging, loyalty to their organization. It also improves teamwork.
Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote 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 found that small talk increases employees’ morale and improves bonding and collaboration.
“Small talk eases transitions—we rarely begin a meeting or pop into someone else’s office without a little small talk, just to grease the wheels and ease into the work-related conversation, and it helps us move from one activity to another,” Methot said. “We have small talk before meetings, interviews, performance evaluation, sales pitches, and negotiations.
“It is this social ritual that helps us transition from one activity to another and sets the stage for building relationships,” she said. “At a very basic level, it simply shows that we recognize someone else’s presence—it’s an acknowledgement.
“It makes us feel better when someone waves to us and smiles or says hello or chats with us, and so it sets a positive tone to a relationship, and as we continue to do that over time with colleagues, we start to build a stronger sense of trust and potentially things like friendships.”
Why does small talk have these effects?
Methot and her coauthors found that on days people made more small talk than they normally would, they experienced a boost in mood and positive energy, which, in turn, increased their positive social behaviors.
“Small talk boosted the extent to which they went out of their way to help their colleagues, and it increased their well-being,” Methot said.
“It had these great positive spillover effects where just simply having more small talk than they normally would on a given day really elevated their affect, their energy, and the extent to which they were willing to go out of their way for their coworkers,” she said.
Small talk, however, does have downsides, at least from a boss’s perspective.
“On the other hand, we found it was distracting, so it wasn’t all positive,” Methot said. “If someone you know comes into your office and starts chatting with you while you’re really in the flow and you were focused on doing your work, it pulls your attention away from that.
“And so, it does create this sense of a time famine where people who engage in too much small talk might not have enough time to then finish all of their work, which can create a little bit of anxiety,” she said. “But for the most part, it is really positive.”
A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:
