Published on: May 8, 2025 at 5:39 pm
When it comes to striking the right balance between personal and professional when making small talk and forming friendships at work, common sense is a good guide for most people.
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 workers should be careful about sharing details about their personal life.
At work, “we’re still prioritizing professionalism, and that’s what we need to do with small talk too,” Methot said. “The goal of small talk is to acknowledge someone, remain superficial, and stay light-hearted, positive, polite, respectful … those are really the key features and goals that we have when we’re engaging in informal types of communication at work.
“But there are other things that organizations’ team leaders and managers can do, as well as employees can do, to ensure that we are still either productive engaging in this small talk or at least not avoiding it unnecessarily,” she said.
Daily check-ins are important, Methot noted.
“If we’re managing a virtual team, we want to make sure that our team knows that we still recognize that they’re there, that we want to make sure that they’re okay, and that they have the support that they need,” she said.
A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:
