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Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer your biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: What should I do if I think my coworkers are gossiping about me?A: In past columns Ive said that much of office life can feel like high school, and this is the ultimate example. This is a situation that feels awful but that you have little control over. So while you cant control other people, you can control your own actions and reactions. Here are a few things you can do: Dont engage in negative gossip yourself “Gossip is an important part of human communication,” says Jason Morgan, vice president of behavioral intelligence at Aware. Its a way that people build relationships, feel more connected, and help soothe their anxiety. In other words, we are social animals that need to talk to each other and, often, about each other. But that doesnt mean that the content of our gossip has to be vicious or hurtful.You dont need to bring someone down to bring yourself up. If you think your coworkers are talking negatively about you, your first step should be to evaluate your own gossiping tendencies. You’re never going to stop people from talking, but the more negativity you put out into the world, the more thats likely to come back to you. Use gossip as a force for good Good gossip is beneficial to everyones well being. Fast Company contributor and behavioral scientist Art Markman points out that gossip can bring people together or it can create factions. Lead by example and start the kind of gossip that makes people feel better. When we celebrate other peoples successes and positive life events, we are bringing our community together, Markman explains. When we let team members know about a sad experience in the life of a colleague, it can create outpourings of sympathy and attempts to help. These are quite positive uses of gossip that can improve the overall sense of community. Deal with it directly If trying to use office gossip as a force for good isnt working and your coworkers are still saying negative things about you, you need to decide if its worth intervening. If the gossip is annoying but ignorable, then do your best to turn the other cheek. If its impacting your daily well-being, you have a few choices:1. Confront it with humor. Sometimes taking a lighter approach might be more effective than an awkward conversation. For example if you overhear two colleagues whispering about how you are a know-it-all, you can say something like, oh, tell me about itthat Kate, shes a real pill! That will shame them enough to either stop their gossip, or at least be more discreet.2. Take it as feedback. You can take a more mature approach and view the content of their gossip as feedback and consider some behavior changes. (Maybe you do interrupt too much?) 3. Have an uncomfortable conversation. If you’re feeling brave enough you can confront the gossip directly. After all, we arent in high school anymore and hopefully in the years since youve gained some self-assuredness. You can start it off with something like Ive heard you and Dan talking about me and I just want to let you know that Id love to hear your feedback directly.4. Talk to your boss. This is generally the type of problem you can handle yourself, but if it rises to the level of creating a toxic work environment, you can get your boss involved. Just make sure you’ve already tried to take some steps to mitigate it yourself. Want more about office gossip? Here you go: Three steps to end office gossip How work gossip has changed in the age of hybrid work How to make office gossip your ally This is when gossip can be healthy in the workplace
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Last month, in an address to investors, D.R. Horton CEO Paul Romanowski said the spring 2025 selling season is getting off to a slower-than-usual start for the nation’s largest homebuilder. This years spring selling season started slower than expected as potential homebuyers have been more cautious due to continued affordability constraints and declining consumer confidence, Romanowski said on the company’s earnings call. It isnt just D.R. Horton. “Demand at the start of this springs selling season was more muted than what we have seen historically, despite a healthy level of traffic in our communities,” wrote Jeffrey Mezger, CEO of KB Home, in the companys Q1 2025 earnings report. “In mid-February, we took steps to reposition our communities to offer the most compelling value, and buyers responded favorably to these adjustments.” Last quarter, Lennar spent the equivalent of 13% of home sales on buyer incentivesup from 1.5% in Q2 2022 at the height of the pandemic housing boom. A 13% incentive on a $400,000 home translates to $52,000 in incentives. This softer housing demand is causing unsold inventory to tick up. Indeed, since the pandemic housing boom fizzled out, the number of unsold completed U.S. new single-family homes has been rising: April 2018: 61,000 April 2019: 77,000 April 2020: 78,000 April 2021: 33,000 April 2022: 34,000 April 2023: 69,000 April 2024: 89,000 April 2025: 117,000 The April figure (117,000 unsold completed new homes) published last week is the highest level since July 2009 (126,000). Lets take a closer look at the data to better understand what this could mean. ResiClubs Finished Homes Supply Index puts the number of unsold completed new single-family homes into historic context. The index is one simple calculation: The number of unsold completed U.S. new single-family homes divided by the annualized rate of U.S. single-family housing starts. A higher index score indicates a softer national new construction market with greater supply slack, while a lower index score signifies a tighter new construction market with less supply slack. If you look at unsold completed single-family new builds as a share of single-family housing starts (see chart below), it still shows we’ve gained slack; however, it puts us closer to pre-pandemic 2019 levels than the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. While the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t give us a greater market-by-market breakdown on these unsold new builds, we have a good idea where they are based on where total active inventory homes for sale (including existing) has spiked above pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Most of those areas are in the Sun Belt around the Gulf. Some builders are experiencing pricing pressure, particularly in major housing markets like Florida and Texas, where resale inventory remains significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); Big picture: Theres greater slack in the new-construction market now than a few years ago, giving buyers some leverage in certain markets to negotiate better deals with homebuilders.
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E-Commerce
Theres nothing spooky about ghostworking, apart from how popular it may be right now. The newly coined term describes a set of behaviors meant to create a façade of productivity at the office, like walking around carrying a notebook as a prop or typing random words just to generate the sound of a clacking keyboard. (Some might call this Costanza-ing, after Jason Alexanders example on a memorable episode of Seinfeld.) Pretending to be busy at the office is not something workers recently invented, of course, but it appears to be reaching critical mass. According to a new survey, more than half of all U.S. employees now admit to regularly ghostworking. That statistic doesnt necessarily mean, however, that the American workforce is mired in permanent purgatory. Conducted by top resume-building service Resume Now, the report is based on a survey of 1,127 U.S. workers this past February. The results show that 58% of employees admit to regularly pretending to work, while another 34% claim they merely do so from time to time. What might be most striking about the reports findings, though, are some of the elaborate methods workers use to perform productivity. Apparently, 15% of U.S. employees have faked a phone call for a supervisors benefit, while 12% have scheduled fake meetings to pad out their calendars, and 22% have used their computer keyboards as pianos to make the music of office ambiance. As for what these employees are actually doing while pretending to crush deliverables, in many cases its hunting for other jobs. The survey shows that 92% of employees have job-searched in some way while on the clock, with 55% admitting they do so regularly. In fact, some of those fake calls employees have made while walking around the office may have been on the way to making real calls to recruiters, since 20% of those surveyed have taken such calls at work. While ghostworking may overlap in some ways with the quiet quitting trend that emerged in 2023, theres a clear distinction between them. It hinges on the definition of the word perform. Someone who is quiet quitting has essentially checked out of their job mentally and is performing the bare minimum of work necessary, says Keith Spencer, a career expert at Resume Now. They are flying under the radar and operating in a way that avoids any attention. Ghostworking, on the other hand, is a performance. It involves actively projecting an appearance of busyness without actually engaging in meaningful work. If quiet quitting was a response to pandemic-era burnout and an abrupt surge in return to office mandates, ghostworking appears to be a response to, well, everything that has happened since. Even before the newly created DOGE began decimating some government and contractor offices around the country in late-January, the waves of layoffs starting in 2023 have continued to gain momentum in the tech world and beyond. Unemployment is still fairly low at 4.2%, not counting those workers who are functionally unemployed, but workers everywhere are worried about a recession. Meanwhile, the drive to incorporate AI into workflow at most companies has created a palpable sense of uncertainty around exactly how to perform jobs in the present, and whether those jobs will even exist in the future. Its no wonder a recent LinkedIn Workforce Confidence Survey found that U.S. workers’ faith in their job security and ability to find new work has plummeted to its lowest level since April 2020, during the onset of the pandemic. Adding to this decline in morale and engagement is a recent decrease in clarity of expectations. According to a Gallup poll from January, just 46% of employees clearly know whats expected of them at work these days, down 10 points from a high of 56% in March 2020. Many workers now live with the tacit understanding that they will have to work harder than ever to avoid getting caught in an impending cull, but without quite being aligned with management on what that work entails. Its in this kind of office environment that ghostworking seems to thrive. The workforce is currently under immense pressure to appear productive, even when its counterintuitive to actual productivity, Spencer says. These behaviors point to a deeper disconnect between how productivity is perceived and how its actually delivered. In many cases, the appearance of working has become just as important as the work itself. The Resume Now survey indicates that 69% of employees believe theyd be more productive if their manager monitored their screen time. However, this invasive approach to task visibility seems destined to backfire. A 2023 report from analytics firm Visier found that employees faced with surveillance tools were more than twice (and in some cases three times) as likely to commit the most egregious performative behaviors, like keeping a laptop screen awake while not working, asking someone to do a task for them, and exaggerating when giving a status update. Even if surveillance did prove effective against ghostworking, it would be an attack on its symptoms, rather than the root causes. The ongoing return to office resurgence has left many employees feeling like theyre working inside of a fishbowl, right as other external factors have made their jobs more challenging and less stable. Some data shows that workers are just as productive while working from home as at the office, while other studies find workers are even more productive at home. Still, for some leaders, a full office humming with deskside chats that could possibly be brainstorming sessions is the only productivity metric that matters. Employees sensing a greater need to broadcast that theyre getting work done than to actually do the work at hand suggests managers may be rewardig performative work. Whatever the solution to the ghostworking trend might be for any individual company, it will likely have to come from those managers shifting their thinking. As Spencer notes, When managers offer more trust, flexibility, and space to do meaningful workinstead of focusing on constant visibilityteams are more likely to stay engaged and actually deliver.
Category:
E-Commerce
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