Coworkers Sharing Personal Details at the Office Is Getting Weird

It’s been “interesting” for Adriana Lima to navigate the sheer amount of personal information she hears from her younger coworkers, to say the least. On the one hand, she thinks it’s great to have open conversations about their anxieties around work, such as feeling uncomfortable on camera during video calls. On the other hand, she’s not qualified to weigh in on their mental health at the lunch table. She wants people to be comfortable on the job, but she also wants to keep the office from turning into therapy sessions. Lima, who’s a communications manager at a small startup, tries to listen and be receptive, and she consults HR when she’s unsure what to do. It can feel callous to direct someone to employee assistance programs or insurance, but sometimes, that’s the best course of action.

“At the end of the day, all of us would be doing the employee a disservice if we were trying to act as a mental health professional,” she says.

We’re in an era of people bringing their whole selves to work. The modern iteration of work-life balance is less about creating a hard line between the two and more about letting them bleed into each other a bit. Many workers don’t believe in a working world where every thought about their personal lives ceases once they walk through the office door. The pandemic and the rise of remote work gave us intimate windows into one another’s lives. Social media has conflated contexts even further, as people post about their divorces on LinkedIn and use Instagram to promote their work. Technology means the workday never ends.

“We now take our work home readily and easily, basically in our pockets with our phones. The lines are blurred no matter what,” says Carrie Bulger, an industrial-organizational psychologist at Quinnipiac University. “Why wouldn’t they blur in the other direction as well? It feels kind of normal.”

It can make the workplace a little more inviting when people act like people, not worker bots. It can also be a little much. And now, oversharing at work is on overdrive. While Gen Z may be the biggest culprit, there’s no age limit on spilling a few too many beans.

“For me, as a millennial, it’s kind of like you had your one work bestie, and you’d be like, ‘Oh, my God, you’d never guess what I did last night,'” Lima, who’s 32, says. “Gen Z, in my experience, there seems to be a bit more openness in sharing about family trauma, diagnoses, things that they’re struggling with.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s generally a good thing that the American workplace has become a more empathetic, human space. The typical “ideal worker” has historically been someone who’s always available, never speaks up, and keeps details about their personal life quiet. It’s a positive shift for workers to feel more comfortable taking a day off or be willing to open up about themselves. But there’s a line — and many people have experienced a coworker or two who leaps right over it. It may not even be their fault — in a way, employers did this to themselves. Encouraging the “bring your whole self to work” thing over the past decade has been a way for employers to try to foster connections and increase loyalty, making work a more comfortable place for people to be. It was also part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion push to encourage openness and belonging. There was a pernicious side, too, since the idea probably helped give employers the permission to expect employees to bring work home with them and finish things up in their off hours. But in some instances, the strategy has backfired.

There’s a difference between being authentic versus being unfiltered.

When reporting for this story, I heard from one woman who had to explain to an intern that it wasn’t OK to take her bra off in the office, and another whose manager told her some pretty extensive details about her birth, including her mother’s episiotomy. Another person described their coworker as an “emotional vampire” who often delves into details about her ex’s alcoholism and her sexual relationship with her current partner and overtakes meetings with her personal and professional problems, sucking energy and space from everyone else. A friend of mine — a new manager — has spent the past several months navigating a direct report’s on-again, off-again relationship with their partner.

Almost all of us have had the experience of watching a certain coworker approach our desks or pop up on a video call and thought to ourselves, “Oh, boy, what’s the story going to be today?” Random gossip is fun! Sharing is a way to bond! But also, maybe the guy from IT doesn’t need to know about your grandmother’s illness and your subway run-in with your ex.

Nicole Magelssen had a former colleague at her job as a virtual assistant who often unloaded about her relationship hiccups and health scares in meetings. But where she really crossed the line was in making jokes about owning guns and “coming for anyone who messed with her,” Magelssen recalls. When she’d mention it, “you could feel the energy in the room just dropping,” Magelssen says, and while the woman was competent, it made it impossible to trust her judgment with clients. “They never had her meet directly one-on-one with a client without someone else there to tone down the oversharing and monitor what was being said,” she says. It hurt morale and caused grudges when the issue hijacked everyone’s day.

“Your reputation at work is built on how clearly and credibly you communicate, and oversharing can cloud both,” says Carla Bevins, an assistant teaching professor of business communication at Carnegie Mellon University. “There’s a difference between being authentic versus being unfiltered. One builds trust; the other, it can really erode professionalism.”

Work culture is constantly shifting, and in recent years, it’s shifted in ways that may be unrecognizable and uncomfortable for some. As New York Magazine recently noted, things have crossed the line from casual to a little too casual in many instances.

Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist who founded the Institute for Life at Work, says there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that “people don’t know how to behave in what we consider traditionally professional ways” at work. People scroll on their phones during meetings, or dress in office attire that’s more fitting for a night on the town. Or, they get anxious about small talk and swing too far in the Big Talk direction. “I think perhaps people have misunderstood that whole idea of just full, unfettered self-expression,” Noonan Hadley says.

“I don’t think you have to overshare to be seen or valued,” says Sasha Leatherbarrow, who’s the global talent leader at Bansk Beauty, a beauty-focused investment firm, and a longtime recruiter and talent manager. Leatherbarrow says people who are a bit rusty in work settings feel like they have to kick things off with an in-depth story to forge a connection with coworkers or clients, but that’s often not the case.

Gen Z, in particular, seems to be leading the TMI charge. They feel a lot of stress and anxiety at work, and they talk about it candidly. They’ve also grown up in a social media era where everything is out in the open.

You don’t want to invite bias or gossip, especially in very competitive and hierarchical environments.

“Gen Z has become much more comfortable with talking openly about mental health issues and is really determined to take away some of the stigma,” says Alison Green, a career columnist who runs the website Ask a Manager. “I don’t think workplaces and the culture more broadly are doing a good job of giving people guidance about how to preserve boundaries and why it might actually be in their best interest to preserve some boundaries at work.”

On the more harmless end of the spectrum, oversharing can be annoying to coworkers and managers. On the more damaging end, it can be harmful to the organization and the oversharer in question.

“You don’t want to invite bias or gossip, especially in very competitive and hierarchical environments,” Bevins says.

When someone is chronically over-the-top, their peers and employers may start to wonder whether they’re trustworthy. Consciously or unconsciously, they may deem the person too emotional, unstable, or preoccupied to handle a project and hand it off to someone else.

“How you present yourself at work does really have an impact on your growth, your influence, and honestly, job security, being able to progress up to the top,” Leatherbarrow says. “If you are the office gossip, how many times do you see C-suite sitting in the office gossiping? You don’t.”

To be sure, it’s not always easy to strike the right balance. If you know absolutely nothing about anyone’s life, that’s strange, too, and can damage trust. Sharing information about ourselves is one of the ways we bond, and some level of familiarity makes work a little more bearable.

“Our coworkers, our supervisors, even our subordinates are an important source of social support,” Bulger says. While most of that support should be work-focused, it’s normal to lean on coworkers for some nonwork advice on occasion, such as asking for day care recommendations or puppy training tips, but you don’t want to get too in the weeds. “You probably don’t need to tell your office mate or your boss about every spat you have with your roommate or your spouse,” Bulger says.

In the spirit of fairness, I also talked to some self-professed oversharers for this story to get their takes on why they are how they are and how it affects them.

Ali Goldberg, who works in tech communications, feels like oversharing makes her more personable and relatable. She thinks her being comfortable talking about things makes others comfortable with her. “I’m so over the whole stonewalling at work thing,” she says. She’s spoken openly at work about her father’s death, and she’s shown colleagues a video of herself being interviewed on the street while drunk while she was in college. “It may make me a little bit unprofessional sometimes, but I think it’s all about context and building upon the relationships that you already have,” she says.

Sometimes people can suck, and they’ll judge you on things that you have no control over.

Jessica Copi, a project analyst, told me she feels like whether she’s viewed as too much is team-culture dependent — on one team she’s on, she’s gotten a talking-to about overdoing it, but on another, all the talk about personal lives is totally normal. “I have a hard time having a work self,” she says, adding that politics, in particular, can be a point of contention: “It’s hard for me not to express my opinion. It’s also hard for my face not to express my opinion.”

Another oversharer says that in past jobs in retail and education, she sort of felt like overdoing it was a necessity. If she wanted to take the day off or call out sick, she had to be really explicit — even dramatic — about the reason. Now, after getting feedback from her boss at her office job about oversharing, she’s trying to change her ways. “She was like, ‘Hey, let me bring this to your attention: Sometimes people can suck, and they’ll judge you on things that you have no control over, and maybe stop giving them ammunition,” she says.

Navigating an oversharing coworker, or navigating work as an oversharer yourself, can be tricky.

If you’re worried that you’re doing the oversharing, Bulger suggests asking yourself how you would feel if the shoe were on the other foot. “Would you think it’s appropriate?” she says. When you’re about to share a bit of gossip or a personal woe with a coworker, think about what your boss would think if they overheard you.

People should also keep in mind that they don’t know what their coworkers may be going through when they bring up tough subjects. “A piece of that people don’t think about a lot, but I hear from readers all the time is you don’t know if someone around you at work might have some related trauma in their background,” says Green, the career columnist.

For those on the receiving end of too much information, Bevins suggests pivoting instead of pushing back. Steer the conversation to neutral ground. It’s possible to have empathy without being indulgent, to listen and acknowledge without egging things on. “You don’t necessarily have to match someone’s level of vulnerability to stay collegial,” she says. Noonan Hadley says managers can dedicate five to 10 minutes in meetings to personal chitchat. It’s a way to help give people space to connect, but it also contains the sharing and ensures one person doesn’t suck all the air out of the room. Leatherbarrow says people need to keep in mind the industry they work in, cultural differences, and generational divides. What’s normal in one context may be super awkward in another. “You don’t need to overshare; you just need to read the room,” she says. “We want personality, not personal drama.”

If things become too much, people can also enlist HR. They may be best equipped to devise a plan for feedback or assist an employee in need.

At work, we’re all in this together, like it or not. We don’t really get to choose who we spend our time with, the way we do our friends or partners. Everyone will survive if we’re too familiar with one another, but it may be a bit better if we all scale back just a smidge. So before you waltz up to the receptionist to talk about the disaster date you had last night, text your best friend instead.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.