The Benefits of Eavesdropping on Office Conversations

It is one of the hardest things about working in an office: You are constantly overhearing other people. Sometimes it is just distracting chatter. Sometimes it is the proverbial “too much information” about people’s lives or projects. And, of course, sometimes other people are listening in on you.

But what if the ability to eavesdrop is a benefit for your work life, not a negative?

Workers can gain a host of insights from the buzz of conversations around them, some executives and researchers say. Eavesdropping not only can deliver information about what is happening at the company, it can help people understand their colleagues’ mind-sets, workloads and moods. It can help people learn who’s who in the organisational structure and pick up tips on how to have certain kinds of conversations. Some workplaces are even trying to create opportunities for this kind of informational osmosis to occur.

This new respect for eavesdropping is driven in part by the return to work after the pandemic. Employees are starting to realise how much they benefited from the information they absorb by seeing co-workers in person—anything from weekend plans to forthcoming work projects.

“They have more opportunities to listen in on the water-cooler conversations,” says Johnny Taylor, chief executive of SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management.

Chattering classes

Robert Burns, a marketing director at Sunnking, an electronics recycler in Brockport, N.Y., says that he often eavesdrops on co-workers as they make their business calls. It helps him better understand how they speak about the company to clients or vendors, which, in turn, helps him pick up tips on what does and doesn’t work, he says.

After overhearing them, he also has given co-workers “talking points” to help them use less industry jargon when discussing the recycling business. The object, he says, is to make it easier for them to relate to clients. “It benefits me in this role and my team to hear what everyone is doing—whether they like it or not,” he says.

Burns is careful of what is said in more hushed tones around the office. When he overhears information being said in a whisper, he is more hesitant about bringing it up later or in meetings. “I can probably hear it, but I don’t need to acknowledge it,” he says. “It’s kind of an unwritten understanding.”

The biggest benefits to eavesdropping go beyond hearing what is said, according to researchers. Seeing who is talking to whom can make it easier to accurately map out other people’s networks, says Hillary Anger Elfenbein, professor of organisational behaviour at Washington University in St. Louis who studies the topic. With that knowledge, employees can better understand how to influence company decision makers based on whom they know or where to turn to find information.

In her research, she found that most employees find it difficult to accurately define these networks without in-person opportunities. Even if the chat is muffled, “you hear about the relationship between them,” she says, through cues like body language.

In recent years, when fewer people are in the office, being in a situation to overhear conversations is also “more valuable for the eavesdropper,” says Elfenbein. With fewer chances for in-person conversations taking place, every chance to listen in is all the more important.

Deploying design

Many companies are starting to see the benefits of promoting awareness of workplace behaviours, including overheard conversations, and are exploring office layouts that encourage the practice, says Brian Stromquist, who leads the technology workplace practice at design and architecture firm Gensler. Specifically, he is seeing more interest from companies that want eavesdropping to serve as an informal way of mentorship between junior and senior employees. A newer employee can benefit simply from overhearing a more senior person participating in a meeting, solving a problem or leading a project.

“Eavesdropping is seen as a subset of observation where junior employees can observe leadership qualities,” he says.

From a design perspective, that means Gensler is now creating more spaces where there are different areas that are explicitly designed to encourage and discourage listening, “allowing for a spectrum of acoustic privacy,” says Stromquist, who is based in San Francisco. For instance, an area of open desks may make it purposely simple to overhear conversations, while another part of the floor may use music or white noise to create an atmosphere more conducive to privacy, he says. Deep-focus spaces or quiet libraries are explicitly places where employees should not be listened to, he adds.

“As people are re acclimating to the office, they’ve kind of established this new set of protocols that really recommend how you might use new spaces within the office,” he says.

Mind your manners

Of course, no one recommends purposely seeking out private or personal conversations to listen in on. And you should only act on information that you overheard without violating somebody else’s privacy.

“You don’t want to create a culture where people feel like you’re big-brothering them and hearing everything they say,” says Adam Struck, founder of Struck Capital, a venture-capital firm based in Los Angeles.

It is possible that employees in certain roles are more likely to be in need of eavesdropping for success, says Leila Bighash, assistant professor of communication at the University of Arizona, who studies social eavesdropping. Previous research showed that nurses, physicians and hospital staff were more likely to consider eavesdropping at work as integral to their job because they could overhear information at a cardiac intensive-care unit that was critical to a patient’s health.

People in a cutthroat work environment may also benefit more from eavesdropping, Bighash says. In those workplaces, people may be more reluctant to share information in direct conversation with certain people. So employees who listen to others can learn about projects outside of their department, or potential conflicts or challenges.

Digital eavesdropping

Eavesdropping doesn’t have to be confined to in-person conversations. With so many people keeping in touch with far-flung co-workers digitally, there are now more companies replicating the office environment by offering more opportunities for digital eavesdropping, says Paul Leonardi, professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara.

One opportunity to digitally eavesdrop is through Slack channels or other messaging apps that allow for many participants, he says. Another is for people to access company materials and presentations online or by listening to recorded Zoom calls that aren’t directly related to their work, says Leonardi.

Leonardi suggests using messaging apps, including Slack, to get a sense of other employees’ lives, especially outside of work. In his research, he finds that information from this kind of digital eavesdropping—such as details about a vacation—makes a good ice breaker when approaching these same workers offline.

“People’s comfort at reaching out to other people on whose information they have eavesdropped increases if they know stuff about them,” he says.

But be cautious when using overheard information, says Deborah Grayson Riegel, an executive coach in Chapel Hill, N.C., who works with large companies on communication. Much of the time, employees need to be aware that some of the information may be confidential, jeopardise company initiatives or simply be interpreted incorrectly.

“You need to understand that you are hearing it out of context, and it’s not the full story,” she says.

In Singapore, it’s not unusual for total strangers to ask, “Have you eaten yet?” A greeting akin to “Good morning,” it invariably leads to follow-up questions. What did you eat? Where did you eat it? Was it good? Greeters reserve the right to judge your responses and offer advice, solicited or otherwise, on where you should eat next.

Locals will often joke that gastronomic opinions can make (and break) relationships and that eating is a national pastime. And why wouldn’t it be? In a nexus of colliding cultures—a place where Malays, Indians, Chinese and Europeans have brushed shoulders and shared meals for centuries—the mix of flavours coming out of kitchens in this country is enough to make you believe in world peace.

While Michelin stars spangle Singapore’s restaurant scene , to truly understand the city’s relationship with food, you have to venture to the hawker centres. A core aspect of daily life, hawker centres sprang up in numbers during the 1970s, built by authorities looking to sanitise and formalise the city’s street-food scene. Today, 121 government-run hawker centres feature food stalls that specialise in dishes from the country’s various ethnic groups. In one of the world’s most expensive cities, hawker dishes are shockingly cheap: A full meal can cost as little as $3.

Over the course of many visits to Singapore, I’ve fallen in love with these places—and with the scavenger hunts to find meals I’ll never forget: delicate bowls of laksa noodle soup, where brisk lashes of heat interrupt addictive swirls of umami; impossibly flaky roti prata dipped in curry; the beautiful simplicity of an immaculately roasted duck leg. In a futuristic and at times sterile city, hawker centres throw back to the past and offer a rare glimpse of something human in scale. To an outsider like me, sitting at a table amid the din of the lunch-hour rush can feel like glimpsing the city’s soul through all the concrete and glitz.

So I’ve been alarmed in recent years to hear about the supposed demise of hawker centres. Would-be hawkers have to bid for stalls from the government, and rents are climbing . An upwardly mobile generation doesn’t want to take over from their parents. On a recent trip to Singapore, I enlisted my brother, who lives there, and as we ate our way across the city, we searched for signs of life—and hopefully a peek into what the future holds.

At Amoy Street Food Centre, near the central business district, 32-year-old Kai Jin Thng has done the math. To turn a profit at his stall, Jin’s Noodle , he says, he has to churn out at least 150 $4 bowls of kolo mee , a Malaysian dish featuring savoury pork over a bed of springy noodles, in 120 minutes of lunch service. With his sister as sous-chef, he slings the bowls with frenetic focus.

Thng dropped out of school as a teenager to work in his father’s stall selling wonton mee , a staple noodle dish, and is quick to say no when I ask if he wants his daughter to take over the stall one day.

“The tradition is fading and I believe that in the next 10 or 15 years, it’s only going to get worse,” Thng said. “The new generation prefers to put on their tie and their white collar—nobody really wants to get their hands dirty.”

In 2020, the National Environment Agency , which oversees hawker centres, put the median age of hawkers at 60. When I did encounter younger people like Thng in the trade, I found they persevered out of stubbornness, a desire to innovate on a deep-seated tradition—or some combination of both.

Later that afternoon, looking for a momentary reprieve from Singapore’s crushing humidity, we ducked into Market Street Hawker Centre and bought juice made from fresh calamansi, a small citrus fruit.

Jamilah Beevi, 29, was working the shop with her father, who, at 64, has been a hawker since he was 12. “I originally stepped in out of filial duty,” she said. “But I find it to be really fulfilling work…I see it as a generational shop, so I don’t want to let that die.” When I asked her father when he’d retire, he confidently said he’d hang up his apron next year. “He’s been saying that for many years,” Beevi said, laughing.

More than one Singaporean told me that to truly appreciate what’s at stake in the hawker tradition’s threatened collapse, I’d need to leave the neighbourhoods where most tourists spend their time, and venture to the Heartland, the residential communities outside the central business district. There, hawker centres, often combined with markets, are strategically located near dense housing developments, where they cater to the 77% of Singaporeans who live in government-subsidised apartments.

We ate laksa from a stall at Ghim Moh Market and Food Centre, where families enjoyed their Sunday. At Redhill Food Centre, a similar chorus of chattering voices and clattering cutlery filled the space, as diners lined up for prawn noodles and chicken rice. Near our table, a couple hungrily unwrapped a package of durian, a coveted fruit banned from public transportation and some hotels for its strong aroma. It all seemed like business as usual.

Then we went to Blackgoat . Tucked in a corner of the Jalan Batu housing development, Blackgoat doesn’t look like an average hawker operation. An unusually large staff of six swirled around a stall where Fikri Amin Bin Rohaimi, 24, presided over a fiery grill and a seriously ambitious menu. A veteran of the three-Michelin-star Zén , Rohaimi started selling burgers from his apartment kitchen in 2019, before opening a hawker stall last year. We ordered everything on the menu and enjoyed a feast that would astound had it come out of a fully equipped restaurant kitchen; that it was all made in a 130-square-foot space seemed miraculous.

Mussels swam in a mushroom broth, spiked with Thai basil and chives. Huge, tender tiger prawns were grilled to perfection and smothered in toasted garlic and olive oil. Lamb was coated in a whisper of Sichuan peppercorns; Wagyu beef, in a homemade makrut-lime sauce. Then Ethel Yam, Blackgoat’s pastry chef prepared a date pudding with a mushroom semifreddo and a panna cotta drizzled in chamomile syrup. A group of elderly residents from the nearby towers watched, while sipping tiny glasses of Tiger beer.

Since opening his stall, Rohaimi told me, he’s seen his food referred to as “restaurant-level hawker food,” a categorisation he rejects, feeling it discounts what’s possible at a hawker centre. “If you eat hawker food, you know that it can often be much better than anything at a restaurant.”

He wants to open a restaurant eventually—or, leveraging his in-progress biomedical engineering degree, a food lab. But he sees the modern hawker centre not just as a steppingstone, but a place to experiment. “Because you only have to manage so many things, unlike at a restaurant, a hawker stall right now gives us a kind of limitlessness to try new things,” he said.

Using high-grade Australian beef and employing a whole staff, Rohaimi must charge more than typical hawker stalls, though his food, around $12 per 100 grams of steak, still costs far less than high-end restaurant fare. He’s found that people will pay for quality, he says, even if he first has to convince them to try the food.

At Yishun Park Hawker Centre (now temporarily closed for renovations), Nurl Asyraffie, 33, has encountered a similar dynamic since he started Kerabu by Arang , a stall specialising in “modern Malay food.” The day we came, he was selling ayam percik , a grilled chicken leg smothered in a bewitching turmeric-based marinade. As we ate, a hawker from another stall came over to inquire how much we’d paid. When we said around $10 a plate, she looked skeptical: “At least it’s a lot of food.”

Asyraffie, who opened the stall after a spell in private dining and at big-name restaurants in the region, says he’s used to dubious reactions. “I think the way you get people’s trust is you need to deliver,” he said. “Singapore is a melting pot; we’re used to trying new things, and we will pay for food we think is worth it.” He says a lot of the same older “uncles” who gawked at his prices, are now regulars. “New hawkers like me can fill a gap in the market, slightly higher than your chicken rice, but lower than a restaurant.”

But economics is only half the battle for a new generation of hawkers, says Seng Wun Song, a 64-year-old, semiretired economist who delves into the inner workings of Singapore’s food-and-beverage industry as a hobby. He thinks locals and tourists who come to hawker centers to look for “authentic” Singaporean food need to rethink what that amorphous catchall word really means. What people consider “heritage food,” he explains, is a mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian and European dishes that emerged from the country’s founding. “But Singapore is a trading hub where people come and go, and heritage moves and changes. Hawker food isn’t dying; it’s evolving so that it doesn’t die.”

The Benefits of Eavesdropping on Office Conversations

Employees—and bosses—can learn a lot of useful information by listening in on the chatter around them

Chattering classes

Deploying design

Mind your manners

Digital eavesdropping

No trip to Singapore is complete without a meal (or 12) at its hawker centres, where stalls sell multicultural dishes from generations-old recipes. But rising costs and demographic change are threatening the beloved tradition.