Gen Z loves to talk. They love it so much, in fact, that the phenomenon of young people chit-chatting nonstop has given birth to a new term: yapping.
To “yap” is to speak for long periods on end, sometimes until the listening party tunes out. And America’s youngest workers, a generation defined as 27 to 12 years old, have recently taken to social media to express how they can’t help but yap at work. “I might be a little parasite that will yap your ear off if you let me, but I think I’m growing on my coworkers,” one worker said in a TikTok video earlier this year.
Yapping may come across as annoying to coworkers, and could get young staffers in trouble with their managers. But experts say that a love of small talk among young employees is likely born out of their years of COVID isolation and loneliness. And Gen Z’s instinct to socialize with their coworkers is far from a bad thing for companies. It actually increases collaboration among the workforce, boosts innovation, and improves well-being.
“Small talk builds social connections between people. And research on this has existed for at least 100 years,” Emily Rosado-Solomon, assistant professor of management at Babson College, tells Fortune. “Part of this yapping trend is just a poorly executed, but well intentioned, attempt to connect with coworkers.”
Young and yapping
Gen Z isn’t the first generation to yap.
Younger people can tend to overdo small talk compared to their elders, Ryne Sherman, chief science officer at Hogan Assessments, a workplace personality evaluation company, tells Fortune. So even though boomer and Gen X employees might sneer at Gen Z’s “yapping,” they likely behaved the same way at that age.
“Older people tend to be more agreeable in the workforce, and are less emotionally volatile,” Sherman says. “Younger people tend to score a little bit higher on sociability, which is kind of the definition of yapping.”
But there are also special factors that may have exacerbated Gen Z’s yapping habits. Many young employees spent their formative years in COVID lockdown or Zoom classrooms, starting their first jobs during or soon after the height of the pandemic. Shut off from peers and coworkers, they were undoubtedly impacted by years of isolation, and have distinguished themselves from other generations in how eager they’ve been to return to the office, build relationships, and gab with coworkers. Yapping is likely a direct consequence of these years quarantined away from an office setting.
To address yapping and other COVID socialization consequences, many U.S. universities are now offering upcoming graduates etiquette classes for a little help when it comes to how to behave in the office. And over 60% of U.S. companies plan to offer employee etiquette training, with how to make polite conversation a top priority.
“Their whole adult life, they haven’t had the chance to actually learn and have that give-and-take in work relationships,” says John Hackston, head of thought leadership at Myers-Briggs Company, a personality assessment provider, tells Fortune. After years of analyzing character types, Hackston says this conversational trend is spotlighted post-pandemic. “And suddenly, bang, they’re in an office, and they do what seems right. They may not realize that perhaps that doesn’t fit into the etiquette.”
Yapping as a source for good
Despite the good intentions behind workplace yapping, some coworkers are annoyed by small talk. Bosses may feel the urge to clamp down on workplace socializing, but experts say that watercooler talk is actually good for offices. Chatting can spark new ideas, foster a sense of belonging, and create a culture of mutual exchange.
“When small talk is successful, it leads to feelings of energy that then promotes what we call ‘citizenship behaviors,’ which is employees doing work for the benefit of somebody in their organization,” Rosado-Solomon says. “So that could be, ‘I’m gonna help my friend or my co-worker with this project, even though that’s not my job responsibility.’”
Overall, the uplifting and social effects of company small talk far outweigh any negatives, according to one workplace study from the Academy of Management Journal. It found that office chatting positively impacts employee well-being at the end of the workday; the same cannot be said for other types of activities like deep-focus solo work. The study also found that small talk improves the emotional aspects of staffers’ working lives.
Yapping can also provide brief periods of mental rest during long stretches of assignments and concentrated thinking. “For any kind of work, you need breaks. Nobody sits down and just plows through eight hours straight,” Sherman says. And workplace chit-chat can also lead to networking opportunities for young people. Rosado-Solomon said she has witnessed her students use yapping to jump-start their careers.
But the downsides can’t be ignored either, and even pro-yappers must acknowledge when it has gone too far. Not only can small talk be incredibly distracting to peers working nearby, but it can also make people with different communication styles uncomfortable, Christina Janzer, SVP of research and analytics for Slack, tells Fortune. For example, introverts may dislike long-winded conversations, and may not feel confident to speak up for themselves. She also says that when managers are looking for where to draw the line, they should act when productivity suffers.
“Going on and on about an unimportant subject for 30 minutes maybe isn’t the most effective way to show up to work,” she says. “Pushing people to be more effective with the time we spend together is going to help people avoid conversations they don’t necessarily want to be in, and get their productivity back.”
But it’s also important for managers to remember that office etiquette is changing, and Gen Z is helping create a new normal when it comes to work culture, according to Rosado-Solomon. Young workers expect to be able to talk about their lives at work in a way that previous generations did not.
“Gen Z in particular has these expectations on the workplace to care about them as whole humans,” she says. “Even before COVID, there was potentially a generational mismatch between what older workers expected or wanted to talk about in the workplace, and the level of authenticity that maybe younger generations are bringing into the workplace.”
Despite any potential pitfalls, experts say it’s still smarter for bosses to get on board with changing workplace expectations and communication styles, or at least wait before bringing down the hammer in a way that would alienate younger staff and create a disengaged workforce.
“I think an employer monitoring [yapping] would be a bad idea,” Sherman says. “What really matters ultimately is, how are people being productive? It’s hard to point to yapping and say, ‘This is the negative impact on our workforce.’”