Workplace stress can have an enormous impact on employees’ mental and physical health, which can lead to reduced performance, productivity, and engagement. Such stress can come from several sources, including concerns about job security or having to take on an increased number of responsibilities and work longer hours.
Mitigating sources of stress is not always easy for managers, but considering more than 80 percent of US workers have reported experiencing workplace stress, it is an imperative. The path to increasing employee well-being seems clear-cut on paper: Reduce stressors, and happier, more productive employees will follow. But what if a potential stressor could also benefit an employee?
That is the subject of new research into organizational secrecy by Michael Slepian, associate professor of business at Columbia Business School. In a study of thousands of workers across a variety of industries, he found that employees who are required to keep secrets at work are more likely to experience feelings of isolation and frustration, leading to increased levels of stress. However, this privileged access to information can also come with a sense of status that can have some surprising benefits, according to Slepian.
“Those feelings of status provide a sense of meaning in the work that employees do, even when the work is hard or stressful,” Slepian says. “The stress from keeping secrets at work is related to lower job satisfaction, and the greater meaning from keeping secrets is related to more job satisfaction. What's interesting is neither outweighs the other when it comes to the downstream outcome on job satisfaction.”
Slepian and his co-researchers, University of Southern California Professor Eric Anicich and Stanford University Professor Nir Halevy, surveyed workers in several industries, including government, media, education, law, and finance. They found that, across all industries and levels of management, 93 percent of workers reported having to keep a significant organizational secret at some point in time.
The most common types of secrets, according to the researchers, were varied, including the details and identities of clients; upcoming hiring and layoffs; the treatment of employees; future plans; finances; product details; ongoing projects; and unethical practices or wrongdoing.
Though some of the more commonly kept organizational secrets seem to have a direct impact on employee well-being, like upcoming layoffs and unethical practices, Slepian says the stress and isolation thrust on employees can happen no matter the secret type.
“Even when we control for how upsetting the secret is, we still see these effects,” he adds “There is something about the type of secret that might tip the scales in the way you would expect, but even so, the secrecy itself has an influence beyond that.”
Personal Versus Private
The foundation of the psychology behind organizational secrecy starts with understanding the inner workings of personal secrecy, according to Slepian, who authored a 2022 book on the topic, The Secret Life of Secrets. Both organizational secrets and personal secrets can cause the keeper to experience isolation and stress, he says. The important difference, however, comes in the way of status and meaning.
“Our personal secrets don’t often give us a sense of status or a sense of meaning; that seems unique to organizational secrets,” Slepian says.
He adds that keeping organizational secrets can induce more stress because they are often not kept by choice, unlike personal secrets. Organizational secrecy typically comes from above and is enforced by management, creating a matter of compliance with assigned responsibility — to not disclose information about product development or upcoming layoffs, for example — rather than one of personal choice.
Managing Secrets and Those Who Keep Them
While non-manager employees have some discretion in managing organizational secrets, leaders bear the most power in using organizational secrecy to maximize workers’ feelings of status and meaning, increasing their effectiveness, according to Slepian.
“It comes down to how managers can minimize the costs and how they can maximize the benefits. When it comes to minimizing the costs, minimizing that isolation and stress, there’s a lot that managers can do,” he says.
For starters, managers can help employees by informing them who else is let in on privileged information. Being able to speak with others about the secret makes a “world of difference,” Slepian says, namely reduced feelings of isolation and stress.
Concurrently, managers can leverage the feelings of status and job meaningfulness that come with employee-kept secrets, highlighting the trust placed in the employee and the privilege that comes with having access to sensitive information, for example. Also crucial is for managers to explain the reasoning behind the secrecy.
“We see that when employees don't understand the reason for the secrecy, some of the negative outcomes crop up,” Slepian says. “Explaining to employees why it's important to keep the organizational secret will give us our best chance of maximizing those benefits of feelings of status and meaning.”