No Stupid Questions

No. But not all drama is super dramatic.

There are some places that have a crazy office politics environment (2007 Microsoft, I'm looking at you). If that is the case, I would just change jobs.

However, if you just have annoying coworkers who are off topic, I would just steer the conversation back to work items ("oh, before I forget, can you tell me about [work related item]?"), then leave the conversation. Other tactics that work for me: look really awkward during personal conversation, never ask how someone is doing, wear headphones.

Someone once told me it's important to care, but not that much. This has also helped me.

Beat of luck to you!!

Nope. Where there are people there is drama.

Some are better at managing their drama than others but no workplace is drama free.

You live in a time with a lot of change and not a very cohesive culture time. Politics are getting rough, people have their own communities and echo chambers making it harder to adapt to others.

No drama means you have a good community that is similar and takes care of each other. Right now that is hard to find

I'm semi retired, disabled, and a house husband. Sometimes I need a little chaos to feel something

I guess I just learned to accept that the only behavior I can control is my own in the workplace. If someone is saying stuff I find objectionable then I keep it strictly professional and let them know I expect the same in return.

No there is always someone who causes problems, and other people to react to it and gossip and talk about it.

I've had entire hourly slack meetings about what someone said.

People expect the workplace to be fair, and to be treated with respect, and some people don't care about what people expect. They treat people badly if they feel they can get away with it.

I’m mostly alone for it so yeah.

Probably not, but I'm sort of oblivious so I don't really notice. 🤷‍♂️

A drama free department, yes! We have that where I am. The whole company? That seems unlikely. But accounting and IT are calm and not dramatic at my workplace.

Yes, my current job is drama free. Not that the work isn't very very hard and stressful, but that my coworkers all work as a team and there has been zero drama in the 2 years I've worked there.

I can't say I've ever encountered much "workplace drama" in my life. When I worked in call centers there would've never been time to find out anyone's opinion on anything. Of course then you trade drama for the stress of the job.

Now I'm back to food service, and other than most of my coworkers not being invested enough to put in their full effort, it's pretty good. Aside from one person, I don't really know anything about anyone's lives that I don't want to and I'm quite happy with that.

YMMV a lot on both of those

1. report them to HR for racist comments in the workplace.

2. report them for sexual harassment.

3 & 4) especially 4 just report to HR for having too many political comments on the floor.

All the stuff you listed is inappropriate and contributing the drama. You report it so that you can say "I've already made it known I'm not trying to have these conversations with you, please stop" and when they don't you go back to step one till they get fired.

The alternative is to learn to accept your coworkers as they are, unprofessional or not, and not let their bullshit irritate you so much.

Not saying which is correct, but you have options.

Yes, and it was my first job out of university. Incredible. It has set the standard for me. Everyone extremely polite, restrained, no oversharing, no politics discussions in the office, no drama. People would just gravitate towards those that shared their views and would have coffee breaks at different times than other groups. Everyone was painfully aware of how bad these things can get, so we all made an effort to keep the environment light.

I've probably really only had one job where this was a problem, and it was already a politically charged environment because of the work we were doing. Despite the nature of the work, the drama wasn't political at all. It was just all young people just out of college airing way too much of their personal lives too freely. With all of the rivalries, infighting, and occasional sabotage, it felt like a 2000s MTV series in there.

No.

Maybe