2. Corporate jargon

Helping to give credibility to business operations or just plain old nonsense?

Dog image by LUM3N from Pixabay, caption by me.

Have you ever had to:

·      ‘leverage your synergies to productise the core’?

·      ‘circle back on low-hanging fruit, but from a 30,000-foot perspective’?

·      ‘think outside the box, but within the confines of the box, while simultaneously disrupting the box’?

I swear, I can feel my soul shrivelling every time I hear phrases like this. I guess it’s because I’ve worked in places that were over-enthusiastic proponents of this kind of language but were not, ultimately, ‘all that’. (I can say that now. 😉)

A few months ago, knowing my feelings about corporate-speak, my partner came home from the office and proclaimed gleefully, “You should see the email we were sent today – you’ll love it!”

Uh-oh… His workplace is a committed fan of phrases like ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘vanilla solutions’, ‘pivoting’ and so on but he showed me a message with a phrase I hadn’t seen before. This time, the management had surpassed themselves by talking about…

…a rolling interim front-door engagement process.

What the heck?!

Turns out they were actually talking about ‘a weekly meeting’.

Then why not say ‘a weekly meeting’ dammit? Why the need to dress it up into something unintelligible? Why do so many businesses do this when so many people hate it?

Random thought deliverables on corporate jargon

1.     Imagine if we ‘lived and breathed’ corporateness, as so many job adverts demand. We’d spend our mornings at work engaging in synergistic ideation break-out sessions, developing innovative solutions for client-centric challenges whilst aligning our divergent thinking alongside organisational objectives. After that, we’d break for a period of nutritional optimisation to replenish our bio-equipoise in preparation for an afternoon of virtual convenings where we would leverage our rejuvenated selves to generate a series of actionable insights and strategic metrics within the optimal parameters of our core competencies… 🙈

2.     Maybe I should start a Jargon Box of Shame to find the worst offenders. Perhaps it could become some kind of therapeutic wellbeing activity for employees whose lives are being adversely affected by the tediousness of beastly business buzzwords? Place the words in the box, close the lid and it’s compartmentalised and out of your life… (well, until the next time, that is).

3.     Corporate communication shouldn’t be this constipated; it should be clear and accessible so everyone in the business can understand it. Think about it: people with English as a second language, neurodivergent employees, new hires – there is nothing more alienating than not knowing what the heck people are talking about. And nothing more unproductive for the business than putting people in that situation.

4.     It’s causing problems. According to this LinkedIn and Duolingo survey from 2023, “50% of professionals say misunderstandings of workplace jargon led to wasted time every week”. And, even worse, “41% say they’ve had a misunderstanding or made a mistake at work because they didn’t know the meaning of workplace jargon or misused it.” Surely, a cast-iron case for reining it in.

5.     Being gracious… it can be hard to find your feet when you move to a new role in a new company. Using corporate language may be something new employees may adopt to fit in and boost their confidence. More power to them if it’s a mechanism that works. If it can ease a path into a new role and help people feel that they belong, then it’s a (the only?) good use of it.

6.     And… some of it is actually quite creative! Think of “building a plane while flying it” or, erm… er… Oh well. It’s just a shame that it’s so eye-rollingly awful when people use it with no sense of irony. I ain’t got no synergy with that!

Let me just circle back and say that leveraging the terms unique to your business or sector are useful and necessary. But, moving forward, generic corporate-speak is something I think the world wouldn’t miss if it were banned overnight.

Or would it? (I wouldn’t be able to write a post like this if it were!) 😛

Random star chart rating

·      Comedy value: 3/5

·      Impact on the mental health of the workforce: -1/5

·      Marks for creativity: 2/5

·      Marks for naffness: 6/5

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So, corporate jargon – do we really need that?

Drop your corporate words or phrases for my Jargon Box of Shame into the comments!

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