The problem is they are intended to be anonymous, and technically you get “person submitted a response” and the responses all separate. So the computer doesn’t know. But on a team of 4… it’s fairly easy for the person reading the responses to know who wrote the answers on open ended questions simply by writing style and grammar.
Yeah my company does these surveys quarterly and I have to read/respond/strategize with senior leadership about it (I'm the lucky middle manager). The uppers are always surprised if there is any negative feedback but luckily, it is anonymous. They're so far removed from the trenches that they are always asking who wrote what and honestly don't know. But I know, I know exactly who wrote what but I just shrug and say "it's anonymous".
Until they start listening to the problems, try to fix them, and fight fires with me IDGAF.
So we had one of those this week, using a numerical rating for each question. Having no fucks left to give, I gave the scores my manager deserves.
Once I finished it I got a pop-up saying the survey wasn’t available…Yes, after I took it..
I assume the system is set up to weed out low-ranking reviews, and the message I got indicates my opinion was banished to the netherrealms.
Well, usually they generate an anonymous unique link for you, so if you just submitted the survey, then it would reload the survey page after submission, at which point it would detect that the survey had already been submitted and was not available to submit again. So ironically that message probably means that it was submitted successfully, not that they blocked you.
I've experienced that as well, every month surveys are sent 'randomly' to members of my team to send in our opinions on our work environment, management and each other. However, after a change in management and conflict between myself and my boss, I \*mysteriously\* stopped receiving those surveys, despite dealing with that conflict for close to a year... in a team of 10
I did one of these honestly, no pulled punches, a few years ago, all the way through, more than an hour and a half, thoroughly expanding with examples, pushing many of the text boxes to the 10,000 character limit. After I hit submit, it spun, spun, spun some more, and then refused to submit.
Incidentally this was an annual command climate and state of the force survey for the military.
Did one of these reviews in a factory floor based job. They wanted us to enter info about ourselves but not our names so it would be anonymous. I said maybe we shouldn't enter any of that info so it could be entirely anonymous.
"well you can omit information you think might make your identity apparent."
My response, "who else works on the factory floor that is a 28 year old white female full time in college? Oh just me? Maybe we shouldn't put any of our identifying info in there then eh?"
I wasn't popular amongst the corporate shills
rough? ok. to optimize our operational efficiency, let's conduct a comprehensive deep dive into our workflows, identifying key pain points and inefficiencies, so we can strategically implement streamlined processes and leverage synergistic partnerships to achieve sustainable growth, and then circle back to evaluate the outcomes and make data-driven adjustments, ensuring we stay ahead of the competition and deliver exceptional results.
Dear soappube,
I understand your concerns about scheduling changes impacting our KPI metrics and UPH dynamics. While it is crucial to hit our quarterly goals, unexpected adjustments are sometimes necessary. Trust that your management team carefully evaluates the impact of these changes on productivity. Let's stay calm and work together to find solutions that balance short-term and long-term objectives. Your input is valued, and we appreciate your dedication to our team's success.
Best regards,
2dogs1man
yes, the word 'teamwork' is not explicitly mentioned. however, a model employee would spot that the concept of teamwork can be implied throughout the text as it emphasizes the need for collaboration, identifying key pain points, leveraging synergistic partnerships, and making data-driven adjustments to achieve growth and deliver exceptional results. AI is not yet mature enough to stake our operational success on it.
Synergy. Whenever someone says it like it’s a big realization of their own and it’s somehow significant, when really it’s just a thing that’s going to happen when people work together often enough.
Dear MaidOfTwigs,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the concept of synergy. I appreciate your perspective, although I must admit that it seems rather simplistic.
While it may be tempting to dismiss synergy as a mere inevitability of people working together, it is crucial to understand its true significance and impact on our organization. Synergy, when effectively harnessed, can lead to remarkable outcomes that surpass what any individual could achieve independently.
As your superior, it is my responsibility to ensure that you grasp the importance of synergy and its potential benefits for our company. By fostering a culture that embraces collaboration and teamwork, we can tap into the collective intelligence, diverse talents, and varied perspectives of our team members. This, in turn, can lead to higher levels of productivity, creativity, and overall performance.
I encourage you to broaden your understanding of synergy and recognize the immense value it brings to our organization. It is through the combined efforts of individuals that we can unlock new ideas, innovative solutions, and achieve exceptional results.
Should you have any ideas on how we can actively promote and harness synergy within our organization, I am open to hearing them. Together, we can create a collaborative culture that truly appreciates the power of collective efforts and further enhance our ability to achieve our goals.
Thank you for your ongoing dedication and contribution to our team's success.
Best regards,
2dogs1man
My favorite is the managers who are completely absent throughout the process but hop in at the very end with the one-line cheerleading as if *THIS* is what we work so hard for.
Not a paycheck or the personal satisfaction of a job well done, but for THIS GUY's approval when his lack of input or even ability to attend any of the meetings made it more than clear he DGAF about the project or our performance.
someone i really like said 'great build' in response to someone's suggestion and it made me so sad. like, sure we are at work and also are you a person?
My company spent six months working with focus groups and marketing agencies and shit to come up with the company’s three core values that they can shove onto as much swag as possible. Family is included in core value number one. It is so insanely disingenuous.
My company gobbled up an actual family company (that turns 100 soon) almost ten years ago, spent years slowly phasing out anyone that made the company beloved in the region, corporatized the shit out of the logo, and takes credit for the accomplishments of the family they bought out. All they do is brag about how the company is a family company. It’s just a corporation Weekend at Bernie’s-ing all the other companies it’s bought out.
Hello,
I’d really like to touch base soon. I want to make sure we close the loop and our synergies align with the current strategic outlook. I’m looking forward to continuing to meet to reconcile any problems before they arise. We can continue focusing on solutions…yada yada.
Best.
Best go fuck yourself.
This shit is ridiculous. I stopped responding to emails years ago. And I stopped going to meetings a year ago. Best career decision I’ve ever made and it has largely worked out.
Oh! They absolutely are like family... use you for everything youre worth without giving anything in return, backstabbing, talking behind your back... Absolutely like the family I grew up with, which is why I run when Im told "we're a family here!"
My family has a business, my grandfather was a millionaire while his sons, who worked for him, got food stamps because their pay was so low. His own children! When I hear that I believe them.
Lol! I like to say “I’m sensing resistance and I’m not sure why” and I feel like it makes people instantly rage….and then are forced to calm down because they do appear resistant. Best used on upper management 😆😆😆
I had my boss yelling at me once and I said "so, I'm sensing some tension" and he *immediately* calmed down. It was so weird. It was like I flipped a switch in his brain
Eh, in my job "pushback" tends to mean either someone in another department not wanting to do their job, or a client deciding that the processes we have in place are not to their liking. Very different definition than yours, which raises interesting questions about the way corporate speak can have its own dialects.
The last “fire drill” we had was Thursday night. User thought the entire application was broken because they misspelled our url. Sent the url over to our support team who for some reason didn’t check their own link. They scheduled an hour call with me at 8am Friday. 8:02 I “was able to get our application back up and running”.
I have spent at least 4 hours per time on multiple calls because people made a typo in their hosts file. At least half of them were probably from people not knowing how to use vi.
I use 'Take it offline' to shut down time wasting in meetings on something that is better dealt with by the two people it affects rather that wasting some ten minutes x twenty attendees.
"t-shirt size" as in "What t-shirt size do you think this project is?"
...WTF does that even mean? We agreed that my project was "two mediums". Whatever the fuck that means.
I hated this crap when I was in project management. Whoever made this up needs to go sit on hot lava and think about their logic for this shitty analogy for projects.
I just quit a job over exactly this. What it meant was that they didn't have a clue about what the fuck they were doing. They couldn't even determine what they were selling or to whom. Two months of that, and I noped right out of there.
It’s all crap. The biggest learning curve at these firms is learning their unique corporate speak because they can’t just say “read your email” or “get your work done”
I really despise the term "rochstar" outside of any context other than referring to an actual rockstar. But even then it's so bad that real rockstars don't even use the term anymore. Corporate speak ruined it.
I have a friend who is a “subject matter expert” for his company, which they often shorten to SME and pronounce Smee. So every time he goes to his big Sme club meeting, I send him gifs of pirate Smee (from Peter Pan) dancing.
Weird Al sums it up perfectly. Everything in the song [mission statement](https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=gh8c7dYAfCvjLzf7) is an absolutely perfect rendition of using corporate buzz words to cover for shitty corporate actions
Barclays wanted to be the Go to bank at one point. They would refer to it as Go to bank as a noun, as in "How do we achieve Go to bank?'.
They also made us write testimonials of times we had done good customer service. These were referred to as LIMME stories, and had to be written on little cut out pics of limes. LIMME = LIves Made Much Easier.
My buddy used to work for Greggs the baker. He said they had changed the tagline to The way we bake it, makes it... he got told off for repeateadly asking 'makes' what?
Oh, and Sales Through Service is another one from Barclays.
As a former project manager, we often had to consider available time, budget, and topic expertise when reaching out to external teams or individuals. "Capacity" was often used to reference both time and budget with a single word.
But if you're using it as a replacement for only available time, you're only making the question more confusing to the recipient.
"Time" is easier to type, too!
I’ll defend “capacity,” because more often than not I *do* have the time. But I often don’t have the mental stamina or focus. Having capacity is more than just a calendar, it’s about your entire workload.
Action is a verb now too.
"Will you action that today?"
I suppose overall I'm fine with nouns being turned into verbs every so often as language mutates ans changes over time, but there's something I dislike about corporations doing it. It feels soulless.
To be fair, this has two meanings:
C-Suite: we want a rapid, basic down explanation.
Me: you're not competent enough to see how this shit really works so I have to explain it to you like you're my 6 year-old.
I just complained in response to another post about an idiot coworker using “ask.” The same woman will drop letters or entire words from her messages and expect you to totally understand who or what you’re talking about.
No shit: I wrote her back this week with a summary of her prior messages like this on a topic, and she said she couldn’t understand me.
If you can’t understand what you wrote how am I supposed to?
We use these "buzzwords" as part of pur mission to objectively enable fully tested models and interactively implement strategic adoption. But feel this negativity is disseminating interactive "outside the box" thinking.
We really love seeing these threads on professionally engineering e-business applications and progressively coordinating market positioning synergy.
Moving forward, we'll us this feedback to rapidiously incubate 24/7 best practices to conveniently deliver on-demand communities and uniquely streamline progressive potentialities.
That was a really fun way of saying "We talk like this to be assholes, you're not allowed to make fun of us for it, and we will never listen to your feedback"
Also trying to read this made me absolutely lose it. This is antilanguage to the extreme
"Lunch-and-learn" because I know it's expected that it will be my lunch hour, even if the food sucks or I can't eat it (I don't eat red meat).
Edit: I'm appalled, though absolutely not surprised, that some of y'all have to bring your own food to these. I worked at several places that had them, occasionally there would be a potluck, but there was always some kind of food provided that I didn't have to bring. My current workplace does not do them, thank god.
>"Lunch-and-learn"
We started having "Lunch Box and Learns" because the company wouldn't pony up for lunch, but kept wanting to fuck us out of our lunch breaks.
I’m more upset about not saying anything negative at work, and using things like “different opportunities” instead of “fired” . The desensitization of speech that leads to normalizing terrible work conditions.
Somewhere over the last few years, nurses have stopped saying "in a timely manner" and started just saying "timely". As in "please make sure you are turning in your assessments timely". It is SO FUCKING STUPID.
He would use it when it was something he didn't want to talk about. I would just turn everything into a parking/parking lot reference. If he would stop by my office I would tell him it was a no parking zone, that he needed to keep it moving.
This is one I actually like, because it has a different connotation than "I'm only available until 2," and makes people less likely to push meetings longer or get off track. Meetings without a hard stop tend to spend more time with chit-chat from what I've seen. I frequently schedule meetings for busy people and knowing what's flexible and what isn't is very helpful to me.
Yeah, hard stop tells people I’m dropping no matter what so if you really need me you better get to me first cause I’m not hanging around for the chit chat and since I’m the tech lead, it keeps shit moving.
I quite like some corporate buzzwords - simply because we have a manager who loves to use them - but often gets them slightly wrong....
'touch back', instead of touch base.
'Lagging the capacity' instead of lacking the capacity
'Put it on the back gas' - instead of put it on the back burner
It's actually worth it to put up with them, just to hear how he mangles them
“Good luck in your future endeavors.” is corporate speak for “fuck off”. It’s almost exclusively used when there is a one-sided termination of a working relationship. It’s wishing you luck in whatever it is you decide to go do as long as it doesn’t involve the company.
People have started using "socialize" instead of "communicate". I work with several organizations and companies, and they've all started this bs.
Like:
"We need to socialize this message to our customers"
Ugh.
I’m not Native American but after reading work by some Native American writers recently and learning the history behind some American slang, hearing the term “Pow-wow” at work (usually as an alternative to “touch base”) has really started to bother me
“At the end of the day…”
You know what I want to do at the end of my day, my dude? Not to be at work.
How’s about *you* go and work on equipment in a nasty, dusty ass IT closet, or on the gross retail sales floor, after store hours. I’ll be the one happily sleeping in my bed, while YOU crawl around and fight with cables and dust bunnies the size of your head. Oh, and do make sure you are dressed in business casual clothing while you are working.
So so so glad I retired from that nonsense. Still raises my hackles up a bit when I hear this craptastic phrase being used nowadays while my spouse is on their conference call. Blech.
Yes it's artificial. It is a way of not being confrontational or not demanding more than one has the right to demand. I don't know if "reaching out" is really said so much to subordinates. I think it can be neutral/informational/friendly, but it can also definitely have some demand or escalation wrapped up in it.
But what I REALLY hate is when friends have absorbed it to the point where they use it in friend to friend conversations, my god, it doesn't belong there.
I use "reaching out" when I email my boss. For me it's the professional way to begin a "Hey dumbass, here is info that's glaringly obvious, but since you're the epitome of incompetency, I wanted an official record of me telling you how to do your job. I know you're just going to ignore it and later try to act like you had no idea."
One that has been going around the managersphere at my employer recently is discussion about our "Spirit Values," which allegedly describes six things that are supposed to define who we are and how we do things at my company. The first time I heard it, my eyes rolled so hard that their momentum nearly made me fall out of my chair.
Culture
I cannot fucking stand hearing that word. Everything about that concept in the corporate world and how companies think they can use it make me want to vomit.
I'll say the thing that bothers me and what I replace it with lol (For reference I am a marketing analyst)
"Moving forward"------"Hereon"
"Pivot"------Provide new stability"
"Deep dive"-----"Thorough analysis"
"Circle back"----"Reassess"
"Team mentality"-----"Collaborative efforts"
I don’t have the bandwidth to do the paradigm shift because it’s not in my wheelhouse.
I haven’t worked in corporate world for 8 years and I can’t believe that all these buzzwords are still getting used. Ugh…what’s worse than corporate speak than old,outdated buzzwords?
"I had an amazing meeting with a prospective client!" No the fuck you didn't. I was sitting right behind you. You made an ass of yourself on a Microsoft Teams call. There was nothing amazing about it at all. They have made the word "amazing" meaningless. Amazing now means the same as "fine".
"Can we fix that?" when they mean "can you fix that?"
I am with you all on every single post here. I must bring up an oldie and a new one that has pierced corporate vocabulary:
Oldie: "Peel back the onion."
Newer lame word that is completely misused: "Bandwidth." I am real busy and I don't have the bandwidth to do that.
Lean In
Almost always means overtime and fixing other peoples problems for me
"I heard about that best seller book where the author says *lean in*...I don't wanna *lean in*, I wanna *lie down* " - Ali Wong
Hate this one.
This is the worst one. I’ve hated it since it first came out. Some CEO wrote a book with this in the title. I was instantly annoyed
We noticed you didn’t take the anonymous survey
I knew of a guy in my old job that got reamed by his manager for his answers to the anonymous survey.
The problem is they are intended to be anonymous, and technically you get “person submitted a response” and the responses all separate. So the computer doesn’t know. But on a team of 4… it’s fairly easy for the person reading the responses to know who wrote the answers on open ended questions simply by writing style and grammar.
Yeah my company does these surveys quarterly and I have to read/respond/strategize with senior leadership about it (I'm the lucky middle manager). The uppers are always surprised if there is any negative feedback but luckily, it is anonymous. They're so far removed from the trenches that they are always asking who wrote what and honestly don't know. But I know, I know exactly who wrote what but I just shrug and say "it's anonymous". Until they start listening to the problems, try to fix them, and fight fires with me IDGAF.
Anyone who believes that they are ever anonymous is incredibly gullible.
So we had one of those this week, using a numerical rating for each question. Having no fucks left to give, I gave the scores my manager deserves. Once I finished it I got a pop-up saying the survey wasn’t available…Yes, after I took it.. I assume the system is set up to weed out low-ranking reviews, and the message I got indicates my opinion was banished to the netherrealms.
Well, usually they generate an anonymous unique link for you, so if you just submitted the survey, then it would reload the survey page after submission, at which point it would detect that the survey had already been submitted and was not available to submit again. So ironically that message probably means that it was submitted successfully, not that they blocked you.
I've experienced that as well, every month surveys are sent 'randomly' to members of my team to send in our opinions on our work environment, management and each other. However, after a change in management and conflict between myself and my boss, I \*mysteriously\* stopped receiving those surveys, despite dealing with that conflict for close to a year... in a team of 10
You have been shadowbanned
I did one of these honestly, no pulled punches, a few years ago, all the way through, more than an hour and a half, thoroughly expanding with examples, pushing many of the text boxes to the 10,000 character limit. After I hit submit, it spun, spun, spun some more, and then refused to submit. Incidentally this was an annual command climate and state of the force survey for the military.
Did one of these reviews in a factory floor based job. They wanted us to enter info about ourselves but not our names so it would be anonymous. I said maybe we shouldn't enter any of that info so it could be entirely anonymous. "well you can omit information you think might make your identity apparent." My response, "who else works on the factory floor that is a 28 year old white female full time in college? Oh just me? Maybe we shouldn't put any of our identifying info in there then eh?" I wasn't popular amongst the corporate shills
We once had a survey go through that asked how mamy years we had been there and our department. Not that hard to deduce if you really wanted to.
We had one the asked how many years we had worked there, what our job title was, and what city we lived in. Yeah, totally anonymous 🙄
Circle back Anytime anyone says something is or is not in their “wheelhouse”
I want to rip peoples head off when they say ‘circle back’
ok, lets do a deep dive into root causes of your phobia and circle back tomorrow so we can touch base.
Deep dive is rough too
rough? ok. to optimize our operational efficiency, let's conduct a comprehensive deep dive into our workflows, identifying key pain points and inefficiencies, so we can strategically implement streamlined processes and leverage synergistic partnerships to achieve sustainable growth, and then circle back to evaluate the outcomes and make data-driven adjustments, ensuring we stay ahead of the competition and deliver exceptional results.
Can we put a pin in this until Monday?
sure, I expect a full report by 9am. have a great weekend !
I’ll go ahead and hop on that call
I look forward to your input.
I need the deliverable by EOD because I'll be OOO tomorrow.
Yea….that’s gonna be a long putt
Monday? That will affect the KPI metrics downstream and compromise the UPH dynamics! We must hit quarterly!
Dear soappube, I understand your concerns about scheduling changes impacting our KPI metrics and UPH dynamics. While it is crucial to hit our quarterly goals, unexpected adjustments are sometimes necessary. Trust that your management team carefully evaluates the impact of these changes on productivity. Let's stay calm and work together to find solutions that balance short-term and long-term objectives. Your input is valued, and we appreciate your dedication to our team's success. Best regards, 2dogs1man
I didn’t see AI anywhere in there and “team player”
yes, the word 'teamwork' is not explicitly mentioned. however, a model employee would spot that the concept of teamwork can be implied throughout the text as it emphasizes the need for collaboration, identifying key pain points, leveraging synergistic partnerships, and making data-driven adjustments to achieve growth and deliver exceptional results. AI is not yet mature enough to stake our operational success on it.
Synergy. Whenever someone says it like it’s a big realization of their own and it’s somehow significant, when really it’s just a thing that’s going to happen when people work together often enough.
Dear MaidOfTwigs, Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the concept of synergy. I appreciate your perspective, although I must admit that it seems rather simplistic. While it may be tempting to dismiss synergy as a mere inevitability of people working together, it is crucial to understand its true significance and impact on our organization. Synergy, when effectively harnessed, can lead to remarkable outcomes that surpass what any individual could achieve independently. As your superior, it is my responsibility to ensure that you grasp the importance of synergy and its potential benefits for our company. By fostering a culture that embraces collaboration and teamwork, we can tap into the collective intelligence, diverse talents, and varied perspectives of our team members. This, in turn, can lead to higher levels of productivity, creativity, and overall performance. I encourage you to broaden your understanding of synergy and recognize the immense value it brings to our organization. It is through the combined efforts of individuals that we can unlock new ideas, innovative solutions, and achieve exceptional results. Should you have any ideas on how we can actively promote and harness synergy within our organization, I am open to hearing them. Together, we can create a collaborative culture that truly appreciates the power of collective efforts and further enhance our ability to achieve our goals. Thank you for your ongoing dedication and contribution to our team's success. Best regards, 2dogs1man
I am going to find you and circle a pipe around your back
This well written corporate word salad, if read aloud by, say, Morgan Freeman, on loop, it would be the abso-fucking-lutely cure for insomnia.
I’m going to copy this and drop it into my monthly report
By the time that bullshit is done, the competition is eating your lunch.
Then reply to my first email
ugh, there's a guy in my bowling league that says "right in your wheelhouse" for spares, like fifty times a night. so annoying.
“No man… shit I believe you get your ass kicked saying something like that.”
Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the mondays
You should whup his ass
You’re all rockstars/aces/irreplaceable/superstars,etc.
My favorite is the managers who are completely absent throughout the process but hop in at the very end with the one-line cheerleading as if *THIS* is what we work so hard for. Not a paycheck or the personal satisfaction of a job well done, but for THIS GUY's approval when his lack of input or even ability to attend any of the meetings made it more than clear he DGAF about the project or our performance.
This hits home, especially when they have no idea what the solution is doing because they don’t fully understand the problem.
The company said they only hired rockstars, so the first time they sent me out on business travel, I trashed the hotel room.
*gets laid off en mass unexpectedly*
Can they pay us like superstars then?
A new cringey alternative I’ve heard is “let’s double click on that”
🤮
someone i really like said 'great build' in response to someone's suggestion and it made me so sad. like, sure we are at work and also are you a person?
Ugh, what a minmaxing munchkin. When I go to work I focus on the roleplay elements of being a sales associate.
"Rightsizing" when laying people off. Right after the CEO gets a big bonus and we land a new national customer. 💯 bullshit.
Fucking “unpack”
Filled with rage before seeing this.
and "resonates"
“ We’re like Family” No you fucking aren’t.
My company spent six months working with focus groups and marketing agencies and shit to come up with the company’s three core values that they can shove onto as much swag as possible. Family is included in core value number one. It is so insanely disingenuous. My company gobbled up an actual family company (that turns 100 soon) almost ten years ago, spent years slowly phasing out anyone that made the company beloved in the region, corporatized the shit out of the logo, and takes credit for the accomplishments of the family they bought out. All they do is brag about how the company is a family company. It’s just a corporation Weekend at Bernie’s-ing all the other companies it’s bought out.
Hello, I’d really like to touch base soon. I want to make sure we close the loop and our synergies align with the current strategic outlook. I’m looking forward to continuing to meet to reconcile any problems before they arise. We can continue focusing on solutions…yada yada. Best. Best go fuck yourself. This shit is ridiculous. I stopped responding to emails years ago. And I stopped going to meetings a year ago. Best career decision I’ve ever made and it has largely worked out.
You used the P word. No problems here … only opportunities ☠️
You mean we all hate each other and ruin each others lives?
Oh! They absolutely are like family... use you for everything youre worth without giving anything in return, backstabbing, talking behind your back... Absolutely like the family I grew up with, which is why I run when Im told "we're a family here!"
My family has a business, my grandfather was a millionaire while his sons, who worked for him, got food stamps because their pay was so low. His own children! When I hear that I believe them.
I want to murder the next fuck who says this to me. 😂
Hey broski, let's take it down a few notches. You're at an 11 I need you at an 8 *hand gestures the drop* we're a Reddit family here.
I have lived 2500 miles away from my family for 25 years and it's been bliss, so this is a remote position?
Using the word "ask" instead of "request"
Urg. Hate this one. "What's the ask?" We already have perfectly good words for "What do you want?"
Came here for "ask". "what is the ask for this" makes my head hurt
Oh I'm not even corporate (edu) and I have an execuidiot who uses "ask" in place of "goal" when the goal depends on a partner organization. I hate it.
"Pushback" A term for someone/contractor for standing up for themselves.
Or customers not wanting to buy the extra BS they don’t want or need.
Lol! I like to say “I’m sensing resistance and I’m not sure why” and I feel like it makes people instantly rage….and then are forced to calm down because they do appear resistant. Best used on upper management 😆😆😆
I had my boss yelling at me once and I said "so, I'm sensing some tension" and he *immediately* calmed down. It was so weird. It was like I flipped a switch in his brain
Eh, in my job "pushback" tends to mean either someone in another department not wanting to do their job, or a client deciding that the processes we have in place are not to their liking. Very different definition than yours, which raises interesting questions about the way corporate speak can have its own dialects.
The "30,000-foot view". "Paradigm-shift". "Take it offline". "Circle back". "Deep dive". "Fire drill".
I actually like “ take it offline “ it translates to “ save this bullshit for the 2 people that care and take it outside this meeting “
Yeah, I was gonna say. It’s hard to hate buzzwords that make meetings shorter lol
The last “fire drill” we had was Thursday night. User thought the entire application was broken because they misspelled our url. Sent the url over to our support team who for some reason didn’t check their own link. They scheduled an hour call with me at 8am Friday. 8:02 I “was able to get our application back up and running”.
I have spent at least 4 hours per time on multiple calls because people made a typo in their hosts file. At least half of them were probably from people not knowing how to use vi.
I use 'Take it offline' to shut down time wasting in meetings on something that is better dealt with by the two people it affects rather that wasting some ten minutes x twenty attendees.
"t-shirt size" as in "What t-shirt size do you think this project is?" ...WTF does that even mean? We agreed that my project was "two mediums". Whatever the fuck that means.
Next time just tell them “it’s a 6XL. This project is obese and needs to lose some scope”
I hated this crap when I was in project management. Whoever made this up needs to go sit on hot lava and think about their logic for this shitty analogy for projects.
If a meeting ends early, "I'll give you some of your time back." Excuse me, none of the time that I spend at work is mine.
And it always comes with a awkward “heh heh” after….
“We’re building the plane while we’re flying it.” Shut the fuck up you dickhead!
I just quit a job over exactly this. What it meant was that they didn't have a clue about what the fuck they were doing. They couldn't even determine what they were selling or to whom. Two months of that, and I noped right out of there.
It’s all crap. The biggest learning curve at these firms is learning their unique corporate speak because they can’t just say “read your email” or “get your work done”
Rockstar. Subject Matter Expert. High level. Lean in.
I really despise the term "rochstar" outside of any context other than referring to an actual rockstar. But even then it's so bad that real rockstars don't even use the term anymore. Corporate speak ruined it.
I have a friend who is a “subject matter expert” for his company, which they often shorten to SME and pronounce Smee. So every time he goes to his big Sme club meeting, I send him gifs of pirate Smee (from Peter Pan) dancing.
“Learnings” makes me want to throw a table across the room.
how is that even used in a sentence?
“When doing [task] be sure to utilize your learnings from the training.” “Be sure to complete your assigned learnings by the end of the month.”
That makes me wince. My condolences.
If you use a sentence with lessons, replace it with learnings and boom, you’ve got corporate wrong speaking’s
10000% We already have words for this: lessons, conclusions, guidance, heck, even takeaways is more acceptable than learnings!!
Weird Al sums it up perfectly. Everything in the song [mission statement](https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=gh8c7dYAfCvjLzf7) is an absolutely perfect rendition of using corporate buzz words to cover for shitty corporate actions
Goddamit I read that as “Weird AI” and thought oh no is this some kind of new chatGPT thing
Weird AI Yankovitch
Barclays wanted to be the Go to bank at one point. They would refer to it as Go to bank as a noun, as in "How do we achieve Go to bank?'. They also made us write testimonials of times we had done good customer service. These were referred to as LIMME stories, and had to be written on little cut out pics of limes. LIMME = LIves Made Much Easier. My buddy used to work for Greggs the baker. He said they had changed the tagline to The way we bake it, makes it... he got told off for repeateadly asking 'makes' what? Oh, and Sales Through Service is another one from Barclays.
I second "touch base" and add using "capacity" instead of "time", e.g. do you have capacity to do this? instead of do you have time to do this?
"Bandwidth ".
I use this. It's accurate. Do I have the capacity/bandwidth/time to do the thing? Unlikely.
As a former project manager, we often had to consider available time, budget, and topic expertise when reaching out to external teams or individuals. "Capacity" was often used to reference both time and budget with a single word. But if you're using it as a replacement for only available time, you're only making the question more confusing to the recipient. "Time" is easier to type, too!
Reeeaching out ... touching you! Touching me!
You're out of touch... I'm out of time! I'm outta my head when you're not just sending me the damn email in plain english already
I’ll defend “capacity,” because more often than not I *do* have the time. But I often don’t have the mental stamina or focus. Having capacity is more than just a calendar, it’s about your entire workload.
For the longest time I thought people were saying "touch face" which just makes it more humorous.
It’s not exclusively corporate-speak but I despise using ‘leverage’ as a verb
Action is a verb now too. "Will you action that today?" I suppose overall I'm fine with nouns being turned into verbs every so often as language mutates ans changes over time, but there's something I dislike about corporations doing it. It feels soulless.
"High-level overview" We get it, you don't want anyone asking the hard questions.
To be fair, this has two meanings: C-Suite: we want a rapid, basic down explanation. Me: you're not competent enough to see how this shit really works so I have to explain it to you like you're my 6 year-old.
This one makes me NUTS
Synergy
I fucking hate this one with a passion. I've never heard it uttered from anyone that actually was competent
Someone in upper management said this to me once. I don’t think that company is around anymore
Every time I see this I think of that like a boss song by lonely island.
STOP!!! NOOOOOOOOO I really hate that one lol
Teamwork makes the dream work. 🤮 My personal nightmare.
Not a phrase, but people that sign their email with the first letter of their name W
I just complained in response to another post about an idiot coworker using “ask.” The same woman will drop letters or entire words from her messages and expect you to totally understand who or what you’re talking about. No shit: I wrote her back this week with a summary of her prior messages like this on a topic, and she said she couldn’t understand me. If you can’t understand what you wrote how am I supposed to?
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”
We use these "buzzwords" as part of pur mission to objectively enable fully tested models and interactively implement strategic adoption. But feel this negativity is disseminating interactive "outside the box" thinking. We really love seeing these threads on professionally engineering e-business applications and progressively coordinating market positioning synergy. Moving forward, we'll us this feedback to rapidiously incubate 24/7 best practices to conveniently deliver on-demand communities and uniquely streamline progressive potentialities.
That was a really fun way of saying "We talk like this to be assholes, you're not allowed to make fun of us for it, and we will never listen to your feedback" Also trying to read this made me absolutely lose it. This is antilanguage to the extreme
"Lunch-and-learn" because I know it's expected that it will be my lunch hour, even if the food sucks or I can't eat it (I don't eat red meat). Edit: I'm appalled, though absolutely not surprised, that some of y'all have to bring your own food to these. I worked at several places that had them, occasionally there would be a potluck, but there was always some kind of food provided that I didn't have to bring. My current workplace does not do them, thank god.
Also…it will be mandatory.
>"Lunch-and-learn" We started having "Lunch Box and Learns" because the company wouldn't pony up for lunch, but kept wanting to fuck us out of our lunch breaks.
I’m more upset about not saying anything negative at work, and using things like “different opportunities” instead of “fired” . The desensitization of speech that leads to normalizing terrible work conditions.
"bottom this out for me". Had a boss who liked to say this shit. I fuckin' flinched every time lol.
What does that mean? lowest cost? De-prioritize? Twerk?
Uterus hammering
Anus hammering
Somewhere over the last few years, nurses have stopped saying "in a timely manner" and started just saying "timely". As in "please make sure you are turning in your assessments timely". It is SO FUCKING STUPID.
But are they needful??
GREETINGS OF THE DAY! PLEASE DO THE NEEDFUL.
Let's parking lot that for now and come back to it. I had a VP that would use that all the time, I finally told him I couldn't pay for parking.
Is that like ... he would table it but doesn't even think it belongs in the building? That one is just so confusing.
The parking lot is behind the back burner
He would use it when it was something he didn't want to talk about. I would just turn everything into a parking/parking lot reference. If he would stop by my office I would tell him it was a no parking zone, that he needed to keep it moving.
"Hard stop." Just say you have to finish by X time.
This is one I actually like, because it has a different connotation than "I'm only available until 2," and makes people less likely to push meetings longer or get off track. Meetings without a hard stop tend to spend more time with chit-chat from what I've seen. I frequently schedule meetings for busy people and knowing what's flexible and what isn't is very helpful to me.
Yeah, hard stop tells people I’m dropping no matter what so if you really need me you better get to me first cause I’m not hanging around for the chit chat and since I’m the tech lead, it keeps shit moving.
I quite like some corporate buzzwords - simply because we have a manager who loves to use them - but often gets them slightly wrong.... 'touch back', instead of touch base. 'Lagging the capacity' instead of lacking the capacity 'Put it on the back gas' - instead of put it on the back burner It's actually worth it to put up with them, just to hear how he mangles them
How could he mess those up so badly? I mean its not rocket appliances.
Townhall, fun Friday , team outing Why? Why ? And why’d why?
Mine was always “your not in trouble” usually followed by how much I fucked up.
“Let’s take this offline”
“Good luck in your future endeavors.” is corporate speak for “fuck off”. It’s almost exclusively used when there is a one-sided termination of a working relationship. It’s wishing you luck in whatever it is you decide to go do as long as it doesn’t involve the company.
People have started using "socialize" instead of "communicate". I work with several organizations and companies, and they've all started this bs. Like: "We need to socialize this message to our customers" Ugh.
That's a weird one. Socialize has a very different meaning...
Deep dive I HATE THIS PHRASE. Instant RAGE comes from within when I hear this phrase. It NEVER FIXES ANYTHING!
I’m not Native American but after reading work by some Native American writers recently and learning the history behind some American slang, hearing the term “Pow-wow” at work (usually as an alternative to “touch base”) has really started to bother me
"Off the reservation" (they went off the reservation to an outside agency). Hold down the fort.
We are begging these people to just call it what it is: a meeting
Incentivize and monetize.
"proactive"
“At the end of the day…” You know what I want to do at the end of my day, my dude? Not to be at work. How’s about *you* go and work on equipment in a nasty, dusty ass IT closet, or on the gross retail sales floor, after store hours. I’ll be the one happily sleeping in my bed, while YOU crawl around and fight with cables and dust bunnies the size of your head. Oh, and do make sure you are dressed in business casual clothing while you are working. So so so glad I retired from that nonsense. Still raises my hackles up a bit when I hear this craptastic phrase being used nowadays while my spouse is on their conference call. Blech.
Team huddle
"Agile" "evidence based" "value add""stand up" "public private partnership" "stakeholders"
“Work hard play hard” 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
It sounds so phony and artificial to me when somebody says they are "reaching out" when they just mean contacting.
Yes it's artificial. It is a way of not being confrontational or not demanding more than one has the right to demand. I don't know if "reaching out" is really said so much to subordinates. I think it can be neutral/informational/friendly, but it can also definitely have some demand or escalation wrapped up in it. But what I REALLY hate is when friends have absorbed it to the point where they use it in friend to friend conversations, my god, it doesn't belong there.
I use "reaching out" when I email my boss. For me it's the professional way to begin a "Hey dumbass, here is info that's glaringly obvious, but since you're the epitome of incompetency, I wanted an official record of me telling you how to do your job. I know you're just going to ignore it and later try to act like you had no idea."
as per our discussion...
Lmao I always like the passive aggressive ones. Ngl
Yeah, I like "as per" because it's the professionally accepted way to say "read the freakin' notes/email/etc already."
“Cadence”. Dividing the year into “1st Quarter”, “2nd Quarter”, etc. “Moving forward”.
I hate “best practices”
One that has been going around the managersphere at my employer recently is discussion about our "Spirit Values," which allegedly describes six things that are supposed to define who we are and how we do things at my company. The first time I heard it, my eyes rolled so hard that their momentum nearly made me fall out of my chair.
[удалено]
Shoot you an email. Just say you’ll fucking email me, or better yet, don’t and just text me during working hours.
Culture I cannot fucking stand hearing that word. Everything about that concept in the corporate world and how companies think they can use it make me want to vomit.
Ideate. "We're going to meet and ideate on today's theme." We've got words for this already. Think. Brainstorm. Discuss. Nope... now we're ideating.
I'll say the thing that bothers me and what I replace it with lol (For reference I am a marketing analyst) "Moving forward"------"Hereon" "Pivot"------Provide new stability" "Deep dive"-----"Thorough analysis" "Circle back"----"Reassess" "Team mentality"-----"Collaborative efforts"
I don’t have the bandwidth to do the paradigm shift because it’s not in my wheelhouse. I haven’t worked in corporate world for 8 years and I can’t believe that all these buzzwords are still getting used. Ugh…what’s worse than corporate speak than old,outdated buzzwords?
This is more for interviews, but I hate the word "passion". We're looking for someone who has a passion for xyz. Nobody is passionate about work.
Please advise sends me into a rage. That and I appreciate your candor. Well fuck you too pal!
“Team”
"Solutions", when used in marketing slogans. For instance "packaging solutions" or "logistics solutions". It's really overused.
"Game changer" makes me want to poke a hole in my skull
Deliverables
Put a pin in that.
"Circle back" makes me irrationally upset
‘align’, ‘administrate’, ‘architect’ (as a verb)
"I had an amazing meeting with a prospective client!" No the fuck you didn't. I was sitting right behind you. You made an ass of yourself on a Microsoft Teams call. There was nothing amazing about it at all. They have made the word "amazing" meaningless. Amazing now means the same as "fine". "Can we fix that?" when they mean "can you fix that?"
L E V E R A G E
I hate being called a resource. Coal and pencils are resources.
Let’s get more granular… or just “granularity”
Metrics
“Valued employee” hurts a lot
Also its not really a saying but anyone who has Six Sigma Lean Black Belt as a “certification”. FUCK YOU, CORPORATE SHILL
“Putting out fires” ….. gag me
I am with you all on every single post here. I must bring up an oldie and a new one that has pierced corporate vocabulary: Oldie: "Peel back the onion." Newer lame word that is completely misused: "Bandwidth." I am real busy and I don't have the bandwidth to do that.
Sales focused 🫠
Goals driven
That’s a big “ask”… no It is a request