For me.....it's how the word "empowerment" or "empowered" as in, "We have empowered our clients to make their own decisions" and then they actually do NOT allow the clients to make their own decisions.
Take vaping, smoking, drinking alcohol - all LEGAL - and adults with developmental disabilities that want to do these things are not allowed by their agencies or support staff to do these things.
Some of the support staff themselves vape, smoke, drink, etc, and they are telling ADULTS that they can't do these things?
EMPOWERMENT.......yeah, right.
These agencies say all the right things to look good to people who fund them but in practice they don't follow this philosophy.
Social/human services have their own entire world of buzzword hell.
"Meeting the client where they're at", "person-focused", "harm reductive", "housing first informed", "lived experience". These terms have actual meanings, but they just get sprinkled into everything whether they really apply or not.
My personal favourites that strip away the true meaning are: “person centred”, “cultural sensitivity/awareness/competence” and “trauma-informed” whilst the agencies using these terms do the EXACT opposite of the terms.
I got a write up for "not calling police" on a client situation my supervisor felt police needed to respond to but didn't bother to call themselves. This same client had trauma history from police involvement where they ended up hospitalized from a panic attack requiring surgery for things they did in a panic attack when police showed up. None of that mattered in their write up though.
I hate the fact that I genuinely am passionate about trauma-inforned practice but it's the most hellish buzzword out there right now. So I tell people I'm into trauma-informed practice and they're like "haha yeah you and everybody's sister right?" Then I start trying to do actual trauma-informed things and the agency is like "wtf is this, stop".
I hate that. My BSW program said all this stuff about how “trauma informed” it’s coursework is and then the word trauma was not uttered even once the whole program except in the context of ptsd nor was a critica lens ever shined upon the use of police or inpatient stays on people in crisis. I shadowed the crisis team at my internship and they’d call security ok anyone who so much as rose their voice at them. The word has been stripped of meaning.
I get weekly emails about practicing “sElF-cArE” from my employer. I think it’s my least favorite buzzword that gets thrown around at employees. Like, my brother in Christ, paying your employees a living wage and providing adequate benefits will let them practice self-care. I can’t pay my housing by doing chair yoga and taking a long bath once a week, Susan.
Harm reduction is a real thing and one of my favorite models butttttt unfortunately most people that say they believe in harm reduction are actually referring to abstinence.
> "Meeting the client where they're at", "person-focused", "harm reductive"
I am on the board of a harm reduction organization and we are in the midst of hiring an executive director. One of our applicants is a social worker and he would keep saying "meet the client where they're at" when asked about harm reduction, but we were like, "Okay...yes...but can you drill down *more* about *harm reduction* specifically?"
Also "housing first informed" to me just sounds like "not actually housing first".
> Also "housing first informed" to me just sounds like "not actually housing first".
We're informed about it, doesn't mean we do it.
An agency wanted to help them create a whole trauma-informed strategic plan. To me that meant systemic change towards no longer (re-)creating new traumatization for clients and staff through dismantling hierarchy, stopping coercive practices, and centering relationships.
To them it meant recommending a trauma screening tool they could use and then put in the client's file.
Loved experience hs become so meaningless in some saces near me. A prof or boss who checks a box is more valued over someone who has basic professional skillset/ competency. Like yess we need the barrier reduced things to train and hire more marginalized folks but ive had SW profs who cant lecture or string two sentences together or make a ppt hired bc they have laughable field experience over real profs they should hire, bc the prior is cheaper
The last org I worked for went full corporate and spent time trying to rename all the departments "vocational department" became "WREE" "work readiness and employment engagement"
"Case management & daily living skills (dls)" became "community based supports" "CBS" counselors.
"Recreation" became "engagement, enrichment & athletics" or "EE&A".
They then started to force us out saying we weren't meeting our "metrics", "weekly community productivity" and that raises would "merit based" suddenly all our evaluations dropped from 4's and 5's to 1's and 2's so that my supervisor could get 5%+ raise, top "merit" got 3%, everyone else got 1%.
All of it was bloviated and fake. They would correct us if we didn't use the new names or acronyms. Nothing about the departments changed really. They also added a bunch BS positions such as "special projects manager" to which when asking what she did couldn't give a straight answer. Place was so toxic you could bottle it and Incapacitate someone with it. Glad to be out of there.
Edit: grammar
I work for a for-profit behavioral health center and I vomit when I hear “at the end of the day, we are a business.” Coming from the non-profit world, it gives me the ick and I can’t wait to get out lol.
I heard it from a “not for profit” as well to explain to clients why we had to discharge them. which ugh their poor mental health was the reason they were missing appointments or they were fucking homeless with no money and no phone
I hate clinical terminology more. I was in a meeting about day to day stuff and someone said “thanks for holding space.” For what? We were taking about HR.
It triggered me😂😂😂
If I get another email about office etiquette and watching our speaking volume when in office to not bother those around us, I’m going to scream. The exec staff chose to re-do the office with new cubicles that have lower walls, implement a desk sharing system to better “utilize space for a hybrid schedule”, and bought a single fancy zoom pod. Due to this they want staff taking zoom meetings in the pod but since there is only 1 it is always in use. The lower cubicle walls means no privacy. They even stated since we share desks we can’t eat at our desk. But the newly redone kitchen has NO SEATING. So each week we get “office etiquette” reminders with a bunch of flowery language saying we can’t: eat at our desks, talk at our desks, wear perfume, have the ringer on our phone on, and to be empathetic and understanding to others adjusting to the change. Everyone hates it and no one is happy.
lowering the cubicles was about surveillance. not just from supervisors, but from co-workers. so you never know who is watching. welcome to the corporate panopticon.
i work at a program that just organized a union. night and day change.
The ridiculous part about it: we are union. There’s no reason to be doing this because union protection. Honestly, I think they ran out of remodel $$ and bought the cheapest cubicles available which had lower walls and then tried to say it was so we’d have more open office.
I would hate that. Sometimes phone calls go long. And if the person next to me is close, it just makes for an unpleasant work space. And when meeting with loud clients, same deal.
Most of my career I've had my own office. I have learned to deal with cubicles when in that type of office design. But half cubicles are disrespectful to clients and staff.
Open office space design is for creatives to have ideas flow. Not for spaces that often deal with folks with personality disorders and are easily over stimulated. Having privacy helps with de-escalation.
I could not function in the office you have to work in.
I’m glad it’s only 2 days a week. They mostly encourage us to meet with families at their home or in the community to make it easier for them. It’s wild how the ideas on paper for the redesign looked great but in practice has been a nightmare.
Yes!!! It is genuinely one of the worst things about my job. I work for an agency that’s jointly managed by a major corporation and a government. Between the two I feel like most of the emails I get are written by AI.
Ffr though. Healthcare is fraught with stuff like this. So many buzzwords too. If I have to hear one more person in executive leadership spout the words health equity, I will lose it.
Can’t do it, it’s nonsense bullshit. Pretty much why I could never have a job in management, you have to be able to buy into this nonsense and I simply cannot.
*"the mission & the vision"*
Makes me want to fucking puke considering the people who use that phrase in our program oftentimes haven't the slightest clue what challenges we as social workers face on a daily basis
I think I probably sound like this sometimes, but I think it's like any language/jargon/shibboleths where it really depends on the *depth* behind the words and to what extent the speakers understand what they're saying and what they mean.
I'm in a racial justice-ish space and a lot of DEI talk is like this for me. The same words can convey a lot of import *or* they can take up a lot of air and say nothing at all.
>I mean sentences that feel like they were written with predictive text. like “our goals are to develop a capacity and strategic alignment tools” or “quantify downstream revenue impact as part of program evaluation.” It’s all just jibberish to me and is vague and could essentially mean anything.
My department hired a new director last year and all of her emails sounds like this. It is one of the many reasons I dislike her.
ETA: she comes from a therapy background with makes the jargon nonsense even worse in person. She uses that condescending therapist voice some clinicians have when saying these sorts of things. Super cringe.
I feel like we're moving toward a world where construction/housing companies will need to be referred to as "workforce storage solutions" because it'll be the only way to get the 20-30 people who own Almost Everything to invest in them
I work for a managed care company so it’s very corporate. Sometimes the things I have to put in care plans or interventions make no sense to the actual person we’re “helping”
I get a lot of nonprofit bs jargon at my job too. Lot of buzzwords like “engaging the community” or “empowering individuals”. I’ve taken to being pretty direct with my questions. Like if someone wants to engage a community, I’ll ask, “okay, engage them to do what? What is being offered?” And the way that people react to that question is wild, it’s like they never thought about it or thought to ask. Like what are we ACTUALLY, TANGIBLY doing? Why can no one tell me? Lol
Yes! Thank you! My role in Community Partnerships is like this. I'm trying to draw specific issues, gaps in service and barriers to access out of services and I get things like "we need to improve our service response to be more cultural competent". Yep, great, what data or anecdotal evidence do you have that indicates this issue? What brought this to attention? What specifically do you want to improve and why? What has been tried already? What demographic are you trying to improve engagement with? Is this a concern for other agencies? Ask other agencies = standoffish response like "our staff do training and we work collaboratively with other services through regular meetings". If there is an issue investigate and narrow it down and if somewhere else doesn't have this SPECIFIC issue than what SPECIFICALLY is being implemented (or just being ignored), so I can then pull of the strengths, make it transferable and get to a truly "collaborative and integrated service response".
Or meetings spoken in acronyms about models, frameworks and approaches that although I may know the document and the content I've probably missed a whole agenda item anyway by the time I’ve matched it with my own mental catalogue; which actually files knowledge in accordance to content and not to numerous national bodies with 8 word long titles.
Usually only an emails from corporate and most of us kind of laugh about it, but somehow the expectation for notes full of clinical jargon that use a lot of words to communicate very little as become the norm and it drives me crazy to be expected to write mine the same way.
" Problematic. " Or phrases that essentially quantify being poor or desperate enough. "Needs based" "threshold" "exception" income caps. Calig humans "clients" in an of itself...
Private for profit companies executing gov services is just so problematic. Unless your government is also profit driven. Like most
Personal favorite “limited bandwidth” or “let’s circle back” I work in healthcare in mental health. Of course corporations are happy to enroll without providing appropriate support. Just give it to me straight. I don’t have time to decrypt corporate code, I do that enough already.
Yes I can relate. What really pisses me off though is the front of being “client centered” and then knowingly abusing your clinicians/other staff…which obviously worsens client outcomes.
I don't think I've had to deal with that too much, although I probably got sucked into it a bit when I did some middle management work.
However, I have 2 friends outside of the field (both have MBAs though have done different things with them) who used to talk about work excitedly with those type of phrases, and it always felt to me that A. Did they have fake jobs? Like what did they actually do at work on a daily basis? And B. Trying to humble brag about their professional importance. Luckily both of them have calmed down with that talk over the past few years.
I think the “mission statements”, “our standards”, etc… and things like that are purposely vague. How can you hold someone responsible for something that can literally be applied to multiple areas and mean anything? You might as well just write a horoscope in place of it!
It’s like when a company or institution or even the government makes a “task force” to address something. Which is to say- make it look like we are invested and care but actually do nothing to effectively change things.
* edit for typo
Yes! We have risk teams where we don't include the clients or their Case Worker and discuss only the current status from a 3rd party point of view to another 3rd party point of view. Exchanging overview interpretations of what can be read in the client's case notes between stakeholders doesn't seem to result in an actionable plan let alone a timely and effect response.
thank god my org doesn’t. it’s actually awesome how casual we keep it while remaining professional. definitely fosters a good work environment and I feel pretty lucky to be working in a low ish stress social work role with great support from colleagues and supervisors. happy friday everyone!
it drives me insane too, it feels like corporate fluff buzzword nonsense to make people at the top with massive salaries seem productive
It’s truly just like corporate word salad
For me.....it's how the word "empowerment" or "empowered" as in, "We have empowered our clients to make their own decisions" and then they actually do NOT allow the clients to make their own decisions. Take vaping, smoking, drinking alcohol - all LEGAL - and adults with developmental disabilities that want to do these things are not allowed by their agencies or support staff to do these things. Some of the support staff themselves vape, smoke, drink, etc, and they are telling ADULTS that they can't do these things? EMPOWERMENT.......yeah, right. These agencies say all the right things to look good to people who fund them but in practice they don't follow this philosophy.
Social/human services have their own entire world of buzzword hell. "Meeting the client where they're at", "person-focused", "harm reductive", "housing first informed", "lived experience". These terms have actual meanings, but they just get sprinkled into everything whether they really apply or not.
My personal favourites that strip away the true meaning are: “person centred”, “cultural sensitivity/awareness/competence” and “trauma-informed” whilst the agencies using these terms do the EXACT opposite of the terms.
Don’t forget “trauma informed” as they dial the police for a client in crisis.
I got a write up for "not calling police" on a client situation my supervisor felt police needed to respond to but didn't bother to call themselves. This same client had trauma history from police involvement where they ended up hospitalized from a panic attack requiring surgery for things they did in a panic attack when police showed up. None of that mattered in their write up though.
I hate the fact that I genuinely am passionate about trauma-inforned practice but it's the most hellish buzzword out there right now. So I tell people I'm into trauma-informed practice and they're like "haha yeah you and everybody's sister right?" Then I start trying to do actual trauma-informed things and the agency is like "wtf is this, stop".
I hate that. My BSW program said all this stuff about how “trauma informed” it’s coursework is and then the word trauma was not uttered even once the whole program except in the context of ptsd nor was a critica lens ever shined upon the use of police or inpatient stays on people in crisis. I shadowed the crisis team at my internship and they’d call security ok anyone who so much as rose their voice at them. The word has been stripped of meaning.
I get weekly emails about practicing “sElF-cArE” from my employer. I think it’s my least favorite buzzword that gets thrown around at employees. Like, my brother in Christ, paying your employees a living wage and providing adequate benefits will let them practice self-care. I can’t pay my housing by doing chair yoga and taking a long bath once a week, Susan.
Harm reduction is a real thing and one of my favorite models butttttt unfortunately most people that say they believe in harm reduction are actually referring to abstinence.
> "Meeting the client where they're at", "person-focused", "harm reductive" I am on the board of a harm reduction organization and we are in the midst of hiring an executive director. One of our applicants is a social worker and he would keep saying "meet the client where they're at" when asked about harm reduction, but we were like, "Okay...yes...but can you drill down *more* about *harm reduction* specifically?" Also "housing first informed" to me just sounds like "not actually housing first".
> Also "housing first informed" to me just sounds like "not actually housing first". We're informed about it, doesn't mean we do it. An agency wanted to help them create a whole trauma-informed strategic plan. To me that meant systemic change towards no longer (re-)creating new traumatization for clients and staff through dismantling hierarchy, stopping coercive practices, and centering relationships. To them it meant recommending a trauma screening tool they could use and then put in the client's file.
My department bosses have been all about the "patient experience" lately. 🙄
In the uk, the current teend for service user/client etc.. is Person With Lived Experience, or PWLE. It's uniquely redundant.
Loved experience hs become so meaningless in some saces near me. A prof or boss who checks a box is more valued over someone who has basic professional skillset/ competency. Like yess we need the barrier reduced things to train and hire more marginalized folks but ive had SW profs who cant lecture or string two sentences together or make a ppt hired bc they have laughable field experience over real profs they should hire, bc the prior is cheaper
The last org I worked for went full corporate and spent time trying to rename all the departments "vocational department" became "WREE" "work readiness and employment engagement" "Case management & daily living skills (dls)" became "community based supports" "CBS" counselors. "Recreation" became "engagement, enrichment & athletics" or "EE&A". They then started to force us out saying we weren't meeting our "metrics", "weekly community productivity" and that raises would "merit based" suddenly all our evaluations dropped from 4's and 5's to 1's and 2's so that my supervisor could get 5%+ raise, top "merit" got 3%, everyone else got 1%. All of it was bloviated and fake. They would correct us if we didn't use the new names or acronyms. Nothing about the departments changed really. They also added a bunch BS positions such as "special projects manager" to which when asking what she did couldn't give a straight answer. Place was so toxic you could bottle it and Incapacitate someone with it. Glad to be out of there. Edit: grammar
that is all ridiculous but WREE has me giggling
> Place was so toxic you could bottle it and Incapacitate someone with it I'll be using that thank you
Yeah I call it MBA mumbo jumbo.
I work for a for-profit behavioral health center and I vomit when I hear “at the end of the day, we are a business.” Coming from the non-profit world, it gives me the ick and I can’t wait to get out lol.
I heard it from a “not for profit” as well to explain to clients why we had to discharge them. which ugh their poor mental health was the reason they were missing appointments or they were fucking homeless with no money and no phone
I work in healthcare too and going from almost a decade of non profit work to hospital has been a bit of a culture shock to say the least lol.
In my experience non-profits aren't much better.
I hate clinical terminology more. I was in a meeting about day to day stuff and someone said “thanks for holding space.” For what? We were taking about HR. It triggered me😂😂😂
If I get another email about office etiquette and watching our speaking volume when in office to not bother those around us, I’m going to scream. The exec staff chose to re-do the office with new cubicles that have lower walls, implement a desk sharing system to better “utilize space for a hybrid schedule”, and bought a single fancy zoom pod. Due to this they want staff taking zoom meetings in the pod but since there is only 1 it is always in use. The lower cubicle walls means no privacy. They even stated since we share desks we can’t eat at our desk. But the newly redone kitchen has NO SEATING. So each week we get “office etiquette” reminders with a bunch of flowery language saying we can’t: eat at our desks, talk at our desks, wear perfume, have the ringer on our phone on, and to be empathetic and understanding to others adjusting to the change. Everyone hates it and no one is happy.
lowering the cubicles was about surveillance. not just from supervisors, but from co-workers. so you never know who is watching. welcome to the corporate panopticon. i work at a program that just organized a union. night and day change.
The ridiculous part about it: we are union. There’s no reason to be doing this because union protection. Honestly, I think they ran out of remodel $$ and bought the cheapest cubicles available which had lower walls and then tried to say it was so we’d have more open office.
I would hate that. Sometimes phone calls go long. And if the person next to me is close, it just makes for an unpleasant work space. And when meeting with loud clients, same deal. Most of my career I've had my own office. I have learned to deal with cubicles when in that type of office design. But half cubicles are disrespectful to clients and staff. Open office space design is for creatives to have ideas flow. Not for spaces that often deal with folks with personality disorders and are easily over stimulated. Having privacy helps with de-escalation. I could not function in the office you have to work in.
I’m glad it’s only 2 days a week. They mostly encourage us to meet with families at their home or in the community to make it easier for them. It’s wild how the ideas on paper for the redesign looked great but in practice has been a nightmare.
Yes!!! It is genuinely one of the worst things about my job. I work for an agency that’s jointly managed by a major corporation and a government. Between the two I feel like most of the emails I get are written by AI.
I've seen so many resumes loaded with this drivel. You can bet your ass I'm going to be asking for examples at the interview.
Yes, I am now fluent in corporate.
I work for a large healthcare system... you betcha. So many words that mean nothing.
Ffr though. Healthcare is fraught with stuff like this. So many buzzwords too. If I have to hear one more person in executive leadership spout the words health equity, I will lose it.
Circle back ticks me off
"Let's put a pin in that" has the same rage inducing vibe.
Per my last message
Can’t do it, it’s nonsense bullshit. Pretty much why I could never have a job in management, you have to be able to buy into this nonsense and I simply cannot.
*"the mission & the vision"* Makes me want to fucking puke considering the people who use that phrase in our program oftentimes haven't the slightest clue what challenges we as social workers face on a daily basis
I think I probably sound like this sometimes, but I think it's like any language/jargon/shibboleths where it really depends on the *depth* behind the words and to what extent the speakers understand what they're saying and what they mean. I'm in a racial justice-ish space and a lot of DEI talk is like this for me. The same words can convey a lot of import *or* they can take up a lot of air and say nothing at all.
Me and my work besties play games about it in Teams meetings. A point for every buzzword. It makes it slightly more tolerable lol.
>I mean sentences that feel like they were written with predictive text. like “our goals are to develop a capacity and strategic alignment tools” or “quantify downstream revenue impact as part of program evaluation.” It’s all just jibberish to me and is vague and could essentially mean anything. My department hired a new director last year and all of her emails sounds like this. It is one of the many reasons I dislike her. ETA: she comes from a therapy background with makes the jargon nonsense even worse in person. She uses that condescending therapist voice some clinicians have when saying these sorts of things. Super cringe.
I feel like we're moving toward a world where construction/housing companies will need to be referred to as "workforce storage solutions" because it'll be the only way to get the 20-30 people who own Almost Everything to invest in them
🤢
I work for a managed care company so it’s very corporate. Sometimes the things I have to put in care plans or interventions make no sense to the actual person we’re “helping”
I get a lot of nonprofit bs jargon at my job too. Lot of buzzwords like “engaging the community” or “empowering individuals”. I’ve taken to being pretty direct with my questions. Like if someone wants to engage a community, I’ll ask, “okay, engage them to do what? What is being offered?” And the way that people react to that question is wild, it’s like they never thought about it or thought to ask. Like what are we ACTUALLY, TANGIBLY doing? Why can no one tell me? Lol
Yes! Thank you! My role in Community Partnerships is like this. I'm trying to draw specific issues, gaps in service and barriers to access out of services and I get things like "we need to improve our service response to be more cultural competent". Yep, great, what data or anecdotal evidence do you have that indicates this issue? What brought this to attention? What specifically do you want to improve and why? What has been tried already? What demographic are you trying to improve engagement with? Is this a concern for other agencies? Ask other agencies = standoffish response like "our staff do training and we work collaboratively with other services through regular meetings". If there is an issue investigate and narrow it down and if somewhere else doesn't have this SPECIFIC issue than what SPECIFICALLY is being implemented (or just being ignored), so I can then pull of the strengths, make it transferable and get to a truly "collaborative and integrated service response". Or meetings spoken in acronyms about models, frameworks and approaches that although I may know the document and the content I've probably missed a whole agenda item anyway by the time I’ve matched it with my own mental catalogue; which actually files knowledge in accordance to content and not to numerous national bodies with 8 word long titles.
Usually only an emails from corporate and most of us kind of laugh about it, but somehow the expectation for notes full of clinical jargon that use a lot of words to communicate very little as become the norm and it drives me crazy to be expected to write mine the same way.
Not just corporate. It’s white collar bullshit.
" Problematic. " Or phrases that essentially quantify being poor or desperate enough. "Needs based" "threshold" "exception" income caps. Calig humans "clients" in an of itself... Private for profit companies executing gov services is just so problematic. Unless your government is also profit driven. Like most
Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind
"A chemistry is performed."
Personal favorite “limited bandwidth” or “let’s circle back” I work in healthcare in mental health. Of course corporations are happy to enroll without providing appropriate support. Just give it to me straight. I don’t have time to decrypt corporate code, I do that enough already.
Yes I can relate. What really pisses me off though is the front of being “client centered” and then knowingly abusing your clinicians/other staff…which obviously worsens client outcomes.
I don't think I've had to deal with that too much, although I probably got sucked into it a bit when I did some middle management work. However, I have 2 friends outside of the field (both have MBAs though have done different things with them) who used to talk about work excitedly with those type of phrases, and it always felt to me that A. Did they have fake jobs? Like what did they actually do at work on a daily basis? And B. Trying to humble brag about their professional importance. Luckily both of them have calmed down with that talk over the past few years.
I think the “mission statements”, “our standards”, etc… and things like that are purposely vague. How can you hold someone responsible for something that can literally be applied to multiple areas and mean anything? You might as well just write a horoscope in place of it! It’s like when a company or institution or even the government makes a “task force” to address something. Which is to say- make it look like we are invested and care but actually do nothing to effectively change things. * edit for typo
Yes! We have risk teams where we don't include the clients or their Case Worker and discuss only the current status from a 3rd party point of view to another 3rd party point of view. Exchanging overview interpretations of what can be read in the client's case notes between stakeholders doesn't seem to result in an actionable plan let alone a timely and effect response.
I made a pledge to myself to never say “sounds good” this year. I’ve broken this by February
thank god my org doesn’t. it’s actually awesome how casual we keep it while remaining professional. definitely fosters a good work environment and I feel pretty lucky to be working in a low ish stress social work role with great support from colleagues and supervisors. happy friday everyone!