Thread by @SimonHeath1

THREAD
The Lexicon of Workplace Bullshittery
(Taken from my 2016 article of the same name)
The world of work is full of nonsense. Here’s a guide to help you navigate:

110 percent – The inverse amount of humility required for a job in sales

1/~

360 degree review – A performance review that makes your head spin

80/20 Rule – What you invoke to excuse yourself from reading the whole report

Accountability – What dimwit recruiters in the Financial Services sector go looking for.

2/~

Action – Doing things for someone whose ego is bigger than their testicles

Actual Space Utilization – Metric used when figuring out how Bob from Accounts takes 3 hours in the loo on a Thursday afternoon with a copy of The Racing Post.

3/~

Agility – Getting out of the office un-noticed at 3:30pm on a Friday

Align – The thing that gets drawn under HR efforts to get all cosy and strategic with “the business”

4/~

Alternative Workplace Strategy – Plan by the business to have you do as much of your work at the bus stop (see below) as possible so as to reduce the amount of desks or workspace they have to pay for

5/~

Alternative Workplace – Wherever you end up working when you’re being flexible (bus stop, cupboard under stairs, coffee shop, loo, supermarket, crowded cinema, mother’s funeral, kid’s school play etc)

Amplify – Shouting down efforts to discuss gender pay equality at the AGM

6/~

Anonymize – Taking your name off of a project update that paints you in a bad light

At the end of the day – That which never arrives in modern business

Augmented reality – Steve from the Sales team has been inflating the pipeline again

7/~

Authenticity – When the boss finally gets round to having that open and honest chat with Bob from Accounts

Autonomy – The half hour enjoyed by the rest of the department when the manager slips away early on a Friday afternoon

8/~

Bae – Your rather shifty BFF who works in the defence, security and aerospace industry

Baked-in – The feeling you get after too many cupcakes at an HR meeting

Balls in the air – Left hanging after a car park conversation

9/~

Bandwith – The CEO’s waistline after a long lunch meeting

Baseline – The minimum effort you can put in and still get away with it

Benchmarking – Desperately looking for something to support a business case

10/~

Best practice (1) – After repeated failures, what you are told to go away and do

Best Practice (2) – What you cite to a client, seeking to excuse yourself from any real innovation

Big Data – A great opportunity to make up for an even greater lack of insight

11/~

Bleeding edge – What you get from banging your head on the desk in frustration with your co-workers

Blended learning – Googling the answers to your company’s e-learning questionnaire whilst completing it

12/~

Boiling the ocean – What the intern feels he’s doing when being made to prepare hot drinks for a board meeting

Building Management System – Dave from FM with his bag of spanners

Business Intelligence – A commonly used oxymoron

13/~

Buy-in – Bribing a colleague to do the work you can’t be bothered to

BYOD – An unofficially sanctioned initiative to avoid employing an IT helpdesk.

CAD – Complicated And Distracting

14/~

CAFM – Costly And Frequently Mis-used

Carbon Footprint – The mess in the print room after Dave from FM tried to change the toner with his bag of spanners

CFO – A person in a race to the bottom line

15/~

Chinese wall – What you cite to avoid having to deal with awkward internal comms issues

Circulation -That which is affected by trying to meet client demands at the last minute

Cloud Computing – Inevitable consequence of years of rising hot air about the future of workplace tech

Coaching – What your boss thinks he’s doing when he spends the first half hour of your appraisal telling you how he got where he is

Co-creation – An offer to put in all of the effort for none of the credit

Collaboration – Delegation, but with nicer biscuits

17/~

Community – Enough people to get a really good group rant going about the place you work at

Competencies – The list of skills your boss wishes his team had

Competitive advantage – A permanent formatting feature of any pitch document

18/~

Content – Something comforting to read beside the pool whilst happily on holiday with your bonus

Continuous improvement – What you say you’re doing to excuse repeated cock-ups

COO – Chief Obfuscation Officer

19/~

Corporate Culture – What happens when the management aren’t looking too closely

Cross–training – Sending Bob from Finance to shadow the sales guys so you don’t have to deal with his body odour

Curation – A very small trumpet, earnestly blown

20/~

Deep dive – What you’re told someone is going to do before they fail to set aside enough time

De-layering – Having one less filling in your sandwich from Pret

De-skilling – What an organisation undertakes before deciding it needs to bring in outside expertise

21/~

Dialogue – Verbal diarrhoea suffered by focus groups

Digital Signage – That team from Marketing are holding a cake sale again

Discretionary Bonus – The one that got away

22/~

Disenfranchise – The fate of Blockbuster

Disruption – A tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Divergent thinking – Coming up with a stupid idea right after someone says “There’s no such thing as a stupid idea”.

22/~

Diversity – A differing of views over whether to introduce quotas in the board room

Dovetail – What you see right before the bird craps on you

Due Diligence – All the stuff you then ignore

Ecosystem – The cultured slime that grows in the petri dish of workplaces

23/~

Efficient Space Utilisation – What Bob from Accounts (see above) will claim he’s practising if ever challenged

eLearning – What you have to do when there aren’t enough rooms available

Elevator pitch – The heightened tone of voice adopted by someone asking for a raise

24/~

Emotional intelligence – The art of never showing your feelings at work

Employee Champion – Finding someone else people can whinge to

25/~

Employee Engagement – Exactly the same as when your partner emits a heavy sigh and you ask what’s wrong and they answer “Nothing, I’m fine.” and you go back to watching TV.

26/~

Empowerment – The feeling you get when you finally find somewhere to recharge your various devices whilst enjoying a bout of flexible working

Energy Management System – Taking the lift instead of the stairs

27/~

Equality – The standard of WiFi connectivity you get in your workplace versus that which you were led to expect

Ethics – A county to the north east of London

Facetime – Time spent with your head in your hands in frustration after another pointless meeting

28/~

Facilitation – A cologne that smells of scented pens

Fail forward – AKA Passing the buck

Fishbowl – Customer insight that you ignore until the fish dies and has to be flushed down the toilet

Full optics – Setting up the bar the night before the annual sales conference

29/~

Functional Zoning – Ensuring the guy who smells a bit funny sits next to the one window that can be opened

Gain-sharing – What you propose to a client when you want to have a really good disagreement

30/~

Game changers – The workplace equivalent of your stroppy teenage daughter sweeping the Monopoly set off the dining room table in a fit of pique because she came second in a beauty contest after drawing a card from the Community Chest.

31/~

Gamification – The inter-office Fantasy Football League

Going forward – Direction of travel for a business with regressive management practices

Hacking – The kind of cough you hear in a meeting when someone suggests an employee engagement programme

32/~

Happiness – What wellbeing consultants have in lieu of mortgage payments

Helicopter view – Staying well out of the way as a project fails in spectacular fashion

Holocracy – An optical illusion used to disguise your Taylorist leanings

33/~

Honest and open – The type of chat that results in a written note on your employee record

34/~

Hot Desking – A practice whereby once a week you get to spend time with the IT helpdesk getting your wireless reconfigured and have a seat with a team from internal audit with a chinese wall so strict in place it makes Omerta look like your fabulously indiscreet Aunty Betty

35/~

Hotelling – Like hot desking but reminds you of that really cute guy on the concierge desk you flirted with at last year’s WorkTech in Singapore

Human capital – The CFO’s chess set

Human-centred – A confection commonly filled by breaking butterflies on wheels.

36/~

Ideation – The differentiation of ideas thought up by consultants versus things you could have come up with yourself

Impactful – Facepalming done by employees when they discover what the latest workplace change programme is supposed to achieve

37/~

Innovation – Spending all that time you saved going #noemail managing all those productivity apps you’ve downloaded

Internet of things – How the CEO views your company’s internal social network

38/~

Interoperability – The futile hope that, just for once, you can have a project on which HR and IT don’t end up actively working against each other

IWMS – It Was My Suggestion, what the Head of Real Estate says when the CEO makes comments kindly on the new /slide/ping pong table

-ize – As in “Uberize”. The uncontrollable desire of the marketing department to jump on any passing bandwagon

Knowledge Worker – Someone who knows how to use Google

40/~

Ladder up – On being promoted, to pull the ladder up after you so nobody else can share in the glory

Lean in – Getting closer to the toilet bowl to throw up after hearing the CEO speak at the latest Town Hall

41/~

Leverage – What Roy from IT has over you after he stumbled on those candid photos of your girlfriend on your laptop

Low hanging fruit – Where you feel you’ve been kicked after your latest pay review

Lunch and learn – An opportunity to do the former at the expense of the latter

Machine learning – The relentlessness of the corporate L&D function

Mastery – The art of being just good enough to keep getting away with it

Matrix organisation – A business where the CEO tries to subdue dissent by taking the job titles off the org charts

43/~

Mentoring – Giving the office bore an opportunity to patronize the junior staff

Meritocracy – An organisation in which mediocrity rises to the top

Millenials – To recruitment consultants, everybody (i.e. they think we were all born yesterday)

44/~

Mindfulness – What we can all now say we are practising when someone catches us staring wistfully out of the window on a dreary, damp Thursday afternoon

Mission Statement – A list of vague terms that are deliberately left open to interpretation

45/~

Mobile Interface – Pretending to be on your Blackberry when you see an unpopular member of staff approaching you at a social event

Mobility – Moving desks to avoid the office bore

46/~

Move the dial – A term used by the kind of person whose only real responsibility in the office is to adjust the AC controls

Neuroscience – Giving an air of respectability to crackpot theories about what motivates us at work

47/~

Non-financial Benefit – Being allowed to keep your job

Offline – Code for something you don’t want to discuss in front of a superior or client

Offshoring – A form of outsourcing where you ensure that mistakes are made at arms length

48/~

On Demand – The kind of service you are lead to expect once you’ve had your wirelesss reconfigured by IT, found a spare desk, connected to the network, found a printer and logged your roaming profile into the desk phone

49/~

On my radar – “…so I can avoid it.”

Onboarding – The first three hours in a new job where you sit in a windowless room and read reams of company policy manuals

50/~

Organic growth – The unidentifiable thing left in the back of the communal fridge

Peel the onion – Sobbing quietly to yourself after finding you’ve been passed over for promotion

Peer review – Your co-workers get together to highlight your shortcomings

51/~

Ping me – Your boss asks you to warm up his leftover curry in the communal microwave

Pivot – A corporate u-turn (e.g. now we want you all to come back and work in the office because it’ll improve collaboration and innovation)

52/~

Planned Space Utilisation – That chat HR need to have with Bob from Accounts

Powerpoint – A presentation by management to demonstrate their superiority

Prayer meeting – What happens right after you’ve submitted a proposal to the client

53/~

Presence Detection – Keeping an eye out for the boss so you can carry on goofing around on the internet

Presenteeism – The whip round for whoever celebrates their birthday this week

54/~

Purpose – The steely glint in Dan Pink’s eye as he bounds on stage to tell us the surprising truth about what motivates us. (cf Ker-ching!)

Reach out – Having to finally talk to that person you’ve been studiously avoiding

55/~

Ready, aim, fire – Instructions to HR from the CEO for the latest round of employee negotiations

Real Estate Management – Trying to convince senior executives that you’re a strategic partner to the business (cf HR)

56/~

Real Time Occupancy Data – What you see is what you get

Resource Management – Make do and mend

Reverse-engineering – Dissecting a failed project in an attempt to find someone to blame

57/~

Rocket science – The fireworks that ensue if any really does challenge the status quo

SaaS – Shortcomings and additional Slip-ups

Scalability – Corporate ladder-climbing

58/~

Scientific Management – What your COO is thinking about when he gets that faraway look during strategy meetings

Scope creep – The person who moves the goalposts hallway through a project

Seat at the table – Musical chairs for the irrelevant

59/~

SEO – Pay-per-view relevance irrespective of usefulness

Serendipity – What Gavin from Facilities is hoping he’ll get with Stacey from Sales Support when he spends every afternoon hovering by the water cooler

60/~

Shared Workspace – A practice that ensures all employees get a tour of the office every day whilst trying to find a place to work

Sharing economy – Team pizzas instead of team pay rises

61/~

SME – The smartest person who’s never in the room when the decisions get made

Space Requirements – The implacable in pursuit of the impossible

Staff on Strength – Those employees not claiming to be off with norovirus

62/~

Stakeholders – What you tell yourself you have to differentiate yourself from someone working in Tesco

Strategic planning – Navel gazing by people who get paid more than you do

Sustainability – How much longer you can stand to work for people who don’t value your contribution.

Swing Space – Well Google have a slide, don’t they?

Synergy – The energy expended lying to your spouse about why you’re late back from work. Again

64/~

Telecommuter – How you describe yourself in the hope that nobody will notice you spent the first hour of the day trying to return that dress you bought for one wear at the office party.

Telework – They tell ‘im, ‘e works.

65/~

Tipping point – When your spouse finds out why you’re really late back from work. Again.

Town hall – A place CEOs go to in order to patronise the workforce

Transparency – The apparent consistency of those at the top of public bodies at a time of regional crisis

66/~

Trust – What they give you right before telling you something that compromises your ethics

Un- – A prefix used to put a cigarette paper between what you’re doing and the flabby, out-of-date, irrelevant thing you did yesterday

67/~

Unicorns – Mythed opportunities

Values – Bulk purchased laminate wall decals

Work/Life Balance – Used to describe something perpetually skewed in someone else’s favour

>ENDS