Annoying business buzzwords that you WILL hear in the office
What's your most hated bit of office slang?
Hi! So nice to e-meet you! Can I borrow you for a sec? I just wanted to touch base and ping over a bit of information for you to cast an eye over! I hope that’s OK?!
No, not it isn't and neither is using any of the following business buzzwords. If you are using any of these then please take a long hard look at yourself and maybe decide to WFH forever.
- If you are WFH, then these are the best office chairs you need to know about.
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Touch base
It's one of the most hated office phrase. When you say touch base, what you really mean is ‘talk’, which takes much less time to say, and makes you sound like much less of a bellend. So just say talk, yeah? You’re not on a spaceship, you don’t have a ‘base’.
Blue sky thinking
What better way to trigger some creative thinking than with a horribly overused phrase that makes all your employees want to die!
We’re on a journey
No you’re not, you’re sat stationary in your office chair – the one that’s giving you terrible back problems - leaving it only for 15 minutes a day to go to the Pret round the corner and grab the same ham and cheese sandwich you’ve eaten for lunch every day for the past three months.
Game changer
“This is a real game changer for the company” = “We will realise about six months’ time – five months too late – that this small change to how the company operates has actually been totally inefficient, given you all more work to do for no extra reward, and been a huge pain in everybody’s arse.”
No brainer
If you didn’t need your brain to come up with it then it probably isn’t a very good idea, is it?
Thought shower
This was brought in as an alternative to brainstorm, which we’re not supposed to say anymore, but I contend that literally any other phrase in the entire world would be better than ‘though shower’. “Let’s go into that meeting room and have a quick dog peanut”, “Shall we just pop over to those sofas and have a 10-minute microwave meal?”, “I’ve booked out the room upstairs at 2pm so we can get together for a clown orgy”. All better.
Run it up the flagpole
Shove your flagpole up your–
If you don’t like it get off the bus
If I get off the bus then how am I supposed to run you over with it, repeatedly, until your body is nothing more than mush – disgusting red mush ground into the tarmac, unrecognisable from regular road kill? Huh? HUH?! Exactly.
Mission statement
Again, this is not a spaceship, and you are not a fucking astronaut. Though if you could become one and then kindly launch yourself into the Sun, that’d be grand.
Pick it up and run with it
This phrase is even worse when you remember that it means doing someone else’s work for them. I don’t even want to do my own work, or run, so don’t make me run with someone else’s work.
Punch a pupp
Thankfully we have never heard anyone actually say this out loud, but apparently it means doing something horrible for the long term good of the company. We're not sure how punching a puppy will do any good for it in the long term, and this phrase is almost certainly used almost exclusively to refer to firing people, so we hate it already.
Let’s get our ducks in a row
What? Please leave me alone to die in peace.