Nearly half of employees say that confusing office language caused them to slip up at work in the past. One company says it can help them avoid that pitfall.
(Bloomberg) — Move the needle. Boil the ocean. Blue-sky thinking. If these phrases have you rolling your eyes or scratching your head, a Los Angeles-based startup says it wants to help.
Haystack, which provides businesses, including BuzzFeed Inc. and NerdWallet Inc., with internal communications software, is readying a tool called Glossary for companies and their workers to demystify corporate jargon.
Glossary comes loaded with industry-specific dictionaries and allows employees to share their own definitions of office lingo. Workers can also upload the meaning of acronyms, buzzwords and ambiguous phrases that populate workplace language to a virtual glossary, either for personal or company-wide reference. The tool is slated to launch on July 27.
Cameron Lindsay, co-founder and chief executive officer of Haystack, was inspired to create Glossary after getting stumped on an unfamiliar abbreviation at his previous job: HRIS, that company’s main product, stands for Human Resources Information Systems. But Lindsay says it took him three months of misunderstanding the term before he was able to figure out what it meant.
Corporate speak has been pervasive for years. Companies have long referred to layoffs as the more pleasant-sounding “downsizing.” And terms like “pivoting” are routinely used in the tech industry to give a patina to companies giving up on a failed strategy or initiative to move in another direction. Remote work has only added to the excess of corporate jargon. Heavy reliance on asynchronous communication, like email and messaging, paves the way for a “huge influx of acronyms and abbreviations that are unique to every industry,” said Lindsay.
Glossary, which is free to use, was launched as part of a suite of office software tools and Lindsay was initially surprised by how popular it became, prompting the company to offer the tool as a separate product. “It would be the first thing newly signed customers wanted to tackle,” Lindsay said.
Haystack, it turns out, hit upon a need many workers had been already craving. When it comes to deciphering office jargon, 60% of workers around the world say they had to figure out workplace jargon on their own, according to a joint survey conducted by LinkedIn and Duolingo. The survey sampled more than 8,000 working professionals across eight countries.
“People often don’t realize that they’re saying something that somebody else doesn’t understand,” said John Carey, a professor emeritus of communications at Fordham University. “And typically the person who’s hearing the word may be intimidated because they feel, you know, ‘Am I stupid because I didn’t know what this means?’”
That stigma may be slowing down office productivity. Professionals feel overused business clichés tend to compromise communication, with 40% of employees saying they’ve made a mistake at work because they either misused or misinterpreted workplace jargon, according to the LinkedIn and Duolingo survey. That’s why being able to anonymously request a definition could be a game-changer, according to Lindsay.
The need is especially acute for work-at-home staff. Nearly 70% of hybrid and remote workers reported feeling left out due to overuse of jargon, whereas only a little more than half of onsite counterparts felt the same, the survey showed. The sentiment was echoed by new employees and workers from non-English speaking households.
So if you’re ever at a meeting with employees from across departments, Carey recommends a rule for making sure nobody feels excluded: “If you are using a very specific term that others don’t understand, either don’t use it or use it and then explain.”
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