What cringey phrases are common in your workplace?

[Soubriquet]

Mine seems to favour

“Smash this”

Makes me internally shudder everytime I see I written. And it’s wrote a lot

“Can I just ...” right before he TELLS me to do something ie pass him a file/diary.
“Can we have ...” when he’s bollocking someone for not wanting to break the law even though he believes it’s ok in this instance.
Pointless stupid fucking names for completely normal job posts ie “Senior Business Officer” for someone to come in and type a few emails. There are 6 people working for the entire company and he acts like we’re a multi conglomerate.
Another example of stupid job titles is “clinical lead”, he sits on his arse and types emails ... there is nothing remotely clinical about his job and we don’t have any patients

It is what it is.

with all due respect
I'm sorry you feel that way
are we all on the same page

"Mood music." Bloody "mood music". Basically means "how do people feel about that?" Except they say "what's the mood music surrounding this?" Drives me bananas.

Battle rhythm

Reaching out to someone - grrrrrrr.

We have battle rhythm too!

'Inappropriate'

Code for anything I disagree with/ disapprove of

Also our new post lockdown verb

To Teams

'I'll be teamsing in to that'
'Can you just Teams me about that?'
'Let's Teams'

Shudder

There's a lot of discussion of "right-sizing" our organisation post-COVID. I suspect my job will go as part of the right-sizing 😥

Mission Critical.

I do not work for NASA.

PMSL at 'open the kimono'
I would like to try lobbing that into my next boring Teams meeting but a) I don't know what it means and b) it sounds a bit 'inappropriate'

Blue sky thinking
Low hanging fruit
Turning the tanker
Pinging emails
Run it up the flagpole
Pushing the envelope
Touching base

And sadly many, many more........

‘What’s the business question here’ < just means what is the actual requirement/real question. The word business is largely redundant. Also ‘what’s the business need’. I work in academia so I think some people say it just to sound oh so super corporate.

My boss went to a conference and now keeps banging on about us taking ‘a systems approach’ to problems. We keep asking if she means systematic (no) and what she does mean because no one really talks like that but yet to get an answer in one concise sentence.

Wtf would open the kimono even mean?!

We also Teams stuff.

Shall we teams with Dave?
Can you teams that to me?

My boss also calls the management team, The Board. We are a private company owned by two directors, we don’t have ‘a board of directors’ and they don’t call themselves that. He’s always taking things to ‘the board’, feeding back ‘from the board’, making commitments ‘to the board’.

I’m an unashamed user of ‘going forward’.

I’ve had all of these in various workplaces (even that’s a cringe, in itself), except for ‘opening the kimono’. Wtf?

They are all heinous.

The one I really hated was a firm that used to refer to emails as ‘wires’. It ain’t the 1960s, you eejits! And even worse, a senior manager used to ask me to ‘flip it to me’ if he wanted me to forward him an email 😡

I can’t tell you how delighted I am to work for myself these days. I have control over my own vocabulary and grammar these days, and it feels good.

I'm guilty of using "we are where we are", as a shorthand for "fuck ups have been made, but rather than recriminations, lets just deal with it"

I'm crying!!!!

Let's all try tomorrow to insert some random ones:

Airing the petticoats
Hop aboard a penny farthing
Get lost in the choo choo train
Bend and snap

Being told we're being taken on a journey, that we'll need to get used to the new normal, post covid. Fuck off, we do not work in transport.

Our current trends are 'place based' - this just means working with the people who live in our town. Align the strategies and the good old restoration and recovery (NHS).

Also, as I work in NHS management, everything has to be named so that it has a twatty acronym that you can say as a word. We like to think that somewhere, there is a TAD - twatty acronym department.

Honestly I swear some people revel in this shit in order to convince themselves their crappy lives have a meaning.

Instead of saying "what are we both going to do today" my colleague calls for "quick strategy briefs" which given the very mundane nature of our work, is fucking laughable.

@livefornaps

I'm crying!!!!

Let's all try tomorrow to insert some random ones:

Airing the petticoats
Hop aboard a penny farthing
Get lost in the choo choo train
Bend and snap

Oh god!

Please do

If any of you are bosses, please try and throw some wacky phrasing in just to see if your colleagues nod and smile or sit there thinking “ok..they have lost the plot”

“Let’s bend and snap the new product.”

"Sounds like a plan"
Drives me nuts

"Senior management team" / SMT (agree with the NHS management pp re acronyms!)

SMT is fine, but there is no middle management. SMT is just.. the managers.