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What office buzzwords are doing to our brains, and to our productivity

Published: Monday, April 28 2014 2:05 p.m. MDT

Tired of running it up the flagpole? Worried you may be the low-hanging fruit? It might be time to circle back on office buzzwords.

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Office jargon is taking a deep dive right into American culture.

The terms and speak often used among workers and cubicles was the subject of The Atlantic’s piece last week, titled “The Origins of Office Speak” (note: the article may contain strong language.) Writer Emma Green cycled through multiple buzzwords and office jargon categories in giving the full scope of how people use these words in the workplace.

“Over time, different industries have developed their own tribal vocabularies,” Green wrote. “Some of today’s most popular buzzwords were created by academics who believed that work should satisfy one’s soul; others were coined by consultants who sold the idea that happy workers are effective workers.”



“Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it,” Green wrote. “In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are."


“It'd be easy to dismiss empty language like value-add and deep dive as silly turns-of-phrase, but they're more detrimental than that,” Crum wrote. “Just as thoughts shape language, the language we use has the power to shape our thoughts and actions.”


And, as also noted in The Guardian’s recent piece, office speak is generally centered toward a male audience, putting women in an odd spot for trying to fit in among their colleagues.

“Women make up nearly half the working population, but they remain under-represented at the highest echelons of organisations (sic), even with the support of legislative and managerial interventions,” The Guardian reported.




“When we replace a specific task with a vague expression, we grant the task more magnitude than it deserves,” Crum wrote. “If we don't describe an activity plainly, it seems less like an easily achievable goal and more like a cloudy state of existence that fills unknowable amounts of time.”

Email: hscribner@deseretdigital.com

Twitter: @herbscribner

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