John Daly: Business jargon and the corporate buzzwords that took hold in 2022

From 'low hanging fruit' to pain points' and 'hyperlocal' workplace jargon continues to thrive

‘Keep me in the loop,’ ‘team player,’ and ‘just checking in’ remain overused buzzwords.

It’s been a year where many of us ‘hit the ground running’ intent on chasing ‘low hanging fruit’  — but only if we had the ‘bandwidth’ and ‘synergies’ to really make it happen. 

In spite of the economic and political turbulence in our world this past year, workplace jargon continues to thrive. Adding new words and phrases to everyday speech, it offers a shared identity for organisations — a commercial shorthand said to ‘begin at the water cooler’ and finish up at the boardroom table. 

And speaking of which — ‘table stakes’ emerged as one of the year’s more popular jargon — an action that must be completed for the business to remain competitive. Hot on its heels came ‘funnel’ — driving consumer awareness of a company’s product toward an eventual sale. Along that marketing journey, there’s bound to be ‘headwinds’ — the commercial hurdles needing to be jumped for a successful conclusion. 

Alternatively, ‘tailwinds’ are opportunities to be seized to push the product further. Nowadays, most companies will have a ‘blue ocean strategy’ to promote themselves, a hook to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. 

Business being business, however, there will be ‘pain points’ along the way  — problems or issues that inevitably arise in everyday commerce. Regardless of how big a company is, it probably got there by adopting a ‘hyperlocal’ mindset — building a local ecosystem that enables customers to buy anything from their neighbourhood stores. 

In the old days, supermarkets attracted customers with ‘loss leader’ incentives. In 2022 it takes the form of ‘freemium’ — a business model offering basic services for free, but after which the customer must pay for sundry attractive add-ons. Regardless of the product or service, companies are focused on ‘downstream impacts’, referencing the outcomes, beneficial or otherwise, resulting from corporate decisions.

Overused jargon

A survey earlier this year by communications company Slack found that 63% of respondents found it off-putting when colleagues use workplace jargon in messages, with terms like ‘asap,’ ‘keep me in the loop,’ ‘team player,’ and ‘just checking in’ particularly overused.

However, the same survey revealed that 89% admitted to using workplace jargon, mainly to sound more professional or intelligent and to maintain office norms. Similarly, a recent survey by language learning app Preply found that 70% of respondents admitted to using jargon from a few times a week to several times per day.

 “We naturally start getting annoyed with words that we hear too often — they become 'empty words' that have no emotional meaning to us over time,” says Mary Glowacka, head of HR for Preply’s Center of Excellence. “In the workplace, employees and people managers use a distinctive type of corporate jargon that can sound like a lot while meaning very little.” 

Saying what you mean is especially important in job postings — Preply found that one in five job applicants viewed corporate jargon as a red flag and were put off from applying for a role because of it. Fifty percent of job seekers said ‘wearing many hats’ turned them off from a role, and 47% disliked the phrase ‘work hard, play hard.’ 

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With memories of the pandemic still fresh in the workworld, a new lexicon of workplace jargon has emerged — especially those of us now accustomed to WFH (working from home). Like it or not, the ‘metaverse’ — first coined in the 1992 dystopian novel, Snow Crash — refers to our shared universe where virtual and augmented reality combine. 

It promises a brave new world where a ‘decentralized autonomous organisation’ takes the form of an internet community governed by its members. It may well be a world where NFT, in the form of ‘non-fungible tokens’ will be the digital currency of choice. Similar to cryptocurrency, NFT is increasingly represented in the art and real estate markets. 

Digitalised pieces of artwork which have been ‘tokenised’ onto a blockchain, they do not have physical copies, instead existing uniquely in the digital universe where investors and collectors buy and sell them. One of the big sales of 2022 was by Murat Park, a major digital artist, whose collection entitled ‘Merge’ sold for over €90 million.

As to where the NFT universe will eventually go, investor and author Tim Ferris predicts: “It’s not even the first inning, it’s like the anthem before the game has even started.” 

I’m not sure I’ve got enough bandwidth to handle that prospect.