A recent survey had found that the most annoying piece of management speak is the phrase 'could I borrow you a sec?'
Business Argus asked local business people what their pet hates were among office jargon...
Ami Jones, Director, Aible HR
My most hated piece of office speak is 'let’s touch base' – can’t people just say let’s catch up or let’s have a chat. I am definitely guilty of saying 'let’s take this offline' when in a meeting and people are talking about things which are not relevant which is a very annoying piece of office speak.
Kate Richards, Territory Manager, Budget Vets
‘It’s on my radar’ or ‘when all is said and done’- both terms irritate me and could be easily replaced with ‘yes, I’m aware of that’ and ‘to conclude’ respectively. I appreciate everyone has their own preferred ‘office speak’. I’m not sure if I use any terms which annoy my colleagues. I probably do but none spring to mind – perhaps I need to ask and ‘put it on my radar'!
John Newell, director, Kingston Newell Estate Agents
I meet a lot of people through my job and have heard all manner of different terminologies. I don’t ‘hate’ any as such but do sometimes wonder why some people choose to use daft expressions such as ‘moving the goal posts’ ‘ping an email’ etc but that’s up to them and it doesn’t cause offence. I often use ‘no brainer’ so can’t exempt myself from criticism.
Lauren Patterson, M4 Property Consultants
How do you ‘touch base’ with someone? The term doesn’t make sense but is frequently used in business. We try to use terms which are clear and easy to understand to avoid any confusion for tenants, clients alike. There are enough technical terms already in our industry so we avoid management jargon whenever possible.
Jakko Brouwers, director, Morrello Clinic
While I understand what the term ‘low hanging fruit’ is used to represent, I would be intrigued to find out how it progressed into the world of business jargon. We often use terms such as ‘bench mark’ and ‘best practice’ but I consider those not to be management speak.
Clive Thomas, managing partner, Watkins & Gunn Solicitors
There are so many of these meeting jargon phrases which are bandied about. It’s hard to choose the most annoying - but I think it has to be – 'let’s park that' or even worse 'take it off-line'. It means that you want to defer something in a meeting and not deal with it there and then. I find that it is one of those phrases whicht you are sorely tempted to use to get a tricky issue out of the way - but you just know that side-stepping the issue won’t help you in the long run and that it will come back to bite you sometime in the future.
Az Ashraf, managing director, of A2Z Computing
Ever since the Borg appeared on our TV screens (for those of you who don’t know, they’re an alien race in Star Trek) the term ‘it’s irrelevant’ has been a bugbear; especially when used out of context. If something doesn’t quite work or is not required, the term ‘it’s irrelevant’ doesn’t make sense. When working through our IIP accreditation, we ensure that our communication is spot on and correct both internally, and with clients.
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