Much more irritated by management speak, blue sky thinking, horizon scanning, moving forward and so on. Unintelligible nonsense. Oh and people who start every sentence with "so", and those who use "like" as a form of punctuation.
big ditto to that. big big big.
"game changing"
"symbiotic"
"finding efficiencies"
"value adding"
These types of words have always been flung at me by folks who are really just saying "make more money for me, which means, just work more, but let's use buzzwords to hide what I'm really getting at - I just want more work out of you and if that means you don't record some of your time and you just eat it but get things done, we could book that as "efficiencies".
I worked at a global firm at one point, we recorded our time. I ate my share of it to make budgets as they implemented two things at once:
* enter all of your time
* no write offs at the end of each month
That's interesting when half of the work at least was budgeted to be 50 cents on the dollar (meaning in order to get that part, you had to bid half of what it cost in time. Make it up elsewhere).
Next phrase " stretch goals".
At the end of one of the years, they raised all of our billable hour requirements and mentioned that they were putting together a work-life balance team as at the same time, there were complaints of being in the office too many hours. Shortly after that, they implemented the idea of "stretch goals".
"we're not changing your goals, but we're adding stretch goals", which was a way of saying "your hours numbers have gone up 50 for the year beyond your regular goals. So, your goals haven't been changed. If you met your goals last year, you get a cost of living and then we'll look at merit separately. This year, to get a cost of living raise, you'll need to meet your stretch goals. But we're not changing your logged billing hours goals, they're still there.
I made my supervisor repeat 6 times that in order to get a cost of living raise (meeting goals was defined as a way to get zero, by definition then), I have to bill 50 more hours than last year, which is up from what it was the prior year. But you didn't change my goals. "no, we added stretch goals". OK, last year, if I met my goal, i got a cost of living raise (how generous) while my hourly rate went up 10%. This year, if I bill my goal, what do I get. "no raise". What do I have to bill to get cost of living like last year". "you have to bill at your stretch goal". OK, so you didn't change our goals "no, we didn't change anything".
These are people who get into a first tier supervisory position and they must go through a speaking class. As in, people who talked in logical terms just prior will now repeat lines like a robot that was programmed incorrectly, and they will not crack.
I mentioned in another thread that my next goal setting was to leave by the end of the year. When I did leave the next year, my supervisor said that he didn't appreciate it as two months prior due to high turnover, the supervisors had been given a retention target, and if there was too much turnover, their bonus would be docked.
"well, I guess you have a turnover stretch goal now, because I put your numbers in the tank at the start of the year".
This was a finance/mathematics related environment. The salesman who had constantly used the term "we just need to find efficiencies" was a former history major who could do nothing more than take people to lunch and obnoxiously repeat things you'd say in a meeting. I have nothing against history majors - but when they become a salesperson in a technical field and then formulaically repeat what you said
while you're still talking.
rant off on business speak. It is or it isn't, please don't make up fake words to hide what is.
