It’s not big and it’s not clever – how to avoid corporatespeak

This guest post comes from Tim Phillips, author of the highly enjoyable Talk Normal blog.

After 20 years as a journalist I started blogging about how we should “Make the Bad Noises Stop” because communicating – which after all is my job – is making me crazy. This is often how my interviews go:

Me: What does your company do?

Them: We’re helping to actualise an ecosystem of solutions for this marketplace.

Me: Could you explain that more clearly?

Them: The solutions in this marketplace require actualisation. That mandates an ecosystem of solution providers. We are cooperating in that effort.

Me: Come again?

Them (exasperated): Solutionise marketplacisation ecosystematically! Do you have much experience in this industry?

But communicating is a job for all of us. Even 20 years ago, if you wanted to send a memo at work, you needed status and permission. Meetings generally didn’t include you. Decision-making was done by decision-makers (not you again), and presentations were made once a year (you listened, and didn’t speak).

Today office work doesn’t just mean doing things: it means making presentations and calling meetings so everyone else can express an opinion too. Then there are the status updates, the conference calls, the email reports, the stakeholder engagement, the corporate blogs, the intranet news, the all-office memos and the customer emails.

This is stressful, because we’re often on show. It makes us self-conscious, and many of us, in this situation, start talking and writing in a weird, formal office jargon. The best bit of advice I heard recently was given to a senior executive who kept tying herself in knots this way: gently, one of her colleagues suggested that she stopped trying to sound clever.

When did the language we use at work become so different to the language we use at home or in the pub? Do you “request the status of the deliverable” when you’re wondering if lunch is ready? If you want ice in your drink, do you think about it as “adding value”? When you offer to buy the cinema tickets, do you say that it’s an “action on me”?

Trying to sound clever, in my experience, causes all sorts of problems:

1. We suffer from word obesity. Many gutsy words are short, Anglo-Saxon words which we learnt as kids. When we want to sound clever, we replace them with long, Latinate words – often for no reason. so we stop saying "use" and say "utilise" instead. We don’t help set something up, we “coordinate to facilitate it”.
2. We start to use weasel words. Substituting “issue” for “problem” avoids unpleasantness: but if you say you will “fix my problem”, I can expect that something will happen. On the other hand if you promise to “action my issue”, there’s no guarantee you’ll do any more than send someone an email about it (which might, on reflection, be the real problem). Compared to “problem”, we’re using the word “issue” three times as much as we did 10 years ago.
3. We are at the mercy of the corporate speak-your-weight machine. Many companies spend months crafting briefing documents with statements for every occasion which sound like they were written by machines, for machines. We have corporate slide decks that we simply read out to each other. For many people involved in the production of the corporate briefing book and slide deck, avoiding risk is the main objective. But when you avoid risk, you usually fail to make an impact too.

If you waste only an hour a week taking parts in pointless, waffly presentations, meetings and conference calls, it’s robbing you of a year of your life at work. My blog is making fun of the way we talk in the office, but look at it this way: I want to give you your life back.

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Related posts:

1. Avoid pious verbiage
2. How to avoid sending d’oh-mails
3. Significant, substantial, meaningful: words to avoid

Tagged as: Business, Buzzwords, Guest Post