Do you use jargon at work? If you do, you might find yourself ‘old school’. Those coming into the workplace are not as keen on your ‘blue sky thinking’.
The AI career tool Kickresume has considered how the typical office-based employee feels about jargon. To do so, they looked at LinkedIn and X to conduct their new research and calculated how much jargon might cost businesses.
The firm also conducted an experiment in which workers were shown the same message in plain English and business lingo to see how much jargon makes things harder to understand.
The review found:
• Office jargon may cost businesses millions of dollars.
• Office jargon is very confusing.
• The most hated office term is ‘circle back’.
• Entry level employees dislike jargon the most.
The survey found that “circle back”, “synergy”, and “low hanging fruit” are the most universally hated office jargon. These terms were found to be mentioned frequently on the social media platforms and mocked by users.
Other terms called out are:
“Touch base”
“Bandwidth”
“Take offline”
“Ping me”
“Move the needle”
“Pivot”
“Think outside the box”
“On my radar”
“Deliverables”
In terms of the different generational types of employees:
Data from LinkedIn shows that 85% of posts about jargon made from entry-level workers were negative. The research also revealed that mid-level employees also have a pessimistic view of corporate speech, as 80% of posts about jargon from this group were negative. and C-suite/Executive employees have mixed opinions (60% being negative posts).
With the experiment to test how useful jargon actually is. This involved separating 50 participants into two groups and presenting both groups with a memo. One memo was full of jargon terms, and the other was written in plain language. The jargon version read: “We are leveraging operational synergies to paradigm-shift our workflow vis-à-vis productivity enhancements” and the one in plain language simply read, “We are combining teams to work more efficiently and be more productive.”
The researchers then tested participants on their comprehension, perception, willingness to act, and recall of what they read. The plain language group outperformed the jargon group in all 4 tests.
In the comprehension test, those who read the plain language memo answered 8/10 questions correctly on average, whereas the jargon group answered just 5, proving that jargon makes your message harder to understand.
The study overall highlighted that jargon ended up complicating matters, confusing participants and leading to misunderstanding.
Jargon may contribute to poor communication in the workplace, which might end up costing businesses time. A report by Grammarly and The Harris Poll found that teams lose an average of 7.47 hours per week per employee due to poor communication. Based on this information and the average private-sector U.S. wage of approximately $36 an hour.
Hence, corporate jargon may not always be needed at work anymore—in fact, its use may just be confusing entry-level employees who are uncertain as to what exactly it means.
