The Alarming Consequences of Office Work
first comes the back pain then comes the overhaul of your vocabulary
Something terrible has begun to happen to me. It’s been a long time coming, and perhaps I should have been less shocked that this affliction is beginning to make itself known. After all, was I not warned? Did friends, peers, acquaintances not caution me on the inevitability of this plight? And yet my hubris won out. I thought, it won’t happen to me; I’m the exception, not the rule. But however much I’ve tried to convince myself over recent months, the truth can no longer be avoided. Corporate speak has made its way into my day-to-day vocabulary.
For better or worse, this is happening to a lot of people around me who have also joined this area of the workforce relatively recently. There is an unfortunate possibility that we’re now stuck in a feedback loop both in and out of the office, unable to escape asking people whether they can ‘circle back on that’.
For me, the infiltration was subtle at first.The tone of my personal emails became slightly more formal, my messages asking friends if they wanted to meet up took on a more jaunty, HR-approved tone (‘hey! hope all’s well—are you around next weekend, by any chance? no worries if not’), and now—though it sickens me to say it—meaningless work jargon has become part of my idiolect.
Spending my days sending emails, waiting for replies to emails and considering who my next email target should be, key elements of the office job, has also resulted in me being even less patient than I used to be in my real life. I’ve got so used to sending follow-ups upon follow-ups that now, when I’m trying to make plans with friends, if they don’t respond within a few hours you can be sure I’m sending them a swift hi, hope all’s well—any updates on this?’. I barely avoid adding ‘would be great to get the ball rolling’. The recipients are often people I’ve known for years, but suddenly I’m talking to them as if we’re nothing more than LinkedIn connections.
Beyond digital communications is the far worse development of these phrases popping up in real-time conversations. A few mornings ago, in the comfort of my own home, I heard myself say “I was just checking in”. What I was ‘checking in’ on was whether someone else in the house was awake. A normal person would say, “are you up yet?” or perhaps even, “hello, good morning”. But no, I said, “just checking in”, as if I was trying to chivvy someone along after they hadn’t turned in a project on time.
It makes sense that a little of my work language would make its way home with me, an unwelcome addition to my already overstuffed backpack. But this involuntary use of business speak in normal life is an issue that’s far broader than just my own experiences, something I try to explain to friends and relations as they laugh at my unfortunate choices of phrases. There are several reasons that people are saying these ridiculous phrases without batting an eye.
Although there’s a big focus on wellbeing and establishing a healthy work-life balance, the line between the two is becoming more permeable. There are many factors that have facilitated this—the therapy-speak boom and its mis-/over-use in personal relationships can come across as exceedingly formal and business-like (i.e. ‘Thanks for reaching out! I’m actually at my emotional capacity right now…’), with maintenance of personal relationships leaning towards work rather than anything enjoyable.
From the other side, the increase in companies trying to be cool and relatable and witty on social media has done potentially irreparable damage to 1) people’s ability to recognise when they’re being advertised to and 2) how people interact with businesses. When companies are appropriating memes to sell their wares and you can joke around with the ‘underpaid intern’ running the Ryanair Twitter account, the lines of what type of language should be used, and where, become increasingly hard to discern.
Another culprit of this whole thing is LinkedIn. I’ve written about LinkedIn before, but that place never ceases to fascinate me, so you will be hearing about it again. Beyond the terrible inspirational posts, the drawn-out stories of workplace goings on that are apparently so meaningful that we all need to hear them, and the occasional notification that someone you haven’t heard from in years has just viewed your profile (leaving you to wonder whether you seem like an accomplished young professional or a small child wearing comically oversized businesswear), LinkedIn has also helped corporate-speak to transition into the real world.
People posting about their personal lives on LinkedIn has already frayed the work-life balance barrier, but the consequences go both ways. Not only do you have to learn that someone’s having a baby through a networking app, but the announcement will be phrased as if it’s a successful business deal (“in delivering this child, Stacey completes the family expansion initiative launched in Q2 2023”) or will somehow be linked to the new parent’s career (“seeing my little bundle of joy for the first time reminded me of another successful acquisition…”). The personal and the professional become one and the same. The baby is now fuel for content, an asset to be tactically deployed.
I hope that there will not come a day when I become someone who corporate language-s my life. It’s not something I can envisage happening, but then again, I didn’t expect to be someone who would circle back by EOD. Maybe, before I realise what’s happening, I’ll become a cheery, regular LinkedIn poster, keeping all my work-connections-slash-fans updated with the highs and lows of my riveting career. If my speech patterns keep (d)evolving as they have been, it might just be a matter of time.