WorkLife Dictionary: Terms you need to know

It’s official: The workplace has a new language. To make sense of these new developments, a bunch of newfangled terms have edged their way into daily conversations.

Here’s a breakout the most well-used terms you need to know.

A

Asynchronous Working 

• Opposite of synchronous working, asynchronous working is when people are communicating at entirely different times of the day and an immediate answer isn’t expected. This could be because they’re in different time zones, or picking up their kids from school, or because they’re working flexible hours that are different to other team members. Whatever the reason, it’s a method of working that allows teams to collaborate and work on something together, but on their own schedules.

B

Bedmin

• Doing admin work in bed. Could be because you’re sick, or simply not understanding when to stop working. Or maybe you’re just having a bad hair day.

Biophilic Design 

• A style of design that centers around merging natural greenery and outdoor vibes – plants, lighting – with indoor, that’s become popular in modern offices. 

C

ChatGPT-4

• OpenAI’s latest language model that can receive both text and image inputs, compared to GPT-3 and 3.5 which were just text-based. Here are 5 ways workers can use ChatGPT

Career Cushioning

• Starting the process of looking for the next job and preparing to move on (just in case) before leaving a current role.

CHRO

• A Chief Human Resource Officer deals with talent and culture demands such as creating flexible work options, fostering a more diverse workforce, and determining how to balance recruitment, retention, and potential layoffs. In a once-unlikely move, CHROs are claiming the top rung on the corporate ladder.

Chief AI Officer 

• Executive with a strong AI perspective that is on companies C-Suite. Needs to exist as a separate role, instead of being blended with another C-suite position, because of how much the details of AI matter.

Chief Opportunity Officer

• The chief opportunity officer roles include giving everyone a strong foundation on which to build a successful career, ensuring belonging is felt every day, and that every worker will have a clear path to the middle class. 

D

Digital Nomad

• People who have unplugged totally from their former physical workplaces and travel wherever they want, with families in tow or by themselves, with all the tech they need to still complete all their work requirements.

E

Employee Experience Manager 

• The head of employee experience works to ensure that the company culture is adhered to no matter who the employee is or where and how they work.

Employee Engagement Manager

• People tasked specifically with ensuring people’s return-to-office experience is positive, as well as those working remotely.

Experience Centers

• Place where customers can come in and interact with companies’ technology or products. This can be an opportunity to build trust between consumers and companies.

G

Gap Career

• Gap careers occur in between jobs and tend to feature extended travel experiences in far-flung places. They also involve learning things that enrich people’s careers and can mean, for some, starting a business.

Great Betrayal

• An employee realizes that stability and loyalty in the workplace are an illusion, and workers are better off betting on themselves and renting out their skills across multiple clients. 

Gaslighting 

• Causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator. In the workplace, it is a form of emotional abuse that can occur between co-workers, both on the same level or from their bosses.

Great Reshuffle

• Describes what many who did resign, did afterward: sought better paid, more flexible jobs or switched careers entirely.

Great Resignation

• The term coined by economists to describe the mass resignations that began happening in 2021, prompted by factors ranging from safety concerns, the restrictions the pandemic put on people’s lives and the need to care for relatives, to people’s light-bulb moments that life was too short to be unhappy or overworked in their jobs. As The Great Resignation slows, here’s how companies are enticing ex-employees back

H

Hush Trip

• When remote workers don’t inform their bosses that they are going to a new destination – even if it’s a tropical island or a known tourist spot.

Holacracy

• A form of organizational structure that decentralizes authority and empowers individual contributors to make decisions based on their roles.

Hotelling

• Desk-booking apps that have been adopted en masse by the corporate world so staff can book their desk for the days they plan to be in the office.  

Hybrid Meeting

• When a team has a meeting in which some of the attendees are in the same room in an office, and the rest are joining remotely.

Hybrid Meeting Moderators 

• People tasked with ensuring everyone who is joining a meeting remotely, gets to speak to ensure there is parity between people in the office and those who aren’t.

Hybrid Working

• Describes the newfound flexibility employers are offering instead of the traditional 9-to-5 schedule. There is no singular blueprint, but it refers to working models where a certain number of days or hours can be worked in the office, with the remainder worked from home or from other remote locations. Here are the 7 biggest hybrid-working challenges, and how to fix them.

I

Insider Threat 

• An insider threat refers to someone who steals data or breaks the internal systems of the organization they work for, for their own purposes.

Imposter Syndrome 

• Individuals doubt their abilities, see themselves as unworthy of their professional achievements and can’t help but feel like a fraud at work.

J

Jobfishing

• A tactic that opportunistic fraudsters are increasingly using to trick people hunting for remote jobs into working for fake companies which tout flexible benefits, and fooling them into working for free or giving up payment details.

L

Learning Quotient

• A measure of adaptability and one’s desire and ability to update our skills throughout life.

Labor Hoarding

• The practice of retaining staff to reduce recruitment cost and keep strong talent.

N

Neurodiverse Talent

• Workers with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome and other learning and mental health differences.

New Normal

• As employers rethink their physical office space, they’re redesigning them to reflect what their staff needs when they come into work. That includes quiet zones, collaboration zones and meeting zones.

O

Office Peacocking

• Employers, in their pitch to get employees to return to in-person work, are going to greater lengths than ever to make their offices look and feel homey. 

P

Protirement

• A term coined in 1961 by U.S. broadcaster Arthur Godfrey – essentially means: “living the dream and achieving a balance in life by trading in professions to follow their fancy.” 

Pleasenteeism

• The sense that we always have to display our best self at work and show that we are OK regardless of whether we’re stressed, under too much pressure or in need of support. 

Polywork

• A rising trend, particularly among Gen Z and millennials, in which people have multiple jobs at once.

Proximity Bias

• The latest inclusivity challenge. It refers to the (somewhat inevitable) bias of managers toward staff that are physically near them, aka in the same office, and those who remain remote due to personal choice or requirements. That bias can lead to promotions and favoritism.

Psychological Safety

• A term that’s been around for a while and refers to work environments that encourage people to feel confident enough to speak their mind (constructively) without reprisals. It’s had a second wind thanks to the coronavirus, which has expanded to include non-work issues and divisive topics like mask-wearing. 

Q

Quiet Promotion 

• When a manager assigns a bunch of new responsibilities to an individual, but without a pay increase or title change.

Quiet Quitting

•  A recently coined term that refers to the push back on hustle culture and longstanding working norm of going above and beyond at work. Instead, a worker will fulfill the core requirements of a job, and stick to contracted hours to maintain their work-life balance.

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Tip-toe through all of the latest “quiet” terms you need to know. Visit WorkLife’s special project: The Quiet Workplace

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Quiet Firing

• When a manager avoids the discomfort of firing someone outright. Instead, they will use a bunch of different passive-aggressive tactics that have the same goal: they make the employee want to quit themselves.

Quiet Constraint

• When someone withholds invaluable information that would benefit a colleague’s output. 

Quittagion

• When quitting becomes contagious at companies.

R

Rage Applying

• The method of mass applying for a range of jobs online, which is often prompted by an individual feeling unhappy at work — whether it’s because they’ve been overlooked for a promotion, or just feel generally unrecognized and under appreciated.

Re-recruiting 

• Continuously working to ensure you’re paying the same attention to employees as you did when first enticing them to join your organization. 

Remote working

• When a person never visits the office but works remotely — not just from home but from any location.

Increase Productivity: Here are the biggest hybrid and remote-working hurdles and how to fix them

Reverse monitoring

• With digital natives entering the workforce in increasing numbers, companies are pairing them with seasoned professionals so they can teach them the most efficient ways to use technology. The established workers mentor the new hires in areas like company culture and workplace etiquette. 

RTO

• The now commonly-used acronym to describe the ‘return to the office’, after the easing of coronavirus pandemic restrictions

S

Social loafing

• Refers to someone who piggybacks off the work of their coworkers to avoid having to do any work themselves, particularly in a group setting like a meeting.

Social Engineering 

• The manipulation of human factors to gain unauthorized access to resources and assets. It’s the active weaponization of your human vulnerabilities, behaviors and errors

Shecession

• Refers to the notable rise in the number of women who had to quit their jobs during the pandemic, to take care of children while schools were closed, causing a sharp u-turn on many of the gains made by women in the labor market.  

Shybrid 

• A term that’s been used to describe how employers have continually pushed back return-to-office dates, but without informing employees of any concrete hybrid (or otherwise) plan. This “shyness” to explain a hybrid strategy, is leading to widespread confusion.

T

Toxic Positivity 

• A continuous effort to focus on positive things and feelings while ignoring negative ones completely. Intended to help people see the positive side of any situation – no matter how dire, but can often lead to a grating, forced positivity at work, where the employee feels pressured to maintain a consistently positive mindset and crush any other concerns.

W

WFA

• Means work-from-anywhere and is an increasingly common workforce strategy where a company will allow its employees to work remotely from a location of their choice.

Workation

• When someone embraces the work-from-anywhere trend — that arose as a result of people’s changed attitudes toward work-life balance — and heads to an exotic location for a vacation, from which they can still work remotely (therefore stay longer).

Z

Zoom bombing

• When someone outside the company hijacks a Zoom video call.