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Employee relations

Managers unable to communicate with staff

by Personnel Today 16 May 2006
by Personnel Today 16 May 2006

Managers’ inability to communicate properly is the number one gripe UK staff have about their bosses, a study shows.

The report by law firm Eversheds, which canvassed the views of 1,500 employees, shows the overwhelming majority (97%) would like their bosses to communicate more clearly.

Specifically, staff would like to see an end to ‘management-speak’, with phrases such as ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ and ‘thinking outside the box’ causing particular irritation.

As a service to its readers, Personnel Today has produced its very own buzzword bingo card for you to take in to meetings with your jargon-fuelled managers.

bingo.gif

For those not familiar with the rules of the game, here they are:



  1. Cut out the buzzword bingo card, right.
  2. Smuggle the card into your next meeting with a particularly bad perpetrator of jargon.
  3. Cross off each buzzword as you hear them, taking extra care not to laugh.
  4. When you have a full house, stand up and shout ‘Bingo’ or ‘Bullsh*t!’
  5. Be prepared for the stunned looks from your colleagues.
  6. Leave the meeting room immediately.

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See next week’s Personnel Today for an in-depth look at good communication.

What’s the worst example of management-speak you’ve heard? E-mail: [email protected]



 

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

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1 comment

Mark Daniels 18 Oct 2014 - 5:17 pm

Eight years later, a response. ; )
This isn’t an example of a specific buzz phrase, but a complaint that such corporate buzzwords, jargon, and doubletalk exist in the first place. I had a job interview yesterday with a manager who spoke like this, and needless to say, the interview didn’t go well. Here’s an idea of what she sounded like: “What processes has your division implemented to assess whether it’s getting maximum leverage of best practices for the agency as a whole?” I have no way of answering such questions, and not because I’m too stupid to know what all those words mean, but because – when thrown together in that order – they make the question too confusing and render it utterly nonsensical. “Come again?” If there’s a legitimate question in there, it’s been unnecessarily complicated to sound more sophisticated and “business-like.” (As a side note: why is this the language of business to begin with? Wouldn’t businesses get better results by using simpler language?) To top things off, when I translated the interviewer’s questions into REAL WORLD language in my head, I found that the questions she was asking were too broad and non-specific; they related to vague business CONCEPTS rather than nuts-and-bolts TASKS in the workplace. I felt like saying: “Will you be asking any simple questions about me, my job history, and the skills I have, or should I just surrender now and leave this job interview early?” I should have; I wouldn’t want to work for a person who speaks like this, anyway.

Comments are closed.

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