It’s been a busy couple of years for terms about business! Not business-speak like onboarding and circle back (it’s always busy times for that sort of stuff), but a slew of words about the changing face of the office. Some of the terms really are new, and others are new takes on older words.
Let’s start with the Great Resignation (also called the Big Quit)—per one estimate, over 95 million people quit their jobs over the course of 2021 and 2022. One factor was burnout, but we’ve also seen the phenomenon of conscious quitting: leaving a job for philosophical reasons, perhaps because the employee doesn’t like the company’s values.
A problem for employers during this period is that resignations can be infectious. As a result, a company might have experienced turnover contagion—if one or more employees quit, others take notice and decide that maybe they, too, should seek greener employment pastures.
The flip side of the Great Resignation has been the Great Regret; many who quit regretted their decision. However, companies are not necessarily interested in rehiring these boomerang employees.
During the pandemic, many companies allowed employees to WFH, or work from home. A number of companies were obliged to support remote work just to keep the business going. Employees might even have taken jobs in this period with the understanding that these positions were fully remote. However, after Covid restrictions were lifted, some companies (notably Amazon and Meta) reined in the WFH trend and insisted on RTO, or return to office. As the engineer Gergely Orosz noted, the tech industry seems to have passed the point of peak remote work. Even if employees don’t have to be the office every moment, many are currently doing hybrid work, where they spend a part of the week in the office and the rest WFH.
When employees do return to the office, they might find themselves having to share a desk with someone on a staggered schedule. This is sometimes known as hot-desking, a term that’s probably from military slang; hot-bunking and hot-racking are used in the navy for sailors on different shifts using the same bunk. Where I work, the preferred term is rotational seating model, but this doesn’t seem to have caught on yet in the wider world. Some companies arrange hoteling, where banks of desks are made available for employees to reserve as needed.
Even those who have returned to work have not necessarily been enthusiastic about it. This has resulted in the phenomenon of quiet quitting, in which people prioritize the “life” part of work-life balance or even check out and become actively disengaged. A Gallup poll suggests that 50% of the workforce constitute quiet quitters. (The definition of quiet quitting is flexible and seems to depend somewhat on whether it focuses on the employee’s point of view or on the employer’s.)
Speaking of work-life balance, many people start to experience anxiety toward the end of the weekend, which is referred to as the Sunday Scaries or Sunday syndrome.[1] One article even reports that per a survey, the average time at which the Sunday Scaries arrive is 3:58 PM.
One way that people cope with this is by putting in Bare Minimum Mondays, in which they show up late for work “after a productive morning of self-care rituals.” This coping mechanism is ascribed to TikToker Marisa Jo Mayes, who says that Bare Minimum Mondays help you “start the week prioritizing yourself as a person over yourself as an employee.”
Some people have been taking advantage of their continued employment to do career cushioning—preparing themselves for the next move, like doing training on the boss’s dime, monitoring job opportunities, and keeping up with their professional networks. In some cases, quiet quitters might exhibit resenteeism: not only are they not delighted with their job, they become resentful and are not afraid to let people know that.
As we know, the tech industry has recently reversed many years of growing headcount. Companies have probably always engaged in quiet firing, where they create an unwelcoming environment that leads the employee to quit. More prominently, of course, one tech company after another has announced big layoffs, which some have referred to as loud firing.
Before all this happened, tech companies had gone on hiring sprees to meet growing business demands. But some employees seem to have had bullshit jobs—for example, some employees at Meta say that they literally had nothing to do. (One venture capitalist suggested that large tech companies had been using hiring as a “vanity metric.”)
You might think that if a company had over-hired and was then forced to lay off many employees, the executives responsible for that would have to account for this inefficiency. That’s unlikely, though, due to the Lake Wobegon effect, whereby companies don’t want to admit that their CEO is below average.
So that’s my collection of business-related terminology. Every time I read articles about the state of business today, I seem to run across more. What others do you know about?
Update! (15 Apr 23) An article in Engadget (via @elysidr on Twitter) introduced me to two additional terms: regretted attrition (quitting a job) and unregretted attrition (getting fired). If I read this right, the “regret” part of these terms is from the point of view of the company (“we regret that they decided to leave,” for example.)
Update #2! (21 Apr 23) Nancy Friedman found more words to add to the collection of business terms: presenteeism, stigmergic coordination, cobots, triple peak work, and EX (for “employee experience”). Check out her blog post on these great terms.
Update #3! (1 May 2023) Another great term found by Nancy Friedman: perk-cession, which WSJ defines as “scaling back the office extras many employees have come to expect.” More from Nancy in her blog post about this term.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] Many years ago I attended some sort of business seminar in which the presenter confidently asserted that heart attacks occurred most often on Sunday nights because people dreaded the prospect of returning to work. This might or not be true; a NYT article suggests that Mondays is actually the most, um, popular for heart attacks. [^]