America’s Most-Hated Office Jargon

The pandemic might have brought office life to a shuddering halt across much of the world but, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, it hasn’t allowed workers to breathe a sigh of relief and escape arguably one of the most annoying aspects of office culture – business jargon.

Even while working remotely, many office workers are still exposed to buzz words when they “touch base” with the boss over email, Teams, Slack and Zoom. Some phrases tend to get under people’s skin more than others and a 2019 GetResponse survey polled 1,000 U.S. employees to determine the absolute worst of the worst.

This infographic focuses on the 15 worst offenders with the survey’s respondents hating the term “Synergy” the most.

You will find more infographics at Statista

It was followed by the seemingly innocuous “Teamwork” and the possibly more irritating “Touch base”. Further down, some well known and cringe-inducing terms make an appearance such as “The next time you feel the need to reach out…” and of course “Circle back”.

Despite the dislike for many of these phrases, bosses no doubt feel they are justified. The issue may be more down to senior figures in companies using all of these buzzwords a little bit too often for their employees’ liking.