Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen dozens of buzzwords make their way into the workplace lexicon—whether just for a fleeting moment or for the long haul remains to be seen.
To help you better decipher the headlines, we’ve created a cheat post with some you may have never heard of or use regularly!
Workplace Buzzwords
Many of these workplace buzzwords will come and go with other workplace trends, but some have stuck around for more than just a couple of weeks.
One of those is boomerang employees. We’ve talked about this topic in a full post—including how to recruit them. They are employees who come back to your company through recruitment efforts made by you, or through the former employee finding a role at your company they’re interested in again.
Bare minimum Mondays and career cushioning are newer terms that put words to older trends. People have tried to ease into their week with less strenuous Mondays for a long time! The same goes for career cushioning. But 2023 has put a phrase to the practice.
Another one of those buzzwords that looks like it will stick around is labor hoarding.
Though the term pre-dates 2023, the trend of holding onto employees by any means necessary gained popularity as the labor market tightened—so companies made attempts to retain employees by any means necessary. This could include things like giving higher pay raises to good employees and retaining underperforming employees because of how tough it could be to fill that role.
“Loud” and “quiet” workplace buzzwords arose as antitheses of each other. “Loud laborers” and “Loud quitters” describe people who are outward about their work—sometimes to a fault—and why they leave their job.
They are the opposites—in personality—of terms like “quiet thriving” and “quiet quitting” (seen in graphics below), which generally describe people who do things at their jobs to make their day-to-day work life more palatable or enjoyable. They just do this without making it explicitly known to management or co-workers.
Quiet thriving, for example, is when employees take action—and make mental shifts—at work to help them feel more engaged in their job. An employee can prioritize multiple 10-minute breaks throughout the day to help them get away from work. Do they tell their manager? Probably not, but they’re making moves to help themselves feel better about their work and enjoy the work day more. They’re quietly thriving.
More About Workplace Buzzwords
We’ve covered some of these buzzwords at length! Check out full blog posts on some of the topics below: