The New Work Vocabulary: Quiet layoffs, chaotic working, career cushioning

Business jargon hasn’t always been such an accurate gauge of the workplace zeitgeist, in large part because it’s long been controlled by the people in charge to motivate and indoctrinate. (Source: Bloomberg)

For an early indicator of the emerging mood and mindset of the American workforce, follow the business buzzwords.

Within the tech sector, as it undergoes massive headcount reductions, there are whispers of “backdoor layoffs” and “quiet layoffs” — shorthand for a company’s attempts to cut its employee base by making conditions so unpleasant or untenable that workers quit on their own accord. The long-dominant pandemic phenomenon of “quiet quitting” is taking a backseat to “career cushioning,” or making a backup plan for your current job when you’re freaked out about getting fired.

The latest developments in the language of business carry a clear message: There’s a lot less posturing on the part of workers and a lot more fear and angst as the pendulum of power swings away from employees and back toward their companies and bosses.

Business jargon hasn’t always been such an accurate gauge of the workplace zeitgeist, in large part because it’s long been controlled by the people in charge to motivate and indoctrinate — raise your hand if your employer calls itself a “purpose-driven” or “values-led” organisation — or to soften the unpleasantries of corporate life. (PSA: A company-wide email that includes the words “headcount rationalisation” or “organisational flattening” means someone somewhere is getting fired.) Part of business jargon’s power is that its cringey and seemingly harmless nature masks just how effective it can be at persuading, cajoling, and manipulating.

But in the last year and a half, there’s been a paradigm shift in who controls business discourse. The emerging vocabulary of work is no longer coming from those at the top but is instead bubbling up from the bottom. Employees, not their bosses, are the ones developing the TikTok and Twitter friendly words, phrases, and memes that are designed to capture and make sense of the dramatically changing nature of work.

It’s not that the feelings these terms encapsulate are particularly revolutionary. Hating on your boss or doing the very minimum at your job is a tale as old as time. What is new and important is having a specific vocabulary to talk about it — even if the resulting memes seem trivial and silly. And as Julia Coff, a PhD candidate researching COVID-related workplace changes at NYU Stern School of Business, told me, having that language is a crucial way to interrogate and reevaluate the old assumptions about what our labor should look like and the role it plays in our lives.

Coff described it as a “social media repackaging” of the truths about work laid bare by the pandemic. As employees became physically and emotionally disconnected from their colleagues and offices, they created a new virtual community of like-minded disaffected workers — and alongside it a vernacular to talk about their experiences.

If the business jargon of yore was designed by consultants and marketing departments to produce comradery and teamwork, today’s worker-inspired catchphrase culture at a base level is about anger (that’s now intermingling with fear). Many of the terms reflect not just a tension and antagonism with bosses, but are also instructive in how to resist them. Got passed over for that promotion? Watch a TikTok video on rage applying. Fed up with your company’s stringent and stingy customer service policies or just generally down on capitalism? Time to try chaotic working, or malicious compliance — using your position to hand out perks or freebies at your company’s expense.

Or take quiet quitting, which is perhaps the phrase that most came to define the pandemic labor market. Its competing definitions underscore how employee and employer are increasingly at odds. From management’s perspective, quiet quitting describes workers who are doing the absolute minimum to keep their jobs. But for workers, it captures their growing awareness that they have long been asked and expected to do more than what they’re compensated for. Rather than just accept these terms, they’re now questioning how much of their lives they want to dedicate to work. “It explodes older idioms, like ‘go the extra mile,’” explained Michael Adams, a professor of the English language at Indiana University.

It’s just as revealing about the state of the labor market that employees felt emboldened enough to put voice to these feelings rather than letting their companies do it for them. Catchphrase culture took off when the job market was exceedingly tight and workers felt secure in their jobs. Their bosses couldn’t afford to fire them for voicing their dissatisfaction, and if they did, finding another job was relatively easy. Employers may not have realised it, but they fed the discourse by encouraging widespread conversations about workplace burnout and mental health in the workplace for the first time.

Even as the labor market turns, employees seem to be holding onto their new-found control of the language of work rather than handing it back over to their bosses. There may be layoffs underway and a new sense of fear and instability. But when management tries to repackage it all as something like the “year of efficiency” (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg), workers now have the platforms and voice to call it out and push back. At least there’s some power to be had in that.

Beth Kowitt is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg