That’s just standard English isn’t it? As far as I know, task has always been a verb, and Merriam-Webster seems to agree:
Task is not a new verb. In fact, it has been verbing along since the 14th century, used with the meaning of “to assign a task to.” It also has an obsolete sense of “to impose a tax on,” and an additional current meaning of “to oppress with great labor.” The word has shown an increase in use of late, particularly in business writing (a form of English many people take great dislike to), but getting tasked with something is commonly found in military use from at least the 1960s.
“Task” as a verb has certainly been bog standard mil-speak since the 1960s, if not before. Of course mil-speak is its own special form of ponderous bureaucratese.
I doubt “task” is something shiny new these days in corp-speak.
Or they could use terms like “staff orientation”, which suggests that a new staffer is a person.
Instead, more language that suggests a new employee is just another fixture: “Load the cargo on board the ship. Make sure you tie it down securely in the hold.”
Interesting. Because I’ve always thought it odd being used as a verb, and assumed - wrongly, apparently - that it was new corporate speak. Ignorance fought.
I’ve never heard that, but to me ‘induction’ carries implications of fraternities or secret societies and definitely wouldn’t include paperwork and IT processes.
That also wouldn’t, to me, include all the behind the scenes work that goes on as part of bringing in a new employee.
So for 2021, ADP (the company that my employer uses to handle payroll) moved some shit around on the website we can use to check our direct deposit statements. Did they say they moved a graphic down, changed a font and changed the default figure displayed in bold from “gross pay” to “take home pay”? (They always showed both, just one bolded and one plain text) Those are the ONLY changes that I can see.
No. Of course not. They…
made some exciting new updates to the pay experience
The only exciting thing you can do to my pay experience is give me a raise.
I hate when someone tells me I have to INTERFACE with a colleague about something. I’m not a machine, not a computer.
My language has thousands of beautiful words and to me it’s a good idea to avoid that kind of expressions.
Another awful thing is when someone takes a word from the english language and just italianizes (?!) it. MECCIARE (matchare) is the newest I heard.
That might may be so, but all that stuff is done somewhere else in the bureaucracy (mostly HR and IT support). They’re ‘onboarding’ the new person. We’re just introducing the new person to what we do, and putting them to work.
Stretch goals.
We need to set the goal so high it is unobtainable. Four minute mile, we need three.
This bullshit stopped when we got a non conformance from our ISO audit for failure to meet our goals.
I loved it when they wrote” management will supply sufficient resources to meet goals”.
Exactly. Corporations do have cultures, but at least in my experience, most companies are so devoid of anything approaching a distinct corporate identity that culture is effectively meaningless.
For example, my first job out of college was with a small company with about 30 years in business, and most of the people there had worked there for 15+ years. Some were corporate plankowners in fact. There was a very definite culture there that was distinctly their own. Attitudes, behaviors, etc… were all very clearly RI (the company’s acronym). One example is that there was a huge chunk of the company that took a 15-20 minute coffee break in the cafeteria (the company dated from the era where manufacturing companies had cafeterias), and chatted. All ranks, all departments- we all just got together and chatted- sort of a super water-cooler conversation. Even the President/CEO was there on occasion.
Where I work now is an IT department for a municipality, and there’s a definite culture there, marked in part by an extreme reluctance to do anything that might cost anyone their job, and a pleasant lack of the driving urgency due to fear that drives most other places I’ve worked. Nobody fears for their jobs, so nobody’s working/escalating out of fear. Which is nice; the stress level is less than anywhere else I’ve worked. Things take longer, but that’s not necessarily bad, unless there’s a real reason it has to be done by a certain date (regulatory, etc…) which does get stuff done.
Other companies have just been very generic, without anything that I’d call unique to them. The company I worked for before my current job was one of them. Huge company- 6000+ workers, 300-ish physical locations, and a head office of about 600-700 people where I worked. Nothing that I can think of stood out as uniquely cultural, except maybe the pervasive stress level and the IT department’s repeated habit of getting caught on their back foot every time something big happened.
Players of BS bingo might like to note that Moonpig (online greetings cards) is about to launch a float on the basis that it aims to “transition into a holistic online gifting companion”.
Back when I was in USAF one of our more humorously cynical officers got custom made Christmas cards one year. The cover art was similar to the USAF logo / seal with some snow piled atop like the Sherwin Williams “paint the globe” logo. It also had some snowy pine trees nearby and an airplane.
The pre-printed interior said “Have a Military Christmas and a Professional New Year!”
Massive smirking all around us junior officers. Some of the brass were Not Amused.
A few days ago there was a site-wide email informing us that we had a new HR representative. Our previous HR person, the email said, had “transitioned to a new position outside [our company].”
I think the thing that frustrates me the most about corporate-speak is that new terms evolve frequently, doesn’t seem to add much in the way of clarity, brevity or sense, and finally that the old terms never really go away.
It feels a lot like being in middle school/high school with the “cool kids” using certain terms.
