Business Jargon: Jargon about success | Learning English For Work

Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work, the podcast where we help you improve your business English.

I'm Phil. And I'm Pippa.

Today we're talking more about business jargon and specifically jargon for when things are going well at work.

Yes, today's episode is all about jargon for success at work.

Remember, you can find all the vocabulary from this episode and a full transcript to read along on our website, bbclearningenglish .com So, Pippa, there's a lot of jargon around being successful and getting results at work, right?

Yes, we've talked before on the podcast about how managers like to use a lot of jargon, so business leaders are more likely to say they like jargon whereas other people find it annoying.

And it's the managers that tend to be responsible for making sure that everyone's meeting certain goals and is being successful.

And so they seem to have developed quite a few common metaphors to talk about these goals, how we measure them and how we succeed in them.

So let's have a look at a few jargon phrases.

OK, so the first phrase we have is low hanging fruit.

And this is to talk about the most easily achievable tasks or goals.

So imagine that you are picking some apples, Phil.

it's much easier to get the apples at the bottom the low hanging fruit and so someone at work might advise you to do that to go for the low hanging fruit yes um and there's another one we've got here move the needle and i think that's about making a noticeable change so think about an old set of scales

where you're weighing something and it has a needle which moves based on the weight.

So if you move the needle, you've made a change to the weight.

And there's a similar phrase, move the dial.

And we often use this to talk about a change in public opinion about something, how people have changed how they think.

Yeah, so if your boss said we really need to move the needle on this, it means we need to change something.

We need to show that we've changed something.

And if they said that we need to move the dial, it means we need to change public opinion, change what people are thinking about this thing.

The next phrase we have is make hay while the sun shines.

Do you know what that means, Phil?

I'm not sure. Could you explain it?

Yes. So it's about making the most of a good opportunity or a good set of circumstances whilst it lasts.

So hay is grass that is cut and then dried and it's usually fed to animals.

So you see on farms a lot and you need dry weather to make hay you need sunshine so if you say let's make hay whilst the sun shines it means let's kind of do things whilst there's a good opportunity or whilst conditions are good.

We use it metaphorically a lot and people often shorten it just to make hay so you might hear people saying oh we need to make hay of that opportunity and it's used a lot in politics as well.

Okay so I guess an example of that could be if you I don't know if you have a company that sells Santa Claus outfits as I'm sure lots of people do around Christmas you're going to be able to sell a lot more Santa Claus outfits so you might say oh December's coming I can really make hay here and get

loads of those Santa suits sold yeah excellent example very festive we've been asking for the jargon you hear at work our colleagues at business daily that's a bbc world service business program ask their listeners on facebook about the jargon that confuses or annoys them yes and lots of people mention language

around targets and achievements at work So the first one we have is leveraging, also pronounced as leveraging by some people.

And leverage as a verb means to use something you already have to get something new or better.

So people at your work might talk about leveraging a customer base or a list of emails maybe to sell more products.

And lots of people on Facebook said they found this annoying or that it was overused in their workplace.

Another one was KPI, which is three letters that stand for Key Performance Indicator.

And this is what companies use to set goals and to measure them.

And maybe people don't like being measured, perhaps, is why we don't like that one.

And another phrase that was mentioned was push the envelope.

Now, Phil, I didn't know what this meant, so I had to go and look it up.

And to push the envelope means to do something new that goes beyond normal limits to get results.

So according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this phrase actually comes from engineering and was popularized by a book about the space program.

And people often use push the envelope when they're talking about doing something radical or risky at work.

And maybe they want to do something different to try and attract new customers or to improve the business.

so Pippa do you think you need to think outside the box if you want to push the envelope maybe or maybe you need to do some blue sky thinking if you want to push the envelope and if you're not sure what we're talking about there we actually covered think outside the box and blue sky thinking on an earlier

episode which you can find on our website That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work.

Find more programmes to help you with your English on our website bbclearningenglish .com.

Next time we'll talk about the technological jargon that we use at work.

Bye for now. Bye. Thanks for listening to this podcast from BBC Learning English.

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[Mastering Business Jargon: Communicating Success and Performance at Work]-[Business Jargon: Jargon about success]

📋 Summary

Navigating Business Jargon: Achieving Goals and Measuring Success

Metaphors for Goal Setting and Progress

Corporate Terminology and Performance Metrics

Key Performance Indicators and Leveraging

Innovation and Risk-Taking

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript