Relying on Dictionary.com just to get through the workday? You’re not alone. According to Duolingo and LinkedIn’s new “State of Workplace Jargon Report”, 60 percent of employees worldwide are stuck trying to decode the loopy lingo used in their workplaces. Phrases like “boiling the ocean” and “blue-sky thinking” have workers scratching their heads as they try to keep up with seemingly buzzy but hard-to-decipher corporate speak.

Almost half of the survey respondents would prefer to ditch such jargon altogether, and business leaders would be wise to consider it. The report’s findings connect confusing language with decreases in employee productivity, increases in stress and feelings of exclusion. 

Some fields are understandably more dependent on specific terminology than others, such as those in IT who communicate in what probably seems to outsiders like some sort of secret code. For others, however, speaking in jargon is an attempt to look smarter, and can easily backfire if the people around you have no idea what you mean. After all, shorthand is only short if no one needs to reach for the dictionary to decipher what you’re saying.

What’s the funniest or most head-scratching jargon used around your office? Send us an email at b.newsletter@business.com and we’ll share some of the best (or worst?) submissions we receive over the next few weeks.

Keep Talking: There are benefits to conversing with yourself.

Blast Off! Apple TV+ explores out-of-this-world marketing lies.

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Today, more than three years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to work from home, U.S. offices are still half-empty, while in-person workplaces in Europe and Asia have rebounded, The Wall Street Journal reports. As of earlier this year, office capacity in America hovered at 40 to 60 percent, compared to 70 to 90 percent in Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile, Asia has seen almost full returns. Why is the U.S. so far behind?

At first glance, remote work seems to go hand-in-hand with large, high-tech companies — in other words, those with the resources and the human and digital infrastructure to make virtual work possible. Think Alphabet, Samsung, or Apple. Where multinational corporations go, digital nomads tend to follow. The news, then, that U.S. return-to-office rates lag globally isn’t so surprising.

Where Multinational Corporations Go, Remote Work Follows

Perhaps not by chance, multinational corporations are major players in the U.S. economy. They employ about a third of all private sector workers, says the Brookings Institute. Globally, the U.S. is home to more conglomerates than anywhere else. One-third of the largest multinational companies are based in the U.S., followed by Japan, China, and the U.K. From a bird’s-eye view, the U.S. is better suited than most to prop up a remote, global workforce.

But the link between multinational corporations and remote work has weaknesses, with the largest being Asia. Although the continent is home to many international companies, cities in Singapore, Japan, and China are extremely dense and lack the substantial urban-suburban divide seen in the U.S. It’s much harder to set up a home office there than, in say, New York City, where workers funnel in from suburban New Jersey and commuter Connecticut. Thus, people in Asia are more inclined, if not obligated, to go into a company office.

🤿 DIVE DEEPER:

• Time-Zone Mania: How to Deal With Geodiversity

Remote Work as the New Benefit

The story can always be flipped, though. Does the U.S. lag in return-to-office rates or does it have the strongest remote workforce? Some companies are embracing the remote-work trend, albeit carefully. The problem, of course, is that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Throughout the pandemic and beyond, multinational corporations have often tied remote policy to place or office. Deloitte, for example, has one remote policy for the U.K. and one for Australia. KPMG’s approach also varies.

Borders and time zones are stubborn things, however, and it’s nearly impossible to account for all disparities. That makes remote work all the more challenging; yet, much of the U.S. seems set on it anyway. For now.

Great business leaders don’t do — or accomplish — anything alone. Great leaders delegate. As a business leader, your time and attention are pulled in a lot of different directions. What if delegating, even just five tasks, to someone you trust could save you 15 hours each week?

With BELAY, you no longer have to own every task as a business leader. When you delegate, you have more time to focus on the things only you can do — growing your business. Our friends at BELAY have been helping leaders like you get their time back by delegating to a virtual assistant. Check out the top 25 tasks you can delegate to a BELAY Virtual Assistant today.

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Dr. Steven Rogelberg is a Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte and former president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.   

As humans, we talk to ourselves a great deal. It’s just what we do. This inner dialogue is called self-talk. We use self-talk to make sense of the past, the future, and what we are experiencing and doing at the present. Self-talk can come in many different forms, but one major category is constructive self-talk. Constructive self-talk refers to a kind of self-talk that involves honest self-evaluation, rational beliefs, and a generally positive mindset. It goes beyond superficial explanations of behavior, situations, and challenges, and instead aims to provide more detailed and nuanced insights that are generally more encouraging and compassionate.

I conducted a study with senior executives to determine whether constructive self-talk among leaders relates to well-being and success outcomes. To do so, nearly 200 leaders wrote future-oriented letters to themselves about their personal development goals and needs. (They did not know at the time these letters would be used for research, though they later agreed to it.) As these letters were written to themselves, by themselves, they were windows of insight into self-talk. Each letter was coded for how constructive the self-talk was.

Findings

1. There was considerable variability in how leaders spoke to themselves, with some being very supportive, insightful, and motivating, and others being none of these things and actually quite caustic.

2. When it came to work-related outcomes, a leader’s internal dialogue appeared to play a role. Engaging in constructive self-talk was linked to improved leadership effectiveness and creativity/originality, as evaluated by their direct reports and managers. Furthermore, more constructive self-talk was also related to less job-related stress, as reported by the leader themselves, separately.

Implications

1. Be mindful. Analyze how you talk to yourself. Is it constructive? If not, recognize it and re-steer your cognitions to more constructiveness.

2. Self-talk training interventions have been widely used by sports psychologists and clinical psychologists to enhance athletic performance and personal well-being. Our findings indicate that similar interventions for promoting constructive self-talk are necessary in organizational settings.

3. Create a healthier and more supportive work environment. These types of work environments tend to promote more constructive self-talk in individuals. The environment helps shape our thoughts.

(Source: Apple TV+)

Anyone could be considered a salesperson today. Every time someone posts a beach photo on their Tinder profile or tailors their resume before a big job interview, they’re selling an idea of themselves. On a larger scale, businesses advertise products as a stepping stone toward a more prolific lifestyle.

The new Apple TV+ series “Hello Tomorrow!” explores how quality character traits define a successful salesperson. Set in a retrofuturistic world, the show follows a man named Jack Billings (Billy Crudup) who leads a team of traveling salespeople that hustle working-class citizens to buy timeshares on the moon. 

Jack even enlists his estranged son Joey (Nicholas Podany), who believes he’ll be helping others pursue a better tomorrow. The twist is that everyone besides Jack is unaware of the true deceptive nature of his operation — no such timeshares exist.

As many entrepreneurs do, Jack found a problem that needed to be solved: Only the ultra-rich were being launched up to live on the moon. But instead of asking people to invest in an affordable lunar colony, Jack printed lies on a pamphlet — and you can bet a herd of jumping sheep that he wasn’t over the moon when the truth came out.

In business, honesty is the best policy. If customers can use social media platforms to generate buzz for a product, they can also expose a fabricated marketing campaign with the click of a button. 

Check out 5 successful marketing campaigns — and the do’s and don’ts for achieving similar success.

• 1723: Adam Smith, the “Father of Economics,” was born. His magnum opus, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is considered the first work of modern economics.
• 1884: The first roller coaster made for entertainment purposes, the Switchback Railway, was first used on Coney Island, New York.
• 1903: One hundred and twenty years ago, Henry Ford and 11 associate investors founded the Ford Motor Company.
• 1911: IBM, one of America’s leading computer manufacturers, was incorporated.

Written by Elizabeth Barton and Antonio Ferme. Comic by John McNamee.