Gen Z workers came of age during the pandemic and missed out on one vital part of work experience: learning the office lingo.
Just as they’re confusing employers with their own new slang, the bright young minds of tomorrow are scratching their own heads at their boss’s demands—or rather, secretly asking ChatGPT for the definition of certain workplace acronyms.
Worryingly, the common term that has professionals most perplexed is KPIs.
Experts at Wix analyzed how often people Google the definitions for each of the 45 most used office acronyms to find out which ones are puzzling professionals the most—and the term KPI has generated a whopping 662,400 searches per year in the U.K. alone.
Although the Google searches weren’t sliced and diced by generation, the researchers concluded that the language barrier impacts young workers the most.
For those still wondering, KPI stands for “key performance indicator,” and it is a measurement most workplaces use to assess performance. For example, a business might set KPIs like sales numbers, team engagement, or website traffic to ensure workers are hitting the company’s targets.
Other acronyms to make the list include IRL and WFH—despite the latter dominating workplace conversations for well over four years.
The 10 most confusing workplace acronyms for workers
1. KPI
Meaning: Key Performance Indicator
2. CRM
Meaning: Customer Relationship Management
3. VPN
Meaning: Virtual Private Network
4. SEO
Meaning: Search Engine Optimisation
5. FTE
Meaning: Full Time Equivalent
6. AWOL
Meaning: Absent Without Leave
7. IRL
Meaning: In Real Life
8. B2B
Meaning: Business-to-business
9. WFH
Meaning: Work From Home
10. TBD
Meaning: To Be Determined/Decided
In the end, the time-saving talk may actually result in businesses wasting time.
“Jargon or abbreviations may make communication faster but it can also open up the opportunity for misunderstandings, especially with entry-level employees that may already be struggling with the adjustment to their new role,” a spokesperson from Wix told Metro.
They urged that if you must use these terms, it’s important to ensure staff are trained on what they mean or feel safe enough to ask—or risk workers getting tasks wrong and feeling disengaged from what their bosses are saying.
Generational communication barrier
Reams of research have suggested that there’s a communication barrier between young workers and their more seasoned peers.
At least once a week, half of workers think a colleague has used a phrase which sounds like a foreign language—when it is in fact, just jargon, with Gen Z and millennial workers struggling to understand their coworkers the most.
At the same time, 1 in 5 Gen Zers haven’t had a single conversation with someone over 50 in their workplace in the last year, LinkedIn research shows. Why? They don’t know how to talk to them, which is hardly surprising when they feel like they’re speaking entirely different languages.
