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Business Jargons That Outlived Their Time And Should Perish From Everyday Conversations

November 14th, 2017 | Posted by ATS in Career | HR | Time and Attendance Blog, Workforce Management Software - (Comments Off on Business Jargons That Outlived Their Time And Should Perish From Everyday Conversations)

Have you ever being in a meeting and feel like you have been transported to another universe when you hear useless business jargon being used by some of the attendees? We’ve all being there! Yes, even some folks, here at ATS are guilty of using jargon.

Below is a list of business jargons or crap speak (as it’s referred to in some quarters) that were extracted from a Forbes.com article titled ‘The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon’ They are listed in no particular order. Here goes:

Leverage
Meet the granddaddy of nouns converted to verbs. ‘Leverage’ is mercilessly used to describe how a situation or environment can be manipulated or controlled. Leverage should remain a noun, as in “to apply leverage,” not as a pseudo-verb, as in “we are leveraging our assets.”

Think Outside the Box
This tired turn of phrase means to approach a business problem in an unconventional fashion. Kudos to a Forbes.com reader who suggested: “Forget the box, just think.”

Lots of Moving Parts
Pinball machines have lots of moving parts. Many of them buzz and clank and induce migraine headaches. Do you want your business to run, or even appear to run, like a pinball machine? Then do not say it involves lots of moving parts.

Corporate Values
This expression is so phony it churns the stomach. Corporations don’t have values, the people who run them do.

Make Hay
This is jargon for being productive or successful in a short period of time. The phrase ‘to make hay’ is short for ‘make hay while the sun shines’, which can be traced to John Heyward’s The Proverbs, Epigrams and Miscellanies of John Heywood (circa 1562). A handy nugget for cocktail conversation, but that’s it.

Buy-In
This means agreement on a course of action, if the most disingenuous kind. Notes David Logan, professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business: “Asking for someone’s ‘buy-in’ says, ‘I have an idea.  I didn’t involve you because I didn’t value you enough to discuss it with you.  I want you to embrace it as if you were in on it from the beginning, because that would make me feel really good.’”

S.W.A.T. Team
In law enforcement, this term refers to teams of fit men and women who put themselves in danger to keep people safe. “In business, it means a group of ‘experts’ (often fat guys in suits) assembled to solve a problem or tackle an opportunity” says USC’s Logan. An apt comparison, if you’re a fat guy in a suit.

Of course, not everyone loves using these nonsensical words. But for the ones who simply cannot get enough of it during the day, check out Lucy Kelleway’s columns on business jargon or “business guff” as she calls it, and her compelling reasons why saying what we really mean, can go a long way.

Some Recent reports are shedding positive light on the manufacturing sector and its possible comeback. While many manufacturing companies disappeared during the 2008 crisis, some remained and had adapted to the changes like cloud-computing technologies around them to remain relevant.

An article written by Bill Cornely for Forbes.com reads in part;

“The U.S. manufacturing sector is coming back, we learn from the Federal Reserve’s industrial production report. Last month’s gain was 0.9 percent, more than making up all the ground lost in the early months of this year. Looking forward, production will continue to expand, but don’t expect a lot more factory jobs.

Manufacturing is the largest component of industrial production. The overall industrial numbers are pushed around by utility production, which rises or fall as weather is unusually warm or cold. Manufacturing is thus a better gauge of underlying economic activity than industrial production.”

The article concludes with the following; “It’s not going to be easy sailing for factories. The world is a very competitive place. But look for further gains by American manufacturers in the year to come.”

For many years manufacturing in Canada and the US outperformed other industries by leaps and bounds and created well paying jobs for thousands of workers. And, while the number of manufacturing companies today is, probably half the size of what it use to be, the ones still standing have had to endure a great deal to survive. And to that, we say Kudos to them!

To learn about ATS go to our website. You can also register for a live demonstration of our intuitive manufacturing time and attendance solution. To reach us by phone, call; (866) 294.2467.

Is Manufacturing Really Making a Comeback?

 

Reviewing The Annual Employee Performance Review

June 23rd, 2015 | Posted by Apex Time Solutions in Benefit Accruals | Cloud Time and Attendance | Overtime | Scheduling | Time and Attendance Solution - (Comments Off on Reviewing The Annual Employee Performance Review)

It’s hard to believe that the employee annual performance review still exist in many companies. Since the realities of today’s workforce is so different from say, 1995 it’s hard to imagine why some companies cannot align their performance reviews to the 21st century. And while many employees feel that this is nail-biting event have passed its best before date, there are probably a few supervisors with an axe to grind with their employees who look forward to this antiquated practice with some zeal.

In the meantime, there growing list of studies that support either eliminating the practice or at least changing the way in which is conducted — but the question remains, why are so many companies still holding on to a practice that’s counterproductive?

In an article by Anne Fischer, titled “Are annual performance reviews necessary?” for Forbes magazine. A couple of paragraphs from the article read in part:

“If you’ve ever been frustrated, annoyed, or otherwise perturbed by annual performance reviews — whether giving them, getting them, or both — here’s something that may surprise you: Not even the HR people in charge of overseeing yearly appraisals really think they’re worth doing.

One of the many strange quirks in the current labor market is that, although unemployment is high, people who have jobs are not hesitating to ditch them for a better offer. A new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers says voluntary turnover has increased by 14% since 2010 and is still rising. The No. 1 reason people give for quitting, according to the U.S. Department of Labor: They don’t feel that their efforts are recognized or appreciated by their direct bosses.”

Bottom-line: the hope is that the few remaining companies that still hold on to their annual employee performance review concept, will one day see the light and ditch them. It should be noted that corporate cultures do not change overnight— companies, after all are run by people and its being well documented, human beings adapt to chance slowly.

Reviewing The Annual Employee Performance Review

 

About ATS:
ATS offers a broad portfolio of time and attendance solutions that streamlines the collection, calculation, and reporting of employee hours for workforce management and eliminates the manual tasks of payroll preparation, increasing efficiency and reducing errors in corporate payroll departments.

To see a live demonstration of our cloud-based time and attendance application, go to our website. You can also contact one of account executives by calling; 1.866.294.2467.

In recent years, the popularity of cloud-based software solutions has grown exponentially. But it was too long ago that some doubters viewed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions as the brand new toy that would fade away from the collective memory of most business executives. As it turned out, the reverse happened. In fact many businesses would prefer to deploy a business management software solution in weeks not years and do not want to hassle of having their IT department maintain a Server for each software application. And in today’s very competitive business landscape who wants to maintain expensive servers when there are less expensive alternatives like a cloud-based application.

Joe McKendrick, contributor on Forbes.com said in a recent article “Benefits already seen from current cloud deployments include the simplification of internal operations (37 percent); better delivery of internal resources (33 percent); and new ways for employees to work, connect, and collaborate (31 percent). Also on the list of cloud benefits realized are faster rollout of new business initiatives to exploit new opportunities (at 23 percent) and improved ability to acquire, share, analyze, and act on data (23 percent).”

If your company happens to be one of the many, that’s struggling to collect employee hours using paper-based time sheets, there is a better and more productive way-ATS TimeWork On-Demand. Your company can tap into the rapid innovation that the ATS Time and Attendance On-Demand, enables and adapt your time collection processes quickly to evolve with the 21st century. ATS time and attendance can manage your entire workforce – business analytics, time tracking, budgeting and forecasting and workforce planning  – in the cloud and with seamless integration to, Payroll, Talent Management,  Enterprise Resources Planning, (ERP), Human Resources and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

To learn more, download a demonstration, join a live webinar or contact one of account representatives at 866.294.2467.

Adoption Of Cloud-Based Applications Is On The Upswing