Offender: Workshop
Every one of us has been an email chain which is borderline unintelligible for the amount of corporate lingo thrown in there. At City A.M., we’re taking a stand and calling out the worst jargon which travels around the City faster than you can drink an overpriced pint. This week: workshop.
What does it mean?
Oh boy would we like to know. According to business resource website Convertkit, a workshop is an “interactive session that focuses on teaching participants a particular skill”, that is specifically collaborative, empowering and “time-bound” (as opposed to the usual timeless chasms of drudgery workers are otherwise subject to).
While the term suggests you’ll be chopping up wood and soldering joints, you will be doing absolutely nothing of the sort. Indeed, the material world of hard reality and tangible outcomes has no such place in these sessions. Instead you are likely to have to endure “breakout groups” and “thought shower” sessions. Don’t leave your fun fact at home!
Said workshops may also invite you to bring along your “toolkit”, but put that screwdriver down, by this it means gizmos such as your resilience and blue-sky thinking.
In a grammatical quirk, you may also be asked to workshop (verb) something while at a workshop (noun). This means nothing.
Who uses it?
Corporate lumberjacks who think building a team is spiritually the same as building a house and use metaphors about “laying foundations” and “cementing relationships” to motivate you. Users may also keep a Swiss army knife on their person, though the only known sightings of their using it is to employ the toothpick after a prawn cocktail lunch.
What could it be confused with?
The good old days of messing around in DT
Labour exploitation (that’s a sweatshop)
Should we be worried?
Undoubtedly. Thou shalt not lie, said God, and he has some authority in these matters. The term workshop is willfully dishonest, and it shall not do.
How do we get rid of it?
Workers, grab your hammers and sickles. Find that jargon and chisel away at its nonsense until you are left with the beauty beneath: words which mean what they say. In this case, enough chiselling should polish away the mumbo jumbo of “collaboration” and “empowerment” and leave you with the hard honest truth of what a workshop is beneath: a time-wasting exercise.