onboarding

A correspondent noted that the word he hated was onboarding for the process of taking on a new employee. This was once called orientation which was an accurate description of the process by which a new person is given help and advice and told where the tea and coffee is in the kitchen. The newbie is helped to get their bearings. Onboarding, by comparison, is a word that is all feel and no substance.  Just for a change, this American management word of the 1990s was borrowed into the IT world later in the decade for the process of familiarising a new customer with a piece of software.  Often the exchange between IT and management goes the other way. 

So, for example, bandwith starts out in the IT world as the amount of data that a communications line can transmit.  From there it leaps to a management meaning: the amount of work that an employee can handle, or, more simply, the amount of spare time they have to devote to a task.  Can you set up the boardroom for a meeting.  Sorry, I’ve got no bandwith.

 But the term that I really hate is team.  Not the old-style team of the sporting world.  That was, and is, fine.  The players understand that in a team everyone has a special role. They understand the notion of team culture and the idea that a team working together can produce better results than just one brilliant player.

Somehow they manage to do that without losing their individual identities, responsibilities and initiative.  In the business world the team seems to be a way of putting all staff under the yoke of a rigid corporate hierarchy -- and then covering up the enslavement with a thick layer of pseudo, highly manufactured camaraderie.  This is most on display at the annual corporate retreat.