The department that turned firing into a growth opportunity.
An arrangement that means you can work from anywhere at any time, which actually means you'll work from everywhere at all times. The flexibility is that the company is flexible about how much of your personal life it absorbs.
Full-Time Equivalent, a unit of measurement that reduces human beings to fractions. You might be 1.0 FTE, 0.5 FTE, or, if you're on three cross-functional committees, approximately 3.7 FTE squeezed into one salaried body.
A performance management system requiring managers to rank employees against each other and place them into predetermined categories, typically firing the bottom performers. Jack Welch's gift to corporate culture, also known as 'rank and yank.'
The 'New Guy/Gal' (with a more colorful adjective), referring to the newest team member who doesn't yet understand unspoken rules, inside jokes, or why everyone hates the quarterly all-hands meetings. Every workplace has one, and we've all been one.
A temporary unpaid leave where employees remain technically employed but don't work or get paid, preserving benefits while saving the company money. It's the corporate equivalent of 'it's not you, it's the economy'—but actually, it's definitely the company's budget.
A trusted coworker you can rely on during workplace crises, conflicts, or political battles—your corporate survival partner. They'll cover your back during layoffs and won't throw you under the bus when projects fail.
Fair Labor Standards Act—the 1938 federal law establishing minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor standards. It's the reason you get paid extra for working more than 40 hours, assuming your employer classifies you correctly.
An employee likely to quit soon, typically identified by updating their LinkedIn profile, taking lots of PTO, or suddenly dressing better for work. HR's version of reading tea leaves, but with resume updates.
When one recruiter handles every step of hiring from writing the job description to extending the offer, rather than passing candidates along an assembly line of specialists. It's the HR equivalent of farm-to-table, but with humans.
The workplace tension that occurs when personalities, processes, or priorities collide, creating organizational drag that slows everything down. In physics, it's the force that opposes motion; in business, it's what happens when sales promises something engineering can't deliver. Smart leaders try to minimize it, while others mistake it for 'healthy debate' right up until someone quits.