The department that turned firing into a growth opportunity.
The process of bringing an international expatriate employee back to their home country office. Often involves culture shock in reverse.
An employee who can do multiple things adequately, borrowed from tech terminology. Essentially, your one-person army before you hire a proper team.
Performance-based pay intended to motivate employees. Studies show it actually causes anxiety and internal competition instead.
The panicked attempt by a company to keep an employee from leaving by suddenly remembering they're worth something after they've accepted another job.
Equity compensation that vests over time, converting hypothetical wealth into actual shares on a schedule designed to retain talent who can't afford to leave.
Society for Human Resource Management—the professional organization that sets standards for HR and makes sure everyone knows the acronym.
The practice of not assigning individual desks, forcing employees to scramble daily for a workspace. It's saving money at the cost of sanity.
When another company hires your good employees away. Considered unethical unless your company does it.
What happens when your job description outlives your usefulness—you become the corporate equivalent of a deleted scene. In HR speak, this means getting let go because the company decided it doesn't need your role anymore, or simply being excessively repetitive.
A service provided to laid-off employees to help find new jobs, often described as generous while amounting to mostly LinkedIn profile coaching.
Anonymous employee testimonies about company culture, used by HR to understand why they can't hire anyone. They rarely like what they find.
A glorious pause in work where you briefly escape your desk, inbox, or responsibilities—or a physical rupture in something, depending on whether you're refreshed or clumsy.
A legal agreement preventing employees from working for competitors after leaving. Controversial because it often favors the employer.
A state of dissatisfaction that drives change; the opposite of complacency. When people are discontented, they're motivated to demand better conditions, though management usually wishes they'd just keep quiet.
A website where employees anonymously trash-talk their employers and ruin the company's reputation before HR can intervene.
Accumulated time that employees can take off while still being paid, provided they don't actually use it out of fear of being perceived as uncommitted.
Management's desperate attempt to get remote workers back to the office for 'collaboration' and 'culture.'
The ongoing process of setting goals, monitoring progress, and documenting reasons to fire people later, usually disguised as 'development conversations.'
The HR function responsible for managing the relationship between employer and employees, or as employees call it, the complaint department.
Scientific evaluation using tests to measure personality, intelligence, or job fit; supposedly objective but often validates whatever bias you already had.
A scheduling arrangement where employees can choose their hours, provided they arrive at 8am, attend 10am meetings, and stay until the work is done at 7pm.
A corporate initiative to improve workplace representation while maintaining that the hiring pool was 'just not diverse enough.'
Working whenever, wherever you want—as long as it's basically 9-5 in your home office instead of the corporate office.
The times you must be working even with flexible schedules, usually 10 AM to 4 PM, which defeats the purpose of flexibility.