WFH: Official Lingo

Well, what a few weeks it’s been for everyone. Now, whilst we don’t want to sound like a broken record these are unprecedented times AMIRIGHT? And by this point the majority of us who are able to (thanks for the clarification BoJo ?) have been working from home for over 7 weeks. That’s quite a considerable amount of time, especially for those who are unused to a remote working environment, and even more so for those who are having to do so whilst being full-time teachers, parents, spouses, carers and just regular human beings who need a time out.

Here at Pistachio we love to shout about all of the benefits that working from home can bring (and there are plenty of them) including; boosted productivity and creativity levels, increased mental wellbeing amongst staff, economic savings on workspace, environmental savings on travel etc, etc. We also have every faith that one of the positives that will arise as a result of this pandemic will be a wider tolerance of a more flexible and agile working format for many more people the world over. HOWEVER, sometimes, just sometimes, it is good to have a big old LOL and shine a light upon one thing that is a tad annoying about the universal working-from-home brigade…the lingo.

In these extraordinary times it is no surprise that there are an extraordinary amount of ways to describe that you are in fact, just simply working from home. What is more anxiety-inducing is that there seems to be a new ‘official’ slang term or abbreviation that crops up almost every day, and if you don’t know it? Well, you might as well mute all of your Zoom calls for the next week because quite frankly, no one on the virtual team meeting will want to engage with someone so unhip and out of the loop as you. In laym(ean girls) terms, YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US.

So, to help you out of this virtual street-cred minefield that is happening in every correspondence we’re currently having, we’ve listed some of our key abbreviations below, along with their very comprehensive and not at all made up, meanings:

• WFH – the classic, the house G&T with ice and a slice if you like, yes ‘WFH’ does exactly what it says on the tin and simply means ‘working from home.’ However, this is not to be confused with the WFH championed by teenage boys currently consigned to their bedrooms for the foreseeable.

• Remote working – the second most popular term used to describe what is essentially you just sitting at your kitchen table in jogging bottoms and a freshly ironed shirt like some kind of modern-day Centaur who shops at M&S. This term is mostly used by managers who want to be absolutely clear that they take WFH much more seriously than most.

• Virtual team meet – this is basically a snobby way of saying that you are dialling in to a team meeting from your bedroom whilst your other half frantically tries to tether any errant children to a stable surface in another room at the same time as they silently plot ways to murder you, and the entire virtual team, by Friday COP.

• Agile working – a term preferred by creative types the world over, it is used to make non-creative types feel inferior, as non-creative brains are clearly not agile and therefore cannot possibly work under the trendy umbrella of the agile workforce. Agile workers are almost exclusively Mac users who are agile enough to work whilst sitting cross legged on a Tahitian prayer mat, supping a soya latte, whilst they send you anti-Tory memes on Slack.

• Flexible working – not dissimilar to its agile counterpart, flexible working is the phrase used by those who have 2.4 feral children who require home-schooling but also need to cram 8 hours’ worth of virtual corporate meetings and pointless power point presentations into one working day. By using the term ‘flexible,’ these workers are proving that they are skilled enough in their due diligence to drink a bottle of Shiraz whilst firing off an expletive ridden email to HR at 10pm, mark algebra homework in the shower, and officially recommend their children’s teacher for an OBE on a daily basis.

• B-O / WFB – Two abbreviations reserved for the most rebellious of home-workers amongst us. B-O meaning Bed-Office and WFB meaning Working from Bed, these are the official terms used by the WFH OG’s. The originals, the ones who have been agile-ly working flexibly from their remote devices for their entire careers and are quite frankly tired of all your sh**t. The WFB will take a Zoom call in their Hogwarts nightgown at any time of the day and not give a damn. From 7am – 8pm they are mostly horizontal and unwashed. Firing off any work that is thrown at them at an unfathomable pace before starting their evening routine of cooking fajitas and dancing to TOTP’s re-runs until 3am. They are the holy grail of the home-work force.

We hope that today’s blog post has been informative and you are now ready to face your week from the home office with all of the essential terms that you need to stay the most popular kid on the screen.

For some light relief, plus our top tips on how your business can utilise some expert digital marketing tools during this crisis, click here.

And remember, you are not supposed to be a full time everything to everyone all in one day, every day, so be kind to yourself, stay safe and stay sane….oh and stay alert?

Thanks for reading!