Workplace BS
Corporate language exists to make a decision sound like weather
Nobody restructures. Restructuring happens. The grammar of workplace announcements is doing a specific and deliberate job.
Workplace BS
Meetings that were emails, corporate language, and the small absurdities of office life.
12 articles · updated August 11, 2026
Workplace BS
The meeting that was an email, and the three that were the same email
Meetings expand because calling one is free for the organiser and expensive for everyone else. That asymmetry explains almost all of it.
More in Workplace BS
Workplace BS
The open-plan office was sold as collaboration and delivered headphones
Removing the walls was justified by spontaneous interaction. What it reliably produces is people wearing noise-cancelling…
Workplace BS
Reply all: how one message becomes four hundred
A distribution list plus a reply-all button plus a request to stop replying all is a self-sustaining reaction with a known shape.
Workplace BS
The performance review that was decided before the form was opened
Annual ratings are constrained by budgets and distributions set in advance. The conversation happens afterwards and is described as…
Workplace BS
Mandatory training: forty minutes of clicking next to prove you were there
Compliance modules exist to create a record. Whether anybody learned anything is a separate question that nobody is measuring.
Workplace BS
The job advert with a salary range wide enough to park a bus in
Every ambiguity in a job posting is doing work for somebody, and it is rarely the person reading it.
Workplace BS
Expenses: prove you bought a sandwich, in triplicate, within thirty days
The process is built to survive an audit, not to reimburse a person. Everything irritating about it follows from that one fact.
Workplace BS
Hot-desking: booking a chair in a building you already work in
Removing assigned desks saves floor space and creates a daily search problem that the booking system was invented to manage.
Workplace BS
The green dot is watching, and it thinks you left at four
Presence indicators measure keyboard activity and nothing else, which makes them a poor proxy for work and an excellent one for…
Workplace BS
Team building: a day out with people you would rather email
Enforced socialising is assigned to solve problems that have structural causes, which is why it so reliably fails to solve them.
Workplace BS
Week three, still no laptop, ticket escalated to the queue it came from
Onboarding fails at the joins between departments, and nobody owns a join. That is the whole diagnosis.