Master the new age work lingo

Karoshi (Japanese)

A couple of days ago, a Japanese woman died from overwork — she’d logged in 159 hours of overtime in a month. The labour standards office in Tokyo attributed her death to karoshi — death from overwork.

Joined up thinking

Title of the first book by writer and artist Stevyn Colgan, the phrase suggests thinking about a complicated problem in an intelligent way, including the important facts.

To ‘ping’ an e-mail

We’re connected through various mediums — WhatsApp, e-mails, Skype, iMessage, etc. The phrase stands for a short message sent through any of the above, and not necessarily via e-mail.

Gleitzeit (German)

It can literally be translated as slipping time. A dream for everyone who’s not a morning person. It’s essentially flexi-time.

Visual Harvesting

It is an information recording and storage method with visuals and text as opposed to only text. “At KHDA, each meeting is captured on a board in the form of quirky sketches and text,” says Mohammed AlSuwaidi, Director of Customer Happiness Experiences.

Cubicle gieren (Dutch)

A term for those who gather office supplies from the desk of a fired co-worker. Cubicle vultures as translated in English.

Blue-sky thinking

The new phrase for the oft used ‘out of the box’ thinking — this one suggests being creative and not limiting oneself to current beliefs or existing thought patterns.