Your first week in an English-speaking workplace comes with a secret second language: office English. It is not in any textbook, everyone speaks it, and nobody explains it because they assume you already know. After ten years in recruitment and several more teaching Career English, here is the glossary I wish someone had handed me on day one.
Meetings and scheduling
- Touch base — have a short, informal chat. "Let's touch base on Thursday" does not require a meeting room or an agenda. Fifteen minutes, maybe less.
- Circle back — return to a topic later. Often used to politely park something: "Good point — let's circle back to that after the launch."
- Sync / sync-up — a quick alignment meeting. "Morning sync" usually means ten minutes of everyone saying what they are working on.
- Push back — two meanings. Push back a meeting means delay it. Push back on an idea means disagree with it. Context tells you which.
- Hard stop — a fixed time you must leave. "I have a hard stop at three" is the professional way of saying the meeting will not run over.
Deadlines and workload
- EOD / COB — end of day, close of business. "Can you send it by EOD?" means today, before people log off. If they say EOD Friday, clarify the timezone — painful experience speaking.
- Bandwidth — spare capacity. "I don't have the bandwidth this week" is a polite, blame-free no.
- On my plate — my current workload. "I've got a lot on my plate" is the informal cousin of the bandwidth excuse.
- Move the needle — make a real, measurable difference. Small improvements do not move the needle; big ones do.
- Low-hanging fruit — the easy wins you should do first. Every strategy meeting mentions this fruit at least once.
Email code words
- Per my last email — officially: "as I mentioned before". Actually: "you clearly did not read my last email". Handle with care.
- Just to clarify — often introduces a correction of someone else's mistake, softened to keep the peace.
- Looping in — adding someone to the conversation. "Looping in Sarah from finance" means Sarah can now see everything.
- Taking this offline — let's discuss privately, away from the group thread or meeting. Not necessarily sinister. Usually.
How to actually learn these
Do not memorise the list. Instead, pick three phrases, use each one once this week in a real message or meeting, and notice the response. Office English is absorbed through use, exactly like every other kind of English. And if you want a safe place to rehearse before the stakes are real, that is precisely what our Career English role-plays are for.