Onboarding/onboard
To get up to speed; a bastardization of the phrase “to get someone on board” and making it into a verb.
As in…
“Make sure the new guy onboards with the tracking software. We’ll need him up to speed by next week.”
The other day I was on a conference call, being trained in a piece of online lead tracking software, and the presenter said, “The next step in the onboarding process is…”
I just about choked on my microphone. Really? Onboarding?
Buzzwords are, in my opinion, primarily lazy attempts at sounding clever. They’re jargon. It is designed to make the speaker seem intelligent and the spoken-to seem out of touch.
Perhaps worst of all, they get in the way of perfectly decent words with much more helpful meanings.
“Onboarding process” sounds ridiculous and has no shared meaning outside of tech companies trying to sound trendy. Swap out “onboarding” for “training,” and you have a sentence that means something. And doesn’t sound silly.
So long as I’m having a curmudgeonly rant, let me share three more of my least-favorite buzzwords:
- Cloud Based — When it was first coined, this term meant something. A distributed online computing architecture. That’s a real thing. But it’s been so horribly abused that it’s lost all meaning. Most often, it’s used interchangeably with “online.” In this case, “online” would be a much better word.
- Gamification — Please stop it. I won’t sell my entire address book to your online service to earn another badge.
- Disruptive — Sure. You’ve got a great idea. Your startup is incredible. And you’re totally going to upend Facebook/Amazon/The Goat Industry. I’m thrilled. But please find a way to stop using Silicon Valley’s most pernicious cliché “disruptive.”
I could go on whining all day. But you probably agree we could use fewer buzzwords and more words that matter, such as revenue, profitability, average order value, and retention. When we have conversations with words that matter, chances are we are growing the business, which is what we are here for.
