11 Trending Buzzwords Every HR Leader Should Know

From ‘wolidays’ to ‘acting your wage’, what are the viral workplace buzzwords that should be on every HR leader’s radar for 2025 and beyond?

An unpredictable landscape over the past few years has resulted in global HR phenomena including ‘The Great Resignation’, ‘The Great Gloom‘ and ‘Quiet Quitting’, as employees have shifted their priorities in what they want and need from their employer. And in response, this has demanded businesses to modernise their People strategies in order to attract and retain the best talent.

But in an ever-evolving modern workplace, employees don’t stand still – and many are taking their workplace expectations and experiences to social media platforms, raising the profile of their changing priorities even more so for employers.

So, we took to the thousands of Reddit and TikTok conversations taking place around this to identify exactly what’s on candidates’ and employees’ minds in the current market. The result: 11 brand-new and trending buzzwords that People, Rewards and Recruitment leaders need to have on their radar. As featured in The Times, let’s explore.

11 Viral Workplace Buzzwords in 2024:

1. Acting Your Wage: Putting in the considered appropriate amount of effort for the wage you earn.

2. Monk Mode: Undergoing intense periods of uninterrupted focus and shutting out all external distractions to optimize productivity.

3. Performance Punishment: Being overloaded with colleagues’ work because you can take on more and operate above expectations.

4. Loud Suffering: Publicly sharing how busy you are, and how close you are to ‘burnout’, all in the hope of getting a pay rise.

5. Fake Happy: Putting on a happy face in the corporate environment whilst hiding true exhaustion.

6. Woliday: Spending your annual leave working.

7. Interview Insanity: A long and strenuous interview process that doesn’t include any updates or feedback.

8. Office Peacocking: When employers make their offices more attractive, hoping to entice employees back post-pandemic.

9. Ghost Jobs: Companies that post about jobs that don’t actually exist to make the organization appear as though it’s thriving.

10. Quitting Guilt: Feeling guilty for quitting an unhealthy work environment and leaving colleagues behind.

11. Interview Post-Mortems: A ‘grave’ term for post-interview debriefs.