Latest / The Productivity Podcast with Fexingo: Output, Efficiency, and Long-Term Economic Growth / The Hidden Productivity Tax of Corporate Jargon
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this number that's been stuck in my head since I read a working paper from the University of Chicago late last year. They tried to estimate the productivity cost of corporate jargon. Not the annoyance factor — the actual measurable output loss. Their number: roughly four thousand two hundred dollars per employee, per year, at a typical large firm. Luna: Wait — four thousand two hundred dollars per person? That's enormous. How do they even calculate something like that? Lucas: They modeled two channels. First, the time spent decoding vague language. If an email or a meeting spends thirty seconds per message translating 'we need to leverage our core competencies to drive synergies' into plain English, that adds up fast. Second, the cost of actual misinterpretation — someone acts on the wrong signal because the language was ambiguous. Their survey of five hundred knowledge workers found that, on average, people spend about forty-five minutes a week just clarifying unclear messages from colleagues. Luna: Forty-five minutes a week. That's nearly four hours a month per person. For a company with ten thousand employees, that's — Lucas: About thirty-seven thousand hours a year, straight into the shredder. The paper put the dollar figure by using median compensation plus overhead. It's a rough estimate, but the direction is undeniable. Luna: And the really frustrating part is that jargon is a choice. Nobody is forced to say 'circle back' or 'deep dive' or 'low-hanging fruit.' Lucas: Right. And there's experimental evidence backing that up. There's a well-known study from Stanford — I think it was 2016 — where they gave participants a set of fairly straightforward instructions for assembling a piece of furniture. Half got the instructions written in standard plain English. The other half got the same instructions but with corporate buzzwords inserted — 'leverage your spatial reasoning,' 'optimize the assembly sequence,' 'synergize the components.' The jargon group took seventeen percent longer to complete the task, and they made more errors. Luna: Seventeen percent longer for something as simple as assembling furniture. Imagine applying that across every email, every meeting, every strategy document in a company. The drag must be immense. Lucas: Exactly. And the drag is invisible because it's embedded in the culture. Nobody clocks the extra few seconds per message. But the aggregate is brutal. The Stanford study also measured comprehension — participants rated the jargon-filled instructions as more complex and less trustworthy. So you're losing speed and trust at the same time. Luna: It makes me wonder where this habit comes from. I mean, nobody starts their career thinking 'I really want to say 'leverage' ten times a day.' It's learned. Lucas: It's a signaling thing, mostly. Linguists call it 'covert prestige' — you use jargon to signal that you're an insider, that you belong to the group. In a corporate context, using the right buzzwords can make you sound more competent, even if you're actually saying less. There's a 2012 study from Yale that showed that readers rated authors as more intelligent when their writing was harder to parse — as long as the difficulty didn't cross into incomprehensibility. Luna: So there's a sweet spot of sounding smart while being just vague enough that people assume you know what you're talking about. That's... depressing. Lucas: It is. And it's economically inefficient. But the fix is surprisingly simple, at least in theory. You just have to make plain language the default and reward clarity over complexity. A few companies have actually tried it. There's a mid-sized manufacturing firm in Ohio — I'm blanking on the name — that implemented a plain-language policy about three years ago. They required all internal emails to be written at an eighth-grade reading level unless they contained technical specifications. They also trained managers to avoid jargon in meetings. Within six months, they reported a twenty-two percent reduction in average email response time and a noticeable drop in follow-up clarification emails. Luna: Twenty-two percent faster responses just from cutting the fluff. And I'm guessing the cultural side effects were positive too — fewer misunderstandings, less frustration. Lucas: That's what they said in a case study I read. Employee satisfaction scores on communication went up something like fifteen percentage points. It makes sense — when you don't have to decode every message, you can just do the work. Luna: I wonder if this is one of those productivity gains that's hiding in plain sight because it's so culturally embedded. We think about big efficiency moves — automation, software, restructuring — but maybe the cheapest fix is just teaching people to write and speak more clearly. Lucas: That's exactly the argument the Chicago paper makes. They call it a 'zero-cost productivity lever' — no new technology, no capital expenditure, just a shift in norms. And the ROI is immediate. If you save each employee even ten minutes a day from reduced jargon, at an average loaded cost of sixty dollars an hour, that's about two thousand five hundred dollars per person per year. The Ohio firm's experience suggests the real savings might be even larger. Luna: And walking through the economy with us has made something click for you — well, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. We don't run ads, and that's because listeners like you chip in to keep it that way. It would make a real difference to us. Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. And it's not about big pledges — it's the small, consistent support that adds up. So if you've found value in these conversations, that link is all you need. Luna: Anyway, back to jargon. One thing that complicates the picture is that some jargon actually does serve a purpose. In technical fields, specialized terms are efficient shorthand. A radiologist saying 'ground-glass opacity' conveys more information in two words than a whole sentence of plain English. Lucas: That's the key distinction. The problem isn't specialized vocabulary — the problem is vague, pretentious language that obscures meaning. The Chicago paper specifically targeted what they call 'opaque jargon' — words and phrases that existing employees can't define consistently. They did a survey asking workers at a Fortune 500 firm to define terms like 'synergy,' 'leverage,' 'holistic,' 'bandwidth' in the business context. The definitions varied wildly. One person's 'bandwidth' meant time. Another's meant team capacity. Another's meant cognitive load. So when a manager says 'we don't have the bandwidth,' nobody knows exactly what constraint they're naming. Luna: That ambiguity is where the productivity cost really lives. Because then you have to schedule a meeting to clarify what 'bandwidth' means in this context, or you guess wrong and waste effort. Lucas: Precisely. And the longer those ambiguous terms persist, the more they calcify into corporate culture. New hires learn to use them to fit in, and the cycle reinforces itself. The Chicago researchers found that companies with higher jargon density — measured by frequency of a set of thirty buzzwords in internal emails — also had lower scores on employee engagement surveys and higher voluntary turnover. Not causal, but the correlation is striking. Luna: So jargon doesn't just slow you down — it might be driving people away. That's a double cost: lost productivity from the leavers and the cost of replacing them. Lucas: Exactly. And we know replacement costs can run anywhere from fifty to two hundred percent of annual salary, depending on the role. So if jargon is contributing even a little to attrition, the dollar figure gets huge fast. Luna: Is there any data on which industries are the worst offenders? I feel like consulting and tech have to be up there. Lucas: You'd be right. The Chicago paper broke it down by sector. Consulting, tech, and financial services had the highest jargon density. Manufacturing, retail, and hospitality had the lowest. But interestingly, the productivity cost per employee was actually higher in the low-jargon sectors, because the contrast was greater — when jargon did appear in a retail setting, it caused more confusion because it was less expected. Luna: That's a fascinating twist. So if you're in a plain-speaking industry and someone suddenly drops 'we need to pivot on our value proposition,' everyone's completely lost. Lucas: Right. In tech, at least people have a shared framework for decoding that kind of language, even if it's inefficient. In manufacturing, it's just noise. There's a great anecdote from a plant manager in the paper: a new executive from a consulting background sent an email about 'operationalizing the customer-centricity initiative.' The plant floor team thought he was talking about a new software system. They spent a week preparing for an implementation that didn't exist. Luna: A week of wasted work. That's the kind of concrete cost that doesn't show up on any spreadsheet unless you go looking for it. Lucas: And it's entirely avoidable. The fix is cultural, but it starts with individual awareness. There's a simple test I use now: if I can replace a phrase with a simpler one without losing meaning, I do it. 'Use' instead of 'utilize.' 'Start' instead of 'initiate.' 'Help' instead of 'facilitate.' It sounds trivial, but over the course of a day, it saves time for everyone reading. Luna: I've started doing something similar in my own writing. I use a tool that flags unnecessary jargon — it's basically a readability checker with a custom dictionary of buzzwords. It's surprising how many slip in without noticing. Lucas: What's the tool called? I'd love to try it. Luna: It's called 'PlainSpeak' — I'll send you the link. But honestly, even just a manual policy of 'write like you're explaining to a smart friend' goes a long way. Lucas: That's a good rule of thumb. And it aligns with something the Chicago researchers recommend: before sending any internal message, ask yourself 'could a new hire understand this in thirty seconds?' If not, rewrite it. Luna: So we've talked about the cost, the causes, and the fix. But I'm curious — is there any evidence that this problem is getting worse? With remote work and async communication exploding, are we drowning in more jargon than ever? Lucas: The data is mixed. One study from 2024 tracked jargon frequency in corporate emails and found it increased about twelve percent between 2019 and 2023. The researchers speculated that remote work reduces informal clarification — in an office, you can just turn to a colleague and ask 'what does that mean?' In Slack, you have to type it out, and some people don't bother. So ambiguous language persists longer. Luna: That makes sense. The friction of asking for clarification is higher in writing, even in chat. So people just nod along and hope they figure it out later. Lucas: And that 'later' often never comes. Or it comes in the form of a mistake that costs time and money. So the remote-work shift might have widened the productivity gap caused by jargon. Luna: It seems like a small thing, but the numbers add up. Four thousand two hundred dollars per employee — that's not small at all. Lucas: It's not. And when you consider that the average large firm has tens of thousands of employees, we're talking about a hidden cost that rivals major line items. And unlike a lot of productivity challenges, this one doesn't require a big investment. It just requires awareness and a little discipline. I think that's the most encouraging takeaway: sometimes the biggest gains come from the simplest changes. Luna: And the best part is, you can start today. Just cut one buzzword from your next email and see what happens. Lucas: Exactly. I'm going to try it. Let's reconvene in a month and compare notes on whether people respond faster. Luna: Deal. And maybe we'll ask listeners to try it too — see if it makes a difference in their own work lives.