Dive Brief:

• Writing at The Guardian, James Gingell says that if George Orwell were alive today, he would have deplored the bureaucratic repression of HR when it comes to language.
• Orwell would have "hated their blind loyalty to power, their unquestioning faithfulness to process, their abhorrence of anything or anyone deviating from the mean." HR managers, basically, could be a little more flexible.
• HR, at its essence, has a clarity problem that managers can easily address.

Dive Insight:

While Gingell attacks HR with an overly broad brush, HR has been a buzzword-filled industry for quite awhile.

Gingell, writing about British businesses (though he no doubt feels the same about HR around the globe) believes HR "deliberately misuses language as a sort of low-tech mind control to avert our eyes from office atrocities and keep us fixed on our inboxes."  He then tosses out examples of HR doublespeak such as annual leave, rightsizing, off-boarding and streamlining as examples of HR speak.

While a little overblown, Gingell, who wrote a similar, longer article on the topic at VICE.com in 2014, makes a valid point about how HR often finds ways to soften harsh workplace realities with buzzwords. His advice for HR? Focus on clarity over obsfucation and avoid buzzword fads.