What Are The Biggest Office Pet Peeves?

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it's a truth, universally acknowledged, that work-related meetings are literally the worst. As a result, we all have our own office pet peeves — the boss who pontificates too long, chairs that don't swivel correctly, your coworker who smacks their gum without a care for who's forced to overhear, and so, so much more. With this in mind, researchers at Igloo Software decided to take a closer look at how, exactly, office workers feel about meetings.

The study surveyed 1,000 corporate office workers on the subject of office etiquette in the modern world, and if you've ever worked in an office, the results probably won't exactly come as a shock. As much as we all loved to watch Don Draper doing his smarmy best every week on our screens, we're rather less enamored of bosses who drop buzzwords in every other sentence in real life. In fact, everyone hates being instructed to "think outside the box." Obviously, I agree — what does that phrase even mean? It sounds like something Ryan would say in his douchey-boss phase of The Office, and nobody wants to be associated with that. Dark times.

But I digress. Judging from the study, people hate it when their bosses use trite terms in general.

Oh, God. I think we can all agree that "synergy" is the worst term in the history of mankind, hands down.

Furthermore, Igloo's research shows that people are evenly split on whether meetings are useful in the first place. Only 56 percent of young people said they found them useful, and the majority of respondents aged 35 to 64 said meetings are a waste of time. Weirdly enough, millennials were the most likely to find meetings productive.

Even when our bosses manage to avoid buzzwords, we're still likely to find something to get annoyed about — especially when it comes to conference calls, because those are the worst.

All in all, I think we can take a few things away from the study: Don't hold a conference call in a coffee shop, and please stop using the phrase "touch base," because it's not cute. In fact, if you want to be more productive, just try making some work friends.

Images: djile/Fotolia; Courtesy of Igloo Software