Office English / Bad news

Sometimes we have to give or receive bad news at work.

Even if you're really, kind of, grown up about it, it's still a difficult thing to hear. So to give that information is equally difficult, I'd say.

It's important to remember that you're talking to a real person and this bad news is going to affect them in a personal way, and you have to take that into account rather than just following business kind of speak.

In this episode of Office English, we're talking about the language of bad news.

Welcome to Office English, the podcast where we discuss business language to help you succeed at work.

Today we're talking about bad news. Nobody likes talking about bad news, right Phil? But sometimes at work we have to.

OK you're talking about bad news. What do we mean by bad news at work? What things can be bad news at work?

So it's things that might affect your job in a bad way. So it might be a company-wide problem, maybe financial difficulties, decisions have to be made about what people can afford ,what jobs are going to remain and who might be losing their job. Or it might be something more specific to you, so your manager might need to give you bad news about a report you've written, or some work you've done, or something that's happened in your department that affects you.

And when people give bad news, they often don't like doing it and so they'll often use something which we call a business euphemism. And that means sort of a word or a phrase which sounds innocent, sounds harmless, but actually could mean something quite bad or serious. So they're trying to hide the bad news from you or make it sound like a positive thing, when it might actually be bad for your future at the company.

So, in this episode of Office English we're going to look at some of these business euphemisms, so that you can recognise bad news, and we'll also talk about some phrases you can use if you need to deliver bad news to somebody else.