Your New Hire Doesn't Know Your Shorthand Yet

A person can arrive with years of experience and still need help understanding how your team talks about its work.

The initials on a meeting invitation, the nickname for a shared folder, and the meaning of a status label may be obvious to everyone who has been there for a while. To someone new, they are another part of the job to learn. Knowing the profession and knowing your workplace are different kinds of knowledge.

Make that local language part of the welcome. Explain unfamiliar terms as they arise, connect them to something concrete, and give the person a short reference they can return to. The aim is to help a colleague follow the work, not to test how quickly they can pick up the vocabulary.

The University of Minnesota's guide to planning employee onboarding specifically includes jargon and acronyms among the things a newcomer needs help learning. It is a useful reminder that an introduction to the team also includes an introduction to the words the team uses.

Explain the word in the work

Spelling out an acronym is a start. Showing what it refers to is often the more useful part.

Here is an illustrative example. A supervisor asks a new office coordinator to add an item to the "WIP review." Explaining that WIP means "work in progress" answers one question. The coordinator may still need to know which review, where the list lives, and what belongs on it.

A fuller explanation could sound like this: "We call our Tuesday discussion of unfinished requests the WIP review. This is the list we use. Add requests that are waiting for information, and include a short note about what is missing."

Now the term is attached to a recognizable piece of work. The person has something to look at and a reason to use it.

Ordinary words deserve the same attention. In an invented example, one team might use "closed" to mean that a request has been answered. Another might mean that the answer has been checked and recorded. Neither meaning is apparent from the word alone. Show the new colleague an example that makes your team's meaning clear.

You do not need to explain every expression in the business on the first morning. Start with the language the person will encounter in their first assignments, then add context as the work expands.

Keep the reference close to the task

A short reference can give someone a place to check a term without having to interrupt the same conversation again.

Keep it in a location the person can access during their normal working day. Include the term, its meaning in your workplace, and a simple example or link to the relevant resource. For the imagined WIP review, that might be one sentence about the meeting beside a link to its current list.

Choose the entries for usefulness. The names of the systems a person will use, the abbreviations in their regular meetings and the labels on their everyday work are a reasonable starting point. A directory of every acronym the company has ever used is a different project.

Ask a colleague who knows the work to check the explanations. Two departments may use the same letters for different things, or an old nickname may point people toward a resource that has moved. Where a familiar word has several meanings, say which one applies.

Give someone responsibility for keeping the reference current, and let new colleagues suggest missing entries. A question asked during training may reveal a definition worth adding for the next person, too.

Make clarification an ordinary conversation

Even with a reference, people will need to ask questions. Leave room for that in the way you introduce the work.

For example: "We use a lot of shorthand here. If I use a term you haven't heard, please stop me. You won't be the first person to ask."

Then respond in the same spirit when someone does ask. Give the explanation without making the question a joke at their expense. If you are in the middle of something time-sensitive, arrange a specific chance to return to it rather than leaving the person with "you'll get used to it."

ADP's employer guide to onboarding recommends clear first-week instructions and frequent check-ins that give new employees opportunities to ask questions. Use those conversations to ask which terms still need explaining, alongside the practical questions about the work itself.

There is no need to remove every useful abbreviation from your workplace. Help people understand the ones they need, and use familiar words when an abbreviation adds nothing. A new colleague should have a clear way into the conversation, even before the language feels like their own.

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