What does "business optional" mean?
A recent question at Academia SE elicited an answer that used the term "business optional":
In the corporate work environment it is quite common for things to not really be entirely optional. A regional term I've familiar with is "business optional," but your supervisor might say something like "[person] is going to be at this event and you should meet them," or a mentor might tell you "this will be good for your career." All of these are effectively code meaning that even though nobody is going to force you to show up, it behooves you to show up. Usually this is something that comes up for holiday parties but it's not just limited to those.
(The region was the U.S. Northeast.)
The writer explained how it could be used in an academic environment, in a comment:
It's basically the same things as a tenure track professor hearing the "suggestion" that they should look into doing more service work for their department, to enhance their tenure application package.
I tried to find a definition of the phrase and I tried googling to find the phrase in use, and came up empty, so I thought I'd ask here.
The usual requirements for documentation will not hold for this question.
Can "business optional" mean what the cited Academia participant described? Please give some examples of its use.
An idea: might it mean that the thing being described is optional, in the realm of the business world? I found several uses of "academic optional" that worked that way, e.g."The module also complements other academic optional modules."
Solution 1:
Can it mean what they described it as?
Sure.
The adjective "business" is qualifying the sense of "optional" which is intended... in their case, allegedly, the ironic sense that the business will call it "optional" but penalize failure to appear.
This is a bog standard aspect of the English language and, indeed, all adjectival use. The adjective describes which particular instance(s) of the noun is/are intended. "Business casual" isn't really casual. It's just casual for a business context. Allegedly, "business optional" isn't really optional. It's just optional compared to things where you will immediately lose your job for failure to appear.
Does it mean what they describe it as?
Eh...
Well, you already did the eugooglizing for us and came up empty so you know it's not terribly common... but I'm sure this kind of snide complaint about corporate's requirements isn't something anyone wants to document. The whole idea of optional-but-not-really-optional is that it is notionally optional but anyone with their head/heart in the right place should want to show up on their own initiative (in corporate's eyes).
Solution 2:
I'm the person that used the term, so it strikes me that there are three aspects to this question:
- What "business optional" mean?
- How widespread is the use of the term?
- Will people generally get what you mean if you use the term?
For the first point, I gave an explanation of what I meant over on Academia.SE but to reiterate,
When attendance at a company event is optional, but not attending may affect your career.
There seem to be a solid answer to the the second point: the term is not very wide spread. It might have been a mea culpa on my part to use it expecting people to know it, but that's also why I provided an explanation once asked. Incipiently the underlying concept of "business optional" is fairly well known, see advice on attending company parties:
And I should note here that while I think this is BS much of the time, it’s a more reasonable expectation if you’re in a management role. The higher up you go, the more you’re expected to appear at these things, so that you don’t create the impression that you’re too important or simply don’t care to mingle with those under you.
Or Forbes for that matter:
Attend the event. Management will see your attendance and may view the event as “team building.”
I also still swear I've heard the term in a show like "Office Space" or the like, but that could just be the Mandela Effect. Conversely, it may have been a term used at the company I was employed at which could have given a false impression it was wider spread than I thought.
Finally, will people get what you mean if you use the term. It depends. I tired it out on a couple of my colleagues and it was hit or miss. Some picked up on the meaning and didn't need an explanation, others didn't care of the term. Everyone was pretty much familiar with the concept of "optional" not really being optional though.