Let’s TOUCH BASE! 15 English idioms to use at work

Well hey there I'm Emma from mmmEnglish.

If there is a place where English idioms are used

most frequently

it's at work.

Learning and using these idioms in the workplace

with your colleagues, with your clients and your managers

is an essential communication skill.

You need to understand the people that you work with

and you want to develop a broader range of expressing

your ideas in English, don't you?

You want to sound intelligent and professional

and sometimes you want to sound funny.

Learning the business English idioms in today's lesson

is definitely going to help you to do that.

Are you ready?

Let's start at the very moment that you get your job or even

just before it because there are a couple of really fantastic

idioms that you can use to talk about this moment.

The first is to get your foot in the door.

And this means to enter an organisation or an industry

for the first time.

We use it to talk about starting out at a lower level

or maybe a less desirable position within the organisation

but there's a chance or an intention

of moving up and becoming more senior or becoming

more successful.

So it talks about an opportunity to get started at a company,

a company that you want to advance or progress within.

An internship is a great way to get your foot in the door,

to get your foot in the door

of a company that you really want to work for.

Volunteering in your industry

will probably help you to get your foot in the door,

you'll get to meet some people who work in your field,

you'll get some relevant experience.

So all of this is super helpful.

Now once you've got your foot in the door and you're starting

your new job, there's always a period of time,

maybe a week, two weeks, a month

where you've got to get used to things.

You need to learn all the administrative processes.

You've got to meet the team,

you've got to take over some new

projects and things that you're working on.

Hopefully, there'll be someone there to show you the ropes.

To show someone the ropes means

to show them how to do a job or an activity.

I've never worked in customer service before

but Kate showed me the ropes.

Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky when they start their job.

Sometimes you just get thrown in the deep end

which means you get put into a situation without a lot of

preparation or much introduction.

You've kind of got to just work it out for yourself.

I was thrown in the deep end with my first teaching job.

I had a class of fifty children with no experience or mentor

to guide me. I'd never taught kids before.

It was stressful. I had to learn really quickly.

Have you ever been thrown in the deep end

when you started a new job?

It's nasty.

Let me know about it down in the comments.

See if you can use that idiom yourself.

So yeah,

that first teaching job was a steep learning curve for me.

Have you heard about this noun before?

A learning curve.

It's often used with the adjective steep, a steep learning curve.

So we use learning curve to talk about new skills

that we're acquiring at a job and that learning curve describes

the rate at which someone progresses and they're learning

this new skill.

A steep learning curve is when you have to learn something

very quickly in a short space of time

and this can be really challenging

like walking up a steep hill

compared to walking up a nice gradual hill.

If you're starting a job with no prior experience,

it can be a really steep learning curve.

Or if you don't have anyone showing you the ropes,

the first few weeks are going to be difficult,

it's going to be quite stressful. It can be a steep learning curve.

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Let's focus on some idioms now that are useful to describe

the different ways of working.

If you do something by the book,

it means that you do something exactly as it should be done.

You follow the rules, the laws or the steps,

the procedure that you have been told to follow.

So you do everything correctly. It's by the book.

On the other hand, if you cut corners that means

you complete the task in the easiest, the quickest

and maybe the cheapest way possible. It means that

maybe you haven't done the job as

thoroughly as you should have done it and therefore

the end result is maybe not as good as it could have been.

Now look, the company will be audited next month

so I don't want anyone cutting corners.

We need everything done by the book!

Sometimes the work that you have to do is

difficult or it's complex.

And sometimes you have a lot of work to do

and not a lot of time to do it in, right?

The idiom to have your work cut out for you describes

exactly this situation.

Geez,

you'll have your work cut out for you finishing those

reports by Friday.

It's going to be hard work to get everything done by Friday.

There's a lot to do and not a lot of time

but then sometimes you think that a job is going to be hard

or it's going to take a lot of time but

you're surprised when you get something done

quickly and easily.

So in this situation, we use

make light work or short work of something.

He made light work of writing the reports.

He wrote them quickly and it was easy to do.

Now you can actually use this idiom

outside of a work context too.

Let's say I made a delicious cake

and when I came back an hour later it was all gone.

You certainly made short work of that cake.

It's gone, it was eaten very quickly. It was finished very quickly.

Communication is an essential part of our work lives, right?

Without effective communication,

most of our plans or our projects and our relationships,

they would completely fail.

So whether you work for yourself and most of the time you're

communicating with your own clients or maybe you work as

part of a team and you communicate with your colleagues

then there are definitely some awesome idioms to help you

communicate in English.

We use the idiom to touch base with somebody

in a similar way as we use the phrasal verb check in.

So when you touch base with someone you talk to them

quickly and you find out how they're doing

or what they think about something

or about a project that they've been working on.

Can we touch base next week sometime to discuss the budget?

Okay but what about when you're rushed, you're in a hurry,

you've got a lot of work to do and you just need to be quite direct

in this conversation, we need to

just talk about the things that are really important.

You want to cut to the chase.

This is the perfect idiom for that situation.

It means you want to talk about the important things

straight away without wasting any time.

I haven't got much time so let's just cut to the chase.

How much is this gonna cost?

Just be a little careful with this one.

Using this idiom in the wrong way

can come off a little rude at times.

You know if you're just

in a hurry and the other person is talking about something

totally unrelated or maybe you're not

particularly interested in it and you're thinking

please hurry up, come on.

Then that's not the right time to use this idiom,

to cut to the chase.

It's more something that you say when you want to

bypass or skip

the usual small talk and chit-chat and just

get to the important stuff.

We all know why we're here so let's just cut to the chase.

All right, managing the different relationships that you have at

work, maybe with colleagues and clients and different people

that you encounter at work. This is really important

and it means sometimes you've got to

hold back

and not say what you really think, you have to bite your tongue.

I wanted to tell him that his idea was ridiculous

but I bit my tongue.

Sometimes it's just not appropriate

to say what you really think at work, is it?

And that's exactly the situation where you might need to

bite your tongue.

Zip it. Don't say anything.

You know bite that tongue.

Now unfortunately and I think we've all probably experienced it,

problems can come up at work

so having a few creative ways to talk about things that are

bothering you or frustrating you can really help to

lighten the mood a little. So this one

to rock the boat,

it describes when you do or you say something that

upsets people or it causes problems.

Let's say you want to talk to your boss about your new manager

who actually has been spending a lot of time

outside of the office lately and then you think

she's been so stressed lately since Jessica resigned.

I don't want to rock the boat.

Maybe I'll just wait till next month to mention this.

I don't want to change or disrupt or affect

the current situation myself so I'm not gonna do anything.

Sometimes you have to deal with problems that are caused

by other people.

Maybe they're new and

they made a mistake or they did something by accident

or maybe you work with a really lazy, careless colleague

and they just don't really care much about their job.

But when it's you spending all of your time

trying to solve these problems that other people have created,

little annoying things that are stopping you from doing

your work, well,

then we can use this idiom to talk about that,

to put out fires.

Well we launched the product update successfully

but then no one could log into the platform.

I spent the day responding to complaints and putting out fires.

So I mean I spent the day

fixing the problems that were created by the platform update.

It was stressful, people were annoyed, it meant that I didn't get

any of the work that I was supposed to do done.

I just spent my day putting out fires.

Have you ever heard anyone say they're in hot water?

Well this means they're in trouble,

they could be in trouble with someone.

They're probably in a difficult situation because of something

that they did or didn't do and now they're at risk of being

criticised or embarrassed or punished.

The CEO's in a bit of hot water about those comments

that she made over the competitors.

Okay your work is done.

The day is over, it's time to go home.

Then you can call it a day.

I'm exhausted. Let's call it a day.

Okay, I think it's time to call it a day.

We'll finish the rest tomorrow.

So there you have it, my friends!

You just learned fifteen useful business idioms,

all of them are essential to learn and to use at work.

The best way to do that, to learn and to use English idioms

fluently is to think about when and how they might apply to you

and to your work life.

So for homework, I want you to choose five of the idioms

that you learned in this lesson and tell me about

your workplace and how these idioms relate to you

down in the comments below.

I'll make sure I get down there and I'll check them for you

just to make sure that you're using these idioms in the

right context and in the right way.

Thank you so much for joining me today,

I will see you in this next lesson right here.

I think you're gonna love it!