Phrasal Verbs You'll Hear in Every Office

Workplace English runs on phrasal verbs. A colleague will follow up, push back, roll out, catch up and sign off in a single message, and none of those appear in the textbook chapter on business vocabulary.

They are also a register trap. Call off the meeting is normal speech; the meeting has been cancelled is what the email says. Knowing both, and knowing which is which, is most of what "sounding professional" means.

Meetings and scheduling

Phrasal verb	Means	Formal alternative
set up	arrange	arrange, schedule
put off	postpone	postpone, defer
call off	cancel	cancel
move up	make earlier	bring forward
push back	make later	delay, reschedule
run over	last too long	overrun
kick off	begin	commence, begin
wrap up	finish	conclude

• Can we push the review back to Thursday?
• The demo ran over by twenty minutes, so we wrapped up early.

Note that push back has a second meaning — to disagree — and context is the only thing separating them: She pushed back on the estimate has nothing to do with the calendar.

Getting work done

Phrasal verb	Means
follow up (on)	check progress after
carry out	perform, do
take on	accept responsibility for
hand over	transfer to someone else
sort out	resolve
figure out	work out, understand
look into	investigate
draw up	prepare (a document)
roll out	release gradually
scale back	reduce

• I'll look into it and follow up tomorrow.
• We're rolling the feature out to ten percent of users first.

The one to get right is "follow up" — as a verb it is two words (I'll follow up), as a noun or adjective it is hyphenated (a follow-up email). Writing "I'll followup" is a small error that gets noticed.

Talking about people and decisions

Phrasal verb	Means
bring up	raise (a topic)
point out	draw attention to
back up	support
rule out	eliminate as a possibility
go with	choose
sign off on	formally approve
step down	resign from a position
fill in for	temporarily replace

• She brought up a good point about the deadline.
• Legal still has to sign off on the contract.
• I'm filling in for Marta while she's away.

Two you will meet in interviews

Come across as — to give an impression. He came across as very organised. This is what an interviewer thinks in the room, so it is worth being able to describe.

Get up to speed — to reach the level of knowledge needed. It took me two weeks to get up to speed on the codebase. Almost obligatory when answering "tell me about joining a new team".

Speech versus writing

The same message, twice:

Spoken, to a colleague

We had to call off Tuesday's session because the client pushed the deadline back. I'll set something up for next week and follow up with the notes.

Written, to a client

Tuesday's session has been cancelled, as the deadline has been deferred. I will schedule an alternative for next week and share the notes afterwards.

Neither is better. The first in an email to a client reads too casual; the second, said out loud in a stand-up, sounds stiff and slightly cold. Fluency at work is the ability to choose.

Try it yourself

The quiz below tests the meanings, the push back ambiguity, and the register choice between the two columns.