I’ve seen this expression a lot recently and it baffles me.
The word you are looking for is “effort,” or if you prefer adjectives, maybe something like “difficult.”
I read/hear sentences like this all day at work and I’ve taken to just interpreting them literally. So I’ll have you know I’m neither exercising nor on an elevator right now.
Even your "looking for" is a metaphor since you technically can't "look" for words (except as a metaphor for literally reading in a dictionary?) but we all know exactly what you mean. Moreover, if we trimmed language down to a minimal set and always used extremely precise meaning that might be an even worse experience than the "corporate speak" you're frustrated by.
Maybe you can redirect your anger to the part of corporate speak that I personally find annoying which is not the phrases per se but the propensity for using lots of words to say very little and to avoid directly taking responsibility for things. Let's put a pin in that one for now though and get something on the calendar to hash that out so we can get on the same page and circle back when we have a better bird's eye view on the action items and the right person to be decider :)
On the other hand you could take up loglan/lojban and maybe end up happier? Especially if it resulted in fewer meetings and managers.
and also:
let's all jump on a call, set kras so we stay on the ball, up our team work to get that perk, get our messaging right, so the kpi chart goes up and to the right.
go team! play ball!