You know the coworker who messages “hi” and then disappears? The one who “circles back” well before you’ve had a chance to respond? What about the one who sends a five-paragraph email when one sentence would suffice?
Of course you do: People with annoying communication habits exist in every conference room, Zoom tile, and inbox in the world. And they’re more than just a minor workplace woe.
“Communication is the most important aspect of our jobs,” says Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them. “We don’t realize this, but it’s [a major] reason why people are happy at work—and also why they disengage and leave.”
Your communication skills, or lack thereof, are on display during everything from daily banter in the break room to negotiating with your boss, running meetings, handling conflict, and dispensing feedback. “When these things break down, people feel really, really miserable at work,” West says.
We asked experts which communication habits are most likely to drive your colleagues up the wall—and why.
Being long-winded
One of the fastest ways to frustrate your coworkers is to bury the point. Think: turning a quick Slack into a TED Talk, or answering a yes-or-no question with context, history, nuance, and a surprise appendix. “You’re so caught up in your own work, and these details are so interesting and relevant to you, that you might not be stopping to ask, ‘OK, what does this other person actually need to know?’” says Alison Green, who runs the work-advice blog Ask a Manager. Often, the answer is: not all of that.
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As Green puts it, “What’s the upshot?” In many cases, you can skip the backstory and go straight to the one actionable thing your colleague actually needs. If they want more context, they’ll ask.
Starting messages with “hi” and no context
It’s the Slack message heard ’round the world: a lone “hi” followed by…nothing. The habit creates ambiguity and forces the recipient to wait and guess how urgent it is with zero clues. Surely the person messaging you wants something other than to extend a greeting; why can’t they come out and say it?
The catch: There’s a communication divide at play. “Some people feel like it’s very rude to just launch into their question,” says Green, who’s received an increasing number of reader emails about this issue. Others feel the exact opposite way, because “you have no ability to assess how to prioritize it.” The middle ground? Be polite and direct. Say hello, then immediately get to the point. Your coworkers don’t need a suspenseful reveal.
Setting a deadline—and then acting like it’s urgent days later
You say something is due in two weeks. Then, a few days later, you fire off a check-in message: “Hey, how’s that coming along?”
To your coworker, it raises an immediate question: Did the deadline change? Why the sudden panic?
This habit comes up a lot, Green says. “The person sets a deadline but then acts like there’s a problem well before the deadline because they haven’t heard anything,” she says. “It’s not that there’s no room for doing that, because sometimes it does make sense to check in, but often, it’s going to aggravate people because they’re going to feel like, ‘You told me I had two weeks. Why are you nagging me about this now?’”
Often, it’s not about the work—it’s about nerves. If that sounds familiar, make sure the deadline you’re setting is the right one, Green suggests, and accounts for any check-ins you’ll want along the way.
Slow response time
Silence speaks volumes—especially at work. When you’re clearly online but don’t respond to a colleague for hours, if at all, “It’s really a signal of the level of respect,” says Erica Dhawan, a leadership expert and author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance. Long delays can trigger what she calls “digital anxiety,” where colleagues start to wonder: Is she ignoring me? Did I do something wrong?
The fix is simple: Acknowledge the message, even if you can’t answer right away. A quick “Got this—will respond later today” goes a long way toward keeping everyone on the same page.
Sending emails with vague subject lines
RE: We need to talk. (About your subject line.)
When it’s vague—or missing entirely—the person on the receiving end has to spend time parsing the email to understand what you need. That’s what psychologist Liane Davey calls “thought load”: the strain we create for others when we don’t communicate clearly. “We should have ‘return to sender’ with emails that are vague and unclear,” she says.
Read More: What to Say Instead of ‘I Hope This Email Finds You Well’
A better approach, Dhawan adds, is to treat the subject line as “the new eye contact”—a quick signal that tells people exactly what matters. For example: “Decision required by 3 p.m.,” which helps people triage the request. If your colleague can’t instantly tell what you need, it’s time to rewrite it.
Softening feedback so much the message gets lost
Managers often think they’re being kind when they soften criticism—but doing so can backfire.
When Green coached managers professionally, she saw the same scenario play out repeatedly: Someone would believe they’d delivered clear, serious feedback, while the employee walked away having missed the message entirely. “It came up so much that it was almost comical, except the stakes were so high that it was actually tragic,” she says. “Managers would think they had given very serious performance feedback to an employee, like the kind of thing that could potentially jeopardize someone’s job. But they softened it so much that the message was not actually delivered.”
Green would often ask: “Did you use the words, ‘I could end up needing to let you go over this’?” At least 75% of the time, the answer was no, and it turned out the manager had sugar-coated their message, even after role-playing the scenario.
The fix is to be clear, not harsh. If something is serious, say so plainly. Otherwise, you’re not sparing someone’s feelings; you’re leaving them without the information they need to improve.
Creating unnecessary uncertainty
Anyone who’s ever received a vague meeting request—or a “can you hop on a quick call?” message—knows how fast anxiety can spiral.
It’s called “uncertainty-based stress,” and it’s a top trigger for workplace anxiety, West says. “Bosses do this all the time: ‘I need to meet with you. It’s important. How does Monday sound?’ You don’t know what it’s about, and you spend the whole weekend stressed out.” (No wonder, she adds, that couples’ therapists spend so much time discussing work issues that bleed into their clients’ relationships and overall well-being.)
The solution is to be specific. A quick note about what you want to discuss can prevent unnecessary stress and make conversations more productive from the start.
Letting your stress spill onto others
We all have bad days at work. The problem is when they become everyone else’s problem, too.
After an unpleasant exchange in a meeting or a tense one-on-one with your boss, people naturally want to talk to someone else about what’s going on. “That’s what we need to regulate our emotions and to feel better about the situation,” says West, who studies stress contagion. “But that pulls that other person in, and they can catch our stress. It can be super disruptive when it happens all the time.”
That’s why immediately venting—especially in the middle of the workday—isn’t always the best move. Instead, West suggests giving yourself some space first: Resist the urge to hop on the phone or Slack or plant yourself on a friend’s desk, and instead take 10 or 15 minutes to cool off. Then share more intentionally—ideally at a time that works for both of you.
Ignoring or mismatching communication norms
Emojis have become corporate lingo—but only certain ones, and only in some offices, and only part of the time.
That’s the tricky thing about workplace communication: The rules aren’t universal. Every team develops its own unwritten norms, including how quickly to respond, how formal to be, and even which emojis register as friendly vs. unprofessional. “We have norms for how we communicate that we don’t realize we have,” West says.
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She recalls working with an organization that brought her in to solve a communication breakdown—only to discover it all stemmed from something surprisingly small. “The person used smiley emoticons, and their team didn’t like it,” she says. It became such a sticking point that the company paid West, as she puts it, “a stupid amount of money” to fix what was essentially a clash over emoji use. No one had said anything directly, but it was bothering people enough to derail communication.
The fix is simple, if a little awkward: Talk about it. Making expectations explicit—around communication tone, timing, and even emoji use—can prevent small misunderstandings from turning into bigger ones.
Poorly run meetings that waste everyone’s time
Few things sour the workday like a meeting that should have been an email.
In most cases, the issue isn’t the meeting itself: It’s how it’s run. “The person in charge of running the meeting isn’t good at facilitating it,” Green says. “Without someone actively guiding the discussion, conversations drift, time gets wasted, and people leave wondering why they were there in the first place.”
A better approach: set a clear agenda (ideally distributed beforehand) and stick to it. “Be willing to be very assertive about managing the time,” Green says. That includes setting expectations upfront and cutting things off when they go off track.
Being too loud—and not realizing it
The return to the office brought something else back, too: noise.
“Being too loud at work is a real problem coming back from the pandemic,” West says. People got used to their own spaces—and their own volume—and those habits didn’t always translate well once they were back around coworkers.
That can show up in all kinds of ways: taking Zoom calls at full volume, playing music out loud, or chatting in shared spaces while others are trying to focus. “There’s a tendency for people to raise their voice when they’re on Zoom,” West says. “They talk louder than they do in person—they’re actually kind of yelling quite a bit.”
Part of the issue is that today’s offices aren’t built for this kind of noise. “We’ve shrunk our workspaces,” she says, which means people are often working just feet away from someone else’s meeting (or their personal phone call). And while it might feel awkward to say something, especially if the person is more senior, staying silent can leave you “miserable all the time.”
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require some coordination. Teams should set basic norms around sound—where to take calls, when to move conversations elsewhere, and what’s appropriate in shared spaces.
Oversharing at work
The workplace has gotten more open—but that doesn’t mean anything goes.
Some people are comfortable sharing everything from health struggles to relationship issues, while others would rather keep things strictly professional. “Don’t assume that these are things you can bring to work,” West says. Without clear norms, those differences can create awkward moments for everyone involved.
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West says she’s seen situations where one employee opens up, expecting support, only to be met with visible discomfort. Why? Because expectations weren’t aligned. “We’re seeing lots of variability in the workplace around acceptability,” she says. And while openness can be valuable, “bosses are not therapists—they’re not trained to do that.”
The fix: Set clearer boundaries. That often starts at the organizational level, through HR policies and team conversations about what’s appropriate. Otherwise, people are left to navigate these gray areas on their own.