I’ve been working remotely for about a year now and overall the job is pretty relaxed. Everyone communicates mostly through Slack and email, so it’s not like we interact face to face much. Last week my boss put a meeting on my calendar called “communication improvement discussion.” Which already sounded a little ominous. The meeting was at like 9:30 in the morning, so I figured it was probably about some project update or something I missed. But when the meeting started he pulled up a few emails I had sent recently and said some people felt my tone was coming across “a little blunt.” The emails he showed were literally things like: “Hi, can you send the updated file when you get a chance?” and “Just checking if there’s an update on this.” That was it. At first I honestly thought he was joking. Those seem like completely normal work emails to me. I wasn’t being sarcastic or annoyed or anything, I was just asking for updates. Apparently a couple people interpreted them as passive aggressive. Which confused me because I genuinely had no idea they sounded that way. Then he suggested I try adding more exclamation points or emojis so the tone feels friendlier. So now I’m sitting there writing emails like “Hi!! Just checking in on this when you have a moment 😊” which honestly feels kind of ridiculous. I get that tone is harder to read through text when everyone’s remote, but now I’m weirdly self-conscious about every message I send. Like I’ll type something normal and then sit there thinking “does this sound rude somehow?” Remote work is strange sometimes. Maybe I’m overthinking it but I didn’t realize punctuation was such a big deal.

EDIT : Me (M29)