Are Your Digital Messages Giving Your Colleagues Anxiety?
The way you respond online might be fracturing trust and connection. Here’s a better way.
Anxiety seems to be an unavoidable symptom of our times, and the workplace is not immune. Unfortunately, our growing reliance on digital communication — a dependency that’s only grown with the rise of hybrid work — is not only contributing to our workplace anxiety, but also actually a key cause of our stress. In a new study of over 2,000 American office workers, Quester found that 70% reported poor digital communication, with an average of four hours wasted due to issues with digital communication. Another survey found that professionals believe that their stress levels have risen in the last five years, with 76% of respondents reporting that work-related stress has had a negative impact on their personal relationships.
In the modern workplace, we’re regularly forced to read between the lines, deciphering our colleague’s messages through layers of passive aggression, typos, and subtext. How do we interpret a very tardy response, or a one-word email? What are we to make of someone who asks you to “work with their assistant” when you had scheduled a time to speak with that person directly?
