From Inbox to Output: Understanding the Influence of Managerial Language on Performance

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Have you ever found yourself on the receiving end of an electronic message from your boss that emotionally derails your day?  Whether via DM or in an email, a message that comes across as aggressive, passive aggressive, sarcastic, or underhanded in a show of disdain from your manager does not a productive employee make.  The emotional distress that occurs from just one message is bad enough, but if you’re receiving messages of this kind on the regular, it can cripple your productivity leaving you staring at your screen wasting valuable energy on what your next move will be.  Whether that’s dusting off your resume, or simply trying to decide how to reply in the hopes of diffusing the situation, either way your upward momentum of completing your workload is disrupted further adding to the stress of it all.  With this being a common occurrence across all industries, periodically training managerial staff on how to better communicate with their employees is something that should be prioritized, but unfortunately it isn’t.

For any manager reading this, you may be wondering just what constitutes a rude email.  In an article for Negotiation Unleashed, Elizabeth Suárez covers these examples so perfectly that I secretly wonder if she’s hacked into my email account reading through some of my previous managers’ messages.  As Suárez lists, these short-tempered emails often insult your intelligence, question your loyalty, refer to your past performance in derogatory fashion (whether true or not), berate you for your lack of immediate response, or my personal favorite—are written in ALL CAPS!  Managers sending electronic messages like these are forgetting how to practice proper online etiquette, something we should all master in order to facilitate healthy and productive communication with our colleagues or subordinates.  

Online classes are a staple in today’s world, especially after the 2020 pandemic sent students home to continue their studies online in all levels of education.  If you haven’t attended an online class before, the curriculum and assignments are broken into modules a student works through during the semester which usually begin with the rules of online etiquette.  These modules educate you on what is deemed acceptable communication and what isn’t.  After having attended many online classes recently myself, I’m left wondering why something so easy couldn’t be incorporated into the many already existing human resources (HR) training programs offered at firms all across the nation. 

Corporations in every industry could benefit by adopting this protocol.  Imagine a pop-up window upon login flash an online etiquette reminder to all employees, even if one quickly dismisses it, at the very least, its repetition could draw attention to it being a tangible issue.  It may also give employees courage to reach out to HR when they’re in a toxic situation that’s affecting their work—in my experience these conversations happen only in whispers with no real solutions ever realized. 

If you’re someone who’s impervious to your manager lashing out in this way, consider yourself lucky.  And for those of you who believe complaining about rude emails is done by those who need to have thicker skin, it’s not that simple.  Some personality types value how others perceive them and their ability, so much so, that when they’re wrongfully attacked will suffer great anxiety diverting attention from their work and shifting it to defending themselves or appeasing their manager with a perfectly curated response to get back in their good graces.  If the employee had done nothing to warrant their manager’s abuse, imagine the time wasted falling down that rabbit hole. 

When you spend most of your waking hours at your job, a toxic environment also raises the probability of it wreaking havoc in your homelife.  As YoungAh Park, a professor at University of Illinois discusses for an article in The Economic Times, the stress you carry at work can travel home with you and begin to affect those closest to you. 

What I found in my previous study is that email incivility – this general rudeness over email, whether it’s the tone, content, or timing of a message – really stresses people out on a daily basis.  People who receive a greater number of negative, rude or just uncivil emails tend to report more strain at the end of their workday, which can manifest itself in all sorts of ways, from physical symptoms such as headaches to feeling negative emotions. (ET 2018)

She also adds, the need for self-preservation often finds one withdrawing from what stresses us, in this case our work, and we can project our stress onto our family members.  This stress that’s carried home can have your loved ones dealing with it in similar ways, and as Park shares, they too have the potential to become withdrawn in areas of their work and homelife. 

With the physical ailments that exposure to stress can potentially cause, coupled with the effects on our mental health, our ability to be productive in the workplace can begin to decline and any decline in quality or efficiency never goes unnoticed making this an endless cycle that doesn’t lead anywhere positive.  The irony I’ve witnessed myself is many corporations have implemented some wonderful initiatives regarding company-wide health and well-being programs that are practiced regularly, yet regarding mangers that browbeat more than they lead, you’ll often find the approach HR departments take to be off-putting.  It’s usually the subordinate who’s counseled, coached if you will, on how to better adapt to their manager’s bad behavior instead of insisting any such behavior not be accepted from any employee, including managers. 

This isn’t a campaign for managers to start giving everyone a trophy for just showing up. I’m aware managers need to be tough, unyielding at times so their team can meet the company’s expectations, but there must also be a level of respect that comes with that.  For a team to be successful, taking a player out of the game mentally doesn’t help to that end.  And isn’t it the goal as a manager to have your team produce timely and exceptional work that, in turn, reflects on your ability to manage them?  I’d love to see the standard of online communication we learn as students continue into the careers we chose.  It’s really tiring seeing what we find unacceptable in all other areas of online correspondence going unchecked in the workplace.  There aren’t enough hours in the day to be giving them up to this communication folly.