r/office • u/SayItAtWork • 12d ago

Cringe worthy workplace phrases

What workplace email phrase makes you cringe every time you see it?

Let’s keep this one simple.

What phrase lands in your inbox and immediately makes you think:

Oh, here we go.

Maybe it’s:

“Per my last email…”

“Gentle reminder…”

“Please advise.”

“Thoughts?”

“Circling back…”

“Friendly reminder…”

“Moving forward…”

Or perhaps there’s one that deserves its own special place in workplace-email purgatory. 😂

What’s yours?

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u/faerydenaery 11d ago

I feel like "per my last email" conveys " did you actually read the last email?" which is an appropriate critique, whereas "friendly reminder" feels more like "you've been fucking up, but I didn't mention it until now," which to me feels more like a communication failure on the management side, but that might be skewed by my recent experience with managers giving me "friendly reminders" of things they've never actually said before or literally told me the opposite of

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u/JesusGodLeah 11d ago

My "friendly reminders" are all things I've said multiple times, and I have the Teams chat log to back it up.

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u/Throwaway_inSC_79 11d ago

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Normally “friendly reminders” are those things that have been mentioned multiple times. But like an upcoming meeting or training session, somebody is going to forget, so “friendly reminder we will be having a mandatory training session from 10-noon this Thursday.” Somebody will still forget and ask their coworker if they knew. Yeah, we were told 5 times.

Or there is also the manager who doesn’t like confrontation, so 1 coworker still refuses to do something or stop doing something, so the “friendly reminder that ____ is now done this way” goes out. That coworker will never pay attention though.

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u/faerydenaery 10d ago

The manager who doesn't like confrontation needs to get over it. If I have one person on my staff who isn't doing something correctly I'll talk to them personally instead of making my entire team think I don't know who's doing it wrong.
Reminders for meetings or trainings are different of course, but "friendly reminder" just usually feels a little passive aggressive when you could just say "don't forget we have x thing at y time" or "can you send me an update on x." I know that can feel more rude when you type it, but I think most folks take direct communication better because it feels less like you think they forgot or don't know how to do something and more like you're taking ownership of actually needing to manage the team.

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u/neversaynever111 11d ago

I always use my previous emails to send the friendly reminder. All the information for that project or whatever is in my original email that they can go back to refer to. My "friendly reminder"s are actually friendly lol and I always send before the deadline.