What we need in our work communication is not more professional politeness or less formal, chat-based messaging applications like Slack. We need honesty. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to see honesty as self-indulgent or disrespectful. I’d argue the opposite is true. Honesty, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient for all parties in the moment, pays dividends later. It builds trust. When my partner Anne Helen Petersen and I were interviewing people for our forthcoming book on remote work, a frequent lament from both middle managers and workers was that they didn’t feel like they knew how to succeed in their jobs; that they were guessing what their superiors and coworkers wanted and, even when they asked, they didn’t quite trust the responses they got back.
I used to work at a place where we would occasionally send reports of network misuse that sometimes included inappropriate images the user had stored on work devices. One person had an email system that was somehow set up to make any attached images the profile pic for that account. So she would end up with random pornographic images as the profile pic whenever she received reports from us. She said she had no idea how to change it and could we please help? Since she was not part of our company, and I have no idea how that could even happen, I just started sending her kitten pictures after every report that included an image. Problem solved.

The one I’ve always wished I was brave enough to write was the one I once got which simply said:
My boss does not understand OOO and thinks I saw his email and sent the reply personally and does not understand why I didn’t answer the actual question.