When a 2022 survey by the language platform Preply asked 1,264 Americans which phrases they consider the most passive-aggressive at work, the results read like a greatest hits of corporate Slack. Topping the list: “As you no doubt are aware…” Followed by “For future reference,” “Friendly reminder,” “CC’ing [my boss] for visibility,” and the all-time classic, “Per my last email.”

You know the feeling. “Friendly reminder” appears in your inbox and something in you wants to hurl the laptop across the room.

The words are soft. The smiley face might even be there. But you know, somehow, in your bones, that you’ve just been told off. And if you mention it to anyone, you sound paranoid.

That gap is the whole game. The phrase isn’t cruel on the surface. It’s wrapped in the language of professionalism, of niceness, of just-checking-in. The discomfort lands inside you, with no clean place to put it. You can’t reasonably complain about a “friendly reminder.” You can only stew. You can read the full Preply survey here.

The polite knife

We can’t help but think about what these phrases share. They’re all technically courteous. None of them include an insult.

And yet anyone who has worked in an office, or really any setting where adults must coordinate over text, recognizes the precise sting of receiving one.

“As you no doubt are aware” is doing the most work. It implies you should know something. It also implies the sender knows you don’t. The phrase performs respect while delivering condescension.

“Per my last email” does something similar. It functions as a paper trail. The translation is roughly: I already told you this, and now I am telling you again, and I am also documenting that I told you.

Dr. Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguistics professor cited in the Preply piece, made a point that’s worth sitting with: “terms that a receiver may view as passive aggressive may be attempts at politeness by the speaker.” The same phrase that wounds one person was, to the sender, an effort to soften a direct request. Workplace language is tangled like that. The “friendly” in “friendly reminder” might be sincere. Or it might be a velvet glove. Often, neither party can say with certainty which one it was. Though the survey suggests the ambiguity isn’t being interpreted generously: 73% of Americans report experiencing passive aggression at work, and of those, 52% encounter it at least weekly. So whatever the speakers think they’re doing, the receivers are mostly hearing it as hostility in soft clothing.

Why no one feels safe being direct

Here’s where it gets interesting. 82% of Americans admit to being passive-aggressive themselves. 52% admit to it at work specifically. Most of us are doing this, it seems. We all know it’s annoying. We do it anyway.

The Preply data offers a reason. 38% of respondents feel their workplace actively incentivizes passive-aggressive communication. 39% don’t feel free to directly express their feelings at work.

If you can’t say “this deadline is unreasonable and I’m frustrated,” you might end up writing “just bumping this up. Let me know if there’s any flexibility on the timeline ☺.” Same emotional content. Different package. The package is the part you’re allowed to deliver.

There’s a real cost to teaching everyone to communicate this way. Plain language gets eroded. Trust gets eroded. People spend their afternoons re-reading a single Slack message trying to figure out whether they’re in trouble. 

What we keep coming back to

We don’t think the answer is to ban “friendly reminder” forever. Sometimes a friendly reminder is just a friendly reminder. The phrase isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens when an entire workplace runs on a thin film of niceness over a base layer of unspoken pressure, and the niceness is the only language anyone is allowed to speak in.

So ask yourself, honestly: when was the last time you sent a “per my last email” instead of saying what you actually meant? The fix isn’t a list of banned phrases. It’s the harder thing. Build the kind of psychological safety where saying what you actually mean doesn’t carry political consequences. When people can write “I need this by Thursday or the project slips” without bracing for fallout, they’ll stop reaching for the velvet glove. When they can’t, the gloves multiply.

And every one of us is either making that climate or tolerating it. The smile keeps doing its job because we keep letting it. The next “friendly reminder” you draft is a choice. Send the velvet glove, or send the actual sentence underneath it. One of those builds the workplace we all claim to want. The other is why we’re still here, deleting replies and stewing at our desks.