5 Of The Pettiest Passive-Aggressive Things People Say At Work

When someone loops in your boss in an email thread, it can be a passive-aggressive way to convey that they don’t trust you.

“This is really a flag that they would like for your manager to stay in the loop in order to have their request prioritized or there may be a lack of trust in the relationship between the two peers,” Cummings said. “Another way to fix this is to simply ask for the request to be prioritized or ask about the person’s bandwidth or timeline to get back to you.”

Using phrases like “A lot of us think” can be an inflammatory way to hide your views behind the vague opinion of many others.

“It suggests, ‘We’ve all been talking about you behind your back.’ It also is usually vague about who ‘us’ refers to, which means that the person receiving the information can’t have a real conversation with the people who supposedly think what they think,” Gallaher said. “It is far more effective and more self-accountable for each person to speak for themselves.”

These are passive-aggressive qualifiers in which the hostile tone contradicts their meaning.

When co-workers deploy these qualifiers in statements like, “Well, clearly, you know our company’s policy on this,” there is coded hostility, Howes said. “‘Why didn’t you know that? You should know better.’ That’s kind of the subtext there.”

A more tactful way to go is to point out to your co-worker, “Hey, you might not be aware,” or “Hey, not sure if you knew this."

Not only is this a condescending phrase that signals a lack of respect, it is also a common passive-aggressive one.

Instead of passively saying you don’t want to offend and then doing it anyway, you could directly state, “I’m concerned what I say might upset you, so I want to know: Do I have permission to give you feedback on something?” or “I’d love for us to build trust so we can have really open dialogue with each other. What do you think?”