12 Communication Habits That Annoy Your Coworkers And How To Fix Them

You know the coworker who messages “hi” and then disappears? The one who “circles back” well before you’ve had a chance to respond? What about the one who sends a five-paragraph email when one sentence would suffice? Of course you do: People with annoying communication habits exist in every conference room, Zoom tile, and inbox in the world. And they’re more than just a minor workplace woe.

“Communication is the most important aspect of our jobs,” says Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them. “We don’t realize this, but it’s [a major] reason why people are happy at work, and also why they disengage and leave.”

Your communication skills, or lack thereof, are on display during everything from daily banter in the break room to negotiating with your boss, running meetings, handling conflict, and dispensing feedback. “When these things break down, people feel really, really miserable at work,” West says.

We asked experts which communication habits are most likely to drive your colleagues up the wall, and why.

Being long-winded

One of the fastest ways to frustrate your coworkers is to bury the point. Think: turning a quick Slack into a TED Talk, or answering a yes-or-no question with context, history, nuance, and a surprise appendix. “You’re so caught up in your own work, and these details are so interesting and relevant to you, that you might not be stopping to ask, ‘OK, what does this other person actually need to know?’” says Alison Green, who runs the work-advice blog Ask a Manager. Often, the answer is: not all of that. As Green puts it, “What’s the upshot?” In many cases, you can skip the backstory and go straight to the one actionable thing your colleague actually needs. If they want more context, they’ll ask.

Starting messages with “hi” and no  context

It’s the Slack message heard ’round the world: a lone “hi” followed by… nothing. The habit creates ambiguity and forces the recipient to wait and guess how urgent it is with zero clues. Surely the person messaging you wants something other than to extend a greeting; why can’t they come out and say it? The catch: There’s a communication divide at play. “Some people feel like it’s very rude to just launch into their question,” says Green, who’s received an increasing number of reader emails about this issue. Others feel the exact opposite way, because “you have no ability to assess how to prioritize it.” The middle ground? Be polite and direct. Say hello, then immediately get to the point. Your coworkers don’t need a suspenseful reveal.

Setting a deadline and then acting like it’s  urgent days later

You say something is due in two weeks. Then, a few days later, you fire off a check-in message: “Hey, how’s that coming along?” To your coworker, it raises an immediate question: Did the deadline change? Why the sudden panic? This habit comes up a lot, Green says. “The person sets a deadline but then acts like there’s a problem well before the deadline because they haven’t heard anything,” she says. “It’s not that there’s no room for doing that, because sometimes it does make sense to check in, but often, it’s going to aggravate people because they’re going to feel like, ‘You told me I had two weeks. Why are you nagging me about this now?’”

Often, it’s not about the work, it’s about nerves. If that sounds familiar, make sure the deadline you’re setting is the right one, Green suggests, and accounts for any check-ins you’ll want along the way.

Slow response time

Silence speaks volumes—especially at work. When you’re clearly online but don’t respond to a colleague for hours, if at all, “It’s really a signal of the level of respect,” says Erica Dhawan, a leadership expert and author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance. Long delays can trigger what she calls “digital anxiety,” where colleagues start to wonder: Is she ignoring me? Did I do something wrong? The fix is simple: Acknowledge the message, even if you can’t answer right away. A quick “Got this will respond later today” goes a long way toward keeping everyone on the same page.

Sending emails with vague subject lines

RE: We need to talk. (About your subject line.) When it’s vague, or missing entirely, the person on the receiving end has to spend time parsing the email to understand what you need. That’s what psychologist Liane Davey calls “thought load”: the strain we create for others when we don’t communicate clearly. “We should have ‘return to sender’ with emails that are vague and unclear,” she says.

A better approach, Dhawan adds, is to treat the subject line as “the new eye contact”, a quick signal that tells people exactly what matters. For example: “Decision required by 3 p.m.,” which helps people triage the request. If your colleague can’t instantly tell what you need, it’s time to rewrite it.

Softening feedback so much the message gets lost

Managers often think they’re being kind when they soften criticism but doing so can backfire. When Green coached managers professionally, she saw the same scenario play out repeatedly: Someone would believe they’d delivered clear, serious feedback, while the employee walked away having missed the message entirely. “It came up so much that it was almost comical, except the stakes were so high that it was actually tragic,” she says. “Managers would think they had given very serious performance feedback to an employee, like the kind of thing that could potentially jeopardize someone’s job.

But they softened it so much that the message was not actually delivered.” Green would often ask: “Did you use the words, ‘I could end up needing to let you go over this’?” At least 75% of the time, the answer was no, and it turned out the manager had sugar-coated their message, even after role-playing the scenario.

The fix is to be clear, not harsh. If something is serious, say so plainly. Otherwise, you’re not sparing someone’s feelings; you’re leaving them without the information they need to improve.

Creating unnecessary uncertainty

Anyone who’s ever received a vague meeting request or a “can you hop on a quick call?” message,  knows how fast anxiety can spiral. It’s called “uncertainty-based stress,” and it’s a top trigger for work place anxiety, West says. “Bosses do this all the time: ‘I need to meet with you. It’s important. How does Monday sound?’ You don’t know what it’s about, and you spend the whole weekend stressed out.” (No wonder, she adds, that couples’ therapists spend so much time discussing work issues that bleed into their clients’ relationships and overall well-being.)

The solution is to be specific. A quick note about what you want to discuss can prevent unnecessary stress and make conversations more productive from the start.

Letting your stress spill onto others

We all have bad days at work. The problem is when they become everyone else’s problem, too. After an unpleasant exchange in a meeting or a tense one-on-one with your boss, people naturally want to talk to someone else about what’s going on. “That’s what we need to regulate our emotions and to feel better about the situation,” says West, who studies stress contagion. “But that pulls that other person in, and they can catch our stress. It can be super disruptive when it happens all the time.”

That’s why immediately venting, especially in the middle of the workday, isn’t always the best move. Instead, West suggests giving yourself some space first: Resist the urge to hop on the phone or Slack or plant yourself on a friend’s desk, and instead take 10 or 15 minutes to cool off. Then share more intentionally, ideally at a time that works for both of you.

Ignoring or mismatching communication norms

Emojis have become corporate lingo, but only certain ones, and only in some offices, and only part of the time. That’s the tricky thing about workplace communication: The rules aren’t universal. Every team develops its own unwritten norms, including how quickly to respond, how formal to be, and even which emojis register as friendly vs. unprofessional. “We have norms for how we communicate that we don’t realize we have,” West says.

She recalls working with an organization that brought her in to solve a communication breakdown, only to discover it all stemmed from something surprisingly small. “The person used smiley emoticons, and their team didn’t like it,” she says. It became such a sticking point that the company paid West, as she puts it, “a stupid amount of money” to fix what was essentially a clash over emoji use.

No one had said anything directly, but it was bothering people enough to derail communication. The fix is simple, if a little awkward: Talk about it. Making expectations explicit, around communication tone, timing, and even emoji use, can prevent small misunderstandings from turning into bigger ones.

Poorly run meetings that waste everyone’s time

Few things sour the workday like a meeting that should have been an email. In most cases, the issue isn’t the meeting itself: It’s how it’s run. “The person in charge of running the meeting isn’t good at facilitating it,” Green says. “Without someone actively guiding the discussion, conversations drift, time gets wasted, and people leave wondering why they were there in the first place.”

A better approach: set a clear agenda (ideally distributed beforehand) and stick to it. “Be willing to be very assertive about managing the time,” Green says. That includes setting expectations upfront and cutting things off when they go off track.

Being too loud and not realizing it

The return to the office brought something else back, too: noise. “Being too loud at work is a real problem coming back from the pandemic,” West says. People got used to their own spaces—and their own volume, and those habits didn’t always translate well once they were back around coworkers.

That can show up in all kinds of ways: taking Zoom calls at full volume, playing music out loud, or chat ting in shared spaces while others are trying to focus. “There’s a tendency for people to raise their voice when they’re on Zoom,” West says. “They talk louder than they do in person, they’re actually kind of yelling quite a bit.” Part of the issue is that today’s offices aren’t built for this kind of noise. “We’ve shrunk our workspaces,” she says, which means people are often working just feet away from someone else’s meeting (or their personal phone call). And while it might feel awkward to say something, especially if the person is more senior, staying silent can leave you “miserable all the time.”

The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require some coordination. Teams should set basic norms around sound, where to take calls, when to move conversations elsewhere, and what’s appropriate in shared spaces.

Oversharing at work

The workplace has gotten more open but that doesn’t mean anything goes. Some people are comfortable sharing everything from health struggles to relationship issues, while others would rather keep things strictly professional. “Don’t assume that these are things you can bring to work,” West says. Without clear norms, those differences can create awkward moments for everyone involved.

West says she’s seen situations where one employee opens up, expecting support, only to be met with visible discomfort. Why? Because expectations weren’t aligned. “We’re seeing lots of variability in the workplace around acceptability,” she says. And while openness can be valuable, “bosses are not therapists, they’re not trained to do that.”

The fix: Set clearer boundaries. That often starts at the organizational level, through HR policies and team conversations about what’s appropriate. Otherwise, people are left to navigate these gray areas on their own.

What Are Our Universities Producing? By Alabidun Shuaib AbdulRahman 

There was a time in Nigeria when education was not merely a pathway to employment but a cultural badge of intellectual distinction. The University of Ibadan in the 1960s did not simply produce graduates; it produced thinkers. Today, however, a quiet but consequential shift has occurred. The Nigerian educational system appears to be producing more certificates than competence, more graduates than thinkers, and more qualifications than knowledge. This raises a difficult but necessary question: what exactly are we learning?

To interrogate this question meaningfully, one must begin with the most honest indicator of national priorities which is budgetary allocation. Education funding is not just a fiscal decision; it is a philosophical statement about what a country values. In Nigeria, that statement has been consistently ambiguous. In the 2025 federal budget, education received roughly 7 percent of total allocation, a figure far below the 15–20 percent benchmark recommended by UNESCO. This is not an anomaly but a pattern. Historical data shows that between 1960 and 2023, Nigeria’s average allocation to education hovered around 5.94 percent, significantly below global standards.

Even more revealing is the comparative picture. Between 1999 and 2021, countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal consistently outperformed Nigeria in educational investment, with Ghana allocating over 24 percent on average, and Kenya exceeding 21 percent. These figures are not just statistical contrasts; they are explanatory variables. They help explain why Nigeria, despite being Africa’s most populous nation, struggles to produce globally competitive graduates at scale.

Paradoxically, Nigeria’s education budget has increased significantly in absolute terms. From ₦602 billion in 2019 to about ₦1.59 trillion in 2024, government spending on education has nearly tripled. Yet, outcomes have remained largely stagnant. Classrooms remain overcrowded, infrastructure is inadequate, and teacher quality is inconsistent. The problem, therefore, is not merely how much is spent, but how it is spent. A large portion of the budget is consumed by recurrent expenditure like salaries and administrative costs, leaving minimal investment in research, infrastructure, and innovation.

This funding structure has profound implications for universities, which are supposed to serve as engines of knowledge production and innovation. Nigeria currently has over 200 universities, spanning federal, state, and private ownership. On paper, this expansion suggests progress. In reality, it reflects a quantitative response to demand without a corresponding qualitative framework. The proliferation of universities has not translated into global competitiveness. Rankings consistently show Nigerian universities trailing behind their African counterparts, with limited presence in global top-tier listings.

The issue here is not merely about rankings, but about what rankings represent. Globally competitive universities are evaluated based on research output, citation impact, faculty quality, international collaboration, and graduate employability. Nigerian universities struggle in these areas, largely due to underfunding and systemic inefficiencies. Research funding, for instance, accounts for less than 1 percent of Nigeria’s GDP, a figure that severely constrains innovation.

What, then, is expected of universities in a global context? At their core, universities are not degree-awarding factories; they are knowledge ecosystems. Institutions like the University of Cape Town in South Africa or the University of Nairobi in Kenya have increasingly aligned their curricula with global standards, emphasizing research, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary learning. Nigeria’s universities, by contrast, often remain trapped in outdated curricular models that prioritize rote memorization over analytical reasoning.

This pedagogical gap is perhaps the most critical dimension of the certification-versus-education debate. In many Nigerian classrooms, success is measured by the ability to reproduce information rather than to interrogate it. Students are trained to pass examinations, not to solve problems. The result is a generation of graduates who possess certificates but lack the competencies required in a global knowledge economy.

To understand the gravity of this issue, one must consider the expectations placed on graduates in today’s world. The 21st-century workforce demands more than subject-specific knowledge. It requires critical thinking, digital literacy, adaptability, collaboration, and innovation. Employers are increasingly interested in what graduates can do, not just what they know. In this context, a certificate becomes merely an entry point, not a guarantee of competence.

Nigeria’s educational system, however, often operates on an outdated assumption—that possession of a degree equates to employability. This assumption is increasingly untenable. With a literacy rate estimated between 62 and 70 percent and significant disparities in educational quality, the system produces graduates who are often ill-equipped for global competition. The consequence is a widening gap between education and employment, a gap that manifests in high graduate unemployment and underemployment rates.

A comparative look at other African nations further underscores this point. Countries like Tunisia and South Africa allocate approximately 20 percent of their budgets to education and have invested heavily in curriculum reform and teacher training. Botswana and Namibia emphasize continuous teacher development and critical thinking skills, while Mauritius has integrated technology into its educational framework. These countries are not without challenges, but they demonstrate a deliberate alignment between educational policy and global standards.

Nigeria’s challenge is not simply that it lags behind; it is that it has not clearly defined what it aims to achieve with its educational system. Is the goal to produce graduates in large numbers, or to produce globally competitive individuals? The current trajectory suggests the former. The emphasis on expanding access to higher education, while commendable, has not been matched by a commitment to quality assurance.

This disparity between access and quality is at the heart of the certification dilemma. The more universities are established without adequate funding and oversight, the more diluted the value of the degree becomes. A certificate, in this context, risks becoming a symbol of attendance rather than achievement.

Yet, it would be overly simplistic to attribute all responsibility to government policy. The culture of learning itself must also be interrogated. In many instances, students approach education as a transactional process—attend lectures, pass exams, obtain a certificate. Intellectual curiosity, independent research, and critical inquiry are often secondary considerations. This cultural orientation is both a product of the system and a contributor to its perpetuation.

The role of educators is equally significant. Teacher quality remains a critical determinant of educational outcomes. In Nigeria, only a small percentage of teachers are considered highly trained, and the teacher-student ratio remains high, particularly in public institutions. Without substantial investment in teacher training and professional development, any attempt at systemic reform is likely to be superficial.

Infrastructure also plays a crucial role. A university without functional laboratories, libraries, and digital resources cannot effectively compete in a global knowledge economy. Yet, many Nigerian institutions operate with facilities that are decades behind contemporary standards. This infrastructural deficit is not merely a logistical issue; it is a constraint on intellectual development.

The global standard for universities today extends beyond teaching to include research and community impact. Universities are expected to generate knowledge that addresses societal challenges. In this regard, Nigeria’s universities face a dual challenge: limited funding and limited integration with industry. The absence of strong university-industry linkages means that research often remains theoretical, with little practical application.

This disconnect further reinforces the certification culture. When education is not linked to real-world outcomes, it becomes an abstract exercise. Students learn to pass exams, not to solve problems. Graduates enter the workforce with theoretical knowledge but limited practical skills, creating a mismatch between supply and demand.

To move beyond certification, Nigeria must undertake a fundamental rethinking of its educational philosophy. This requires not only increased funding but also strategic investment. Resources must be directed toward infrastructure, research, teacher training, and curriculum reform. Universities must be granted greater autonomy to innovate, while also being held accountable for outcomes.

Equally important is the need to redefine success within the educational system. Success should not be measured solely by graduation rates or the number of degrees awarded, but by the quality of graduates produced. Are they capable of critical thinking? Can they adapt to new challenges? Are they equipped to contribute meaningfully to society?

Until those questions are answered with honesty and urgency, the certificates will continue to accumulate, but the knowledge they are meant to represent will remain elusive.

Blood in Jos Again? By Boniface Ihiasota

The latest killings in Jos are not an isolated tragedy; they are part of a long, painful continuum of violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. From afar, many in the diaspora watch with a mix of grief, frustration and weary familiarity. The March 29, 2026 attack in Jos North, which left at least 28 people dead, underscores a recurring failure to break the cycle of bloodshed that has defined the region for decades.

Historically, Plateau State sits at the fault line of Nigeria’s ethno-religious crises. The region has witnessed repeated clashes rooted in disputes over land, grazing rights, and identity politics, often between predominantly Muslim Fulani herders and largely Christian farming communities. These issues have erupted into mass killings over the years, including the Christmas Eve attacks of December 2023 that claimed about 200 lives across several communities. The persistence of such violence reflects deeper structural issues—weak security response, climate-induced resource competition, and unresolved grievances.

The immediate victims of the March 29 attack were ordinary Nigerians—families caught in a nighttime assault by gunmen who reportedly stormed communities and opened fire indiscriminately. Residents and local accounts put the death toll at over 20, while officials later confirmed at least 28 fatalities. Behind the numbers are human stories: parents, children, and breadwinners whose lives were abruptly cut short. One of the most haunting images to emerge was that of a grieving mother clutching her dead son, a symbol of the personal devastation behind national statistics.

Reactions from within Nigeria were swift but divided. The Plateau State Government imposed emergency measures, including curfews, in an attempt to contain further violence. Community leaders and groups condemned the killings as senseless and called for justice, while also urging residents to remain calm. Yet, as has often been the case, these responses appeared reactive rather than preventive—coming after lives had already been lost.

President Bola Tinubu condemned the attacks on March 31, describing them as “barbaric” and vowing that perpetrators would be brought to justice. His administration also promised to strengthen security operations and improve intelligence gathering. However, such assurances have become a familiar refrain in Nigeria’s security discourse, often repeated after each tragedy with limited visible change on the ground.

Although Tinubu’s visit to Jos on Thursday, April 3, 2026, was intended as a gesture of solidarity with victims and their families. During the visit, he met with affected residents, offered condolences, and pledged measures such as the deployment of surveillance technology to curb future attacks. Yet the visit itself became a subject of controversy. Due to logistical constraints, the President addressed victims at the airport rather than visiting affected communities directly, a decision that drew criticism from many Nigerians who viewed it as detached from the reality on the ground.

The backlash was immediate and amplified across social and political spaces. Critics argued that the delay in response and the nature of the visit reflected a lack of urgency and empathy. Opposition voices accused the government of reacting only after public outrage, while others questioned whether symbolic visits could substitute for concrete security reforms. The controversy highlighted a broader trust deficit between citizens and the state, particularly on issues of security.

Perhaps most troubling was the fact that violence did not abate after the presidential visit. Within 24 hours, fresh attacks were reported in parts of Plateau State, including Riyom and Bassa local government areas, resulting in additional deaths and injuries. For many observers, this grim development reinforced the perception that official responses have yet to translate into real protection for vulnerable communities.

From the diaspora, the Jos killings evoke not only sorrow but also a sense of urgency. They raise difficult questions about governance, accountability, and the value placed on human life. While condolences and condemnations are necessary, they are insufficient without sustained action. The recurring nature of these attacks suggests that Nigeria’s security challenges are deeply systemic, requiring more than episodic interventions.

Ultimately, the tragedy in Jos is a reminder that behind every headline are lives interrupted and futures erased. For Nigerians at home and abroad, the hope remains that this latest loss will serve as a turning point—one that compels decisive action to end a cycle of violence that has endured for far too long.