A “hey” on Slack from a coworker is a minor interruption. A “hey” from a manager with nothing after it is an entirely different experience. The same word, the same app, but the power dynamic turns a casual greeting into something that can derail a person’s focus for hours.
People call it hey hanging, and it’s become one of the more common low-grade stressors at work. But the version that actually does damage is the one that travels down the power dynamic. When a manager sends a context-free message to someone on their team, the ensuing silence doesn’t come across as friendly. It reads as ominous. And most managers have no idea that’s happening.
What’s actually going on
Digital communication strips out every signal that makes in-person greetings feel safe. When a manager walks up to someone’s desk and says “hi,” the employee can see their face, read their body language, and gauge the tone before the first sentence is finished.
On Slack, none of that exists. All the employee sees is their manager’s name, the word “hey,” and silence. Or worse, the typing indicator. Three dots that appear, disappear, and reappear, signaling that something is being composed and revised without any clue what it is.
That silence gets filled fast. Employees have learned through experience that unscheduled, context-free outreach from leadership often precedes bad news.
A calendar invite with no agenda. A vague “can we chat?” on a Friday afternoon. A lone “hey” fits the same pattern.
Without enough information to calibrate, people prepare for the worst. Heart rate goes up. Focus breaks. The rest of the morning gets spent worrying instead of doing actual work.
Most managers who do this are just doing what feels natural: opening with a greeting before getting to the point. They don’t realize that the power differential between them and the people they manage means their messages don’t land as intended. A message sent in two seconds can cost someone 30 minutes of productive focus.
Where HR comes in
If you’re in HR, this looks trivial on the surface. It’s three letters on a screen. But if a manager with eight people on their team does this regularly, that’s eight employees experiencing small, repeated stress responses throughout the week. Multiply across a department, and you’ve got a pattern that chips away at psychological safety without anyone naming it as a problem.
The coaching is straightforward. When you’re messaging someone you manage, lead with context. Not just a greeting. Not “hey, got a minute?” with no topic. Give the person enough information to know what this is about before they have to respond.
“Hey, quick question about the Q3 timeline” works. “Hey, wanted to flag something positive from the client call” works even better. The greeting is fine. What matters is that the next few words exist and they signal whether this is routine, urgent, good, or bad.
This applies beyond Slack, too. The same dynamic plays out in email subject lines, calendar invites, and Teams messages.
A meeting invite titled “Quick sync” with no agenda and no description triggers the same anxiety as a bare “Hey.” The principle is consistent across every channel: when you have positional authority over someone, context isn’t optional. It’s how you prevent your communication from becoming a source of stress for the people you’re supposed to be supporting.
It’s worth flagging this specifically for senior leadership. The higher someone sits in the organization, the more weight their messages carry and the less likely they are to hear about the impact.
A VP who sends “hey” to a mid-level employee may never find out that the employee spent the next hour convinced they were being let go. Nobody tells the VP because the power dynamic that caused the anxiety is the same one that prevents the feedback.
Make it part of manager training
This is something to build into onboarding and communication training for new managers. Not as a rigid policy or a list of banned words, but as part of a broader conversation about how digital habits shape how safe a team feels.
Most managers have never been told that their messaging style has an emotional impact on their team. Once they hear it, most of them adjust immediately. They just need someone to name it.
Frame it the way you’d frame any other communication coaching: your words carry more weight than you think, and the less context you provide, the more your employees fill in the gaps themselves. That framing resonates with managers because it’s practical, not accusatory. You’re not telling them they’re doing something wrong. You’re telling them there’s an easy adjustment that makes their team’s day measurably better.
If your organization already trains managers in giving feedback, handling difficult conversations, and coaching, digital communication norms belong in the same curriculum. These interactions occur dozens of times a day, far more often than formal feedback sessions or performance reviews. The tools your managers use every day are shaping how their teams experience them as leaders.
Two extra words after “hey” won’t fix a broken culture. But in a functional one, they’re the difference between a team that trusts its manager and one that flinches at every notification.
