Comment by luckylion

I've received messages from people (who don't even report to me) asking whether they did something wrong because I had forgotten to close some google doc they shared which then showed me as "active on the document" for hours and they thought "he's combing through everything, I'm in trouble" and eventually reached out because they couldn't take it anymore.

People read things very differently based on their perceived (job) safety. If you add culture differences (I'm german in a company with a lot of non-germans; what's normal communication to me makes some people gasp), there's a lot of opportunity to accidentally cause stress.