According to a BBC article a friend sent me there are apparently health risks involved when a boss sends a threatening email to his or her workers. According to the article, “[ Experts from Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College] found that blood pressure shot up if emails were from their superiors - or written in an aggressive tone.”.
For anyone working for than, oh, about 6 months… this shouldn’t come as any great surprise. But what about snail mail, phone calls, pager messages, or even inter-office memos; not to mention the countless other methods of communication at our disposal? I think that any time a superior communicates with a worker in a threatening tone our blood-pressure rises, our anxiety increases, etc. Hell, I’m sure my BP rises if/when I even think that something has gone awry and a superior may catch wind of it and give me hell because of said incident.
That’s part of life in the workforce as a human being; you’re going to screw up every now and again and you’re going to get yelled at for doing so. How the reprimand itself is carried out should be the focal point of reducing stress and/or anxiety in the workplace. Employers, managers, and any “boss” should be aware that what they say and how they say it to an employee carries not only a lot of weight in the workers professional life, but in their personal life as well.