A workplace behavior that really bugs the crap out of me is the person in a meeting who keeps getting distracted by IMs on their laptop or phone and says “Sorry, SENIOR EXEC keeps pinging me.” In my org, we refer to these as a “y/t?”

Sometimes I feel like it’s the person receiving the messages trying to show how important and/or busy they are—and that’s annoying—but I actually don’t think that is the real problem. I think the real problem is senior executive-types randomly chasing people with questions and updates to which they expect an immediate response, and people not feeling comfortable responding “I’m in a meeting right now, but I’ll get that for you in a bit.”

These sorts of requests are occasionally time-sensitive, but my experience has been that mostly they are not. Responding to them as if they are just rewards and perpetuates the behavior, and the widespread feeling that you’ll get in trouble if you don’t respond immediately probably indicates an organizational culture problem that needs to be addressed.