Regarding your other points, of course I try to be specific, already because it makes context switching easier and is generally more productive. However, in some situations you want to be vague. If you want to get the opinion from someone and don't want to discuss this with everyone else around for example, or if you want to hear their immediate idea right now without overthinking it, etc. Not very common, but also nothing bad about it in my opinion.
The problem is that the actual scary conversations are always masked as an innocent one for exactly the reason to not induce panic, nobody will say "you have a moment to discuss your performance wrt/ the layoffs that will be coming?". This sucks but that's how things are. If we change our language and interactions to make it impossible to take somebody aside without being explicit about that it's not scary - how do you take somebody aside for an actual scary conversation? These should be anyways rare and typically not coming out of the blue and if somebody is constantly anxious that they might have done something terribly wrong there are deeper problems in your employment relationship
Regarding your other points, of course I try to be specific, already because it makes context switching easier and is generally more productive. However, in some situations you want to be vague. If you want to get the opinion from someone and don't want to discuss this with everyone else around for example, or if you want to hear their immediate idea right now without overthinking it, etc. Not very common, but also nothing bad about it in my opinion.
The problem is that the actual scary conversations are always masked as an innocent one for exactly the reason to not induce panic, nobody will say "you have a moment to discuss your performance wrt/ the layoffs that will be coming?". This sucks but that's how things are. If we change our language and interactions to make it impossible to take somebody aside without being explicit about that it's not scary - how do you take somebody aside for an actual scary conversation? These should be anyways rare and typically not coming out of the blue and if somebody is constantly anxious that they might have done something terribly wrong there are deeper problems in your employment relationship