Comment by scrumper

I've seen this a lot from Indian colleagues, some European colleagues, and people from various (not all) Latin American countries too both senior and subordinate to me. I see it occasionally from some older gen X and boomer USA and UK-born people without any obvious correlation to race or gender. In other words it's pretty broad, probably has some cultural aspect to it, but I can't map it to anything obvious.

I don't think it's a failed attempt at politeness actually, partly but not only because it's so obvious how to be courteous ("Hi! Hope you had a great weekend, when you get a sec could you tell me XYZ?" or "Hey - hope your day going well. I'm stuck on ABC and it's quite urgent, please get in touch asap.") and it's even more obviously discourteous. I think it's more that we don't have the same understanding of the medium. Slack/Teams/Chat to me is a lot more like text messaging than email, and it's not at all like walking over to someone's desk or phoning them. Their mental model of it probably differs. (They're wrong of course.)

Most charitable explanation is, they want a realtime chat and don't want to be pushy about it.