Almost every piece of advice about giving feedback assumes a room. Read the person's face, adjust as you go, soften if it lands badly. For eight years the room did not exist. My team was spread across time zones, most of us were working in a second or third language, and nearly everything went in writing.
Written feedback in someone's second language has a specific failure mode, and it is not the one people brace for. It is not harshness. It is hedging.
Softening reads as approval
"Maybe we could think about approaching this a bit differently" is understood, face to face, as: change this. The same sentence read on a screen, hours later, by someone translating as they go, is understood as: this is acceptable, and here is an optional idea. Then nothing changes, and the manager concludes the person does not take feedback well. They took it exactly as it was written.
Three things that fixed it for me
Separate what I saw from what I concluded, and put the observation first. "This case was closed without the escalation note" is a fact we can both look at. "You rushed this" is an interpretation, and if it is wrong the conversation is over before it starts.
State the change plainly, and put the warmth somewhere else. In the opening, in the offer to talk it through, in what I say about the rest of their work — anywhere except inside the instruction itself. An instruction that has been made gentle has usually also been made unclear.
Ask before concluding. "Here is what I saw — is that how it went?" costs one extra exchange and has saved me from being wrong more times than I would like to count. In a distributed team, the context you are missing is almost never in the ticket.
And then there is the waiting
Written feedback is read alone, often at the end of someone's day, with no chance to reply for hours. So I never end on the problem. There is always a next step and always a way to answer — even if it is only: tell me if you see this differently, we can talk tomorrow. The gap between sending and replying is where people quietly write the worst version of your message for you.