Should you use emoticons and emojis at work?

When you should use emoticons and emojis, remember the fundamentals of effective communication, to use or not to use AI and an Editorial Director job alert.

When communicating, especially in the workplace, should you use emoticons and emojis?

They are now almost ubiquitous on some platforms, such as text messaging and WhatsApp, and extremely popular. But does that means their use is appropriate?

The short answer is that it depends on the context.

Research shows using emoticons (which can be typed on a keyboard) and emojis (which are unchanging graphic icons) at the right time can dramatically improve your communications. But they can also significantly compromise your efforts to be heard and listened to.

So it’s important to know when and how to use them.

Understanding that not only will help you decide when to add emoticons and emojis to your message, but it will also remind you of many of the principles of effective communication; such as reinforcing the importance of tailoring your communications depending on audience, format and platform, genre or sector, the trust you want to engender and the authority you want to convey.

Before you add an emoticon or emoji to your message, the first thing you should do is know your audience - a principle that holds for all communications.

For example, at work, you write professional, carefully- edited impactful emails and reports that impress your colleagues and organisation’s leaders. But over time, you increasingly want your colleagues, your audience, to like you. So you start to populate your internal corporate communications, your emails, instant messages and reports, with expressive emoticons, such as happy or hesitant faces, kisses and cute animals. They appear chatty, personal and funny.

That reinforces one important aspect of emoticons and emojis. They are designed to convey, as their name suggests, emotions. There are now more than 3500 available emoticons and emojis, but the 90 or so in the Smileys and People category remain the most frequently used.

Generally speaking, it’s good to add emotion to factual communications, as content that elicits an emotional response is far more engaging.

You can learn more in our Factual Storytelling School lesson ‘It’s Time To Get Emotional’.

A 2018 research paper examined the specific use of emoticons and emojis in job-related communications, and how their use affected perceptions of whether the sender was a capable executive.

That paper, which you can read here, asked participants to read an email presumably written by a male supervisor, demanding the timely completion of an important task. When the message was enriched with emojis or emoticons, recipients felt more warmth and empathy towards the sender.

However, and this is important, they also rated the sender as being less assertive.

A prior research paper published in 2017 titled The Dark Side of a Smiley: Effects of Smiling Emoticons on Virtual First Impressions found that using smiley emoticons online doesn’t necessarily impress your audience. In fact, the research paper discovered that “contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence. Perceptions of low competence in turn undermined information sharing.”

In short, the researchers say: “a smiley is not a smile”, and adding a smiley emoticon to your online message may lead your audience to react with less empathy towards you and think you less capable.

Another study in 2020 examined how using emojis in emails affects perceptions of business leaders.

It found that emails with emojis led to positive perceptions of a leader’s likeability and effectiveness. But the kicker is that only male recipients felt this way. Female recipients rated a leader using emojis as less effective, with no difference in likeability. Further study showed that females perceived emails with emojis as more positive but also less appropriate for the workplace.

So using emoticons and emojis may engender warmth, but they are unlikely to engender professional respect. The unintended reaction to your content is that your audience likes you more, but respects you less. So think about the reaction you want from your audience. And then optimise your content to maximise the desired reaction. For more on this see our lesson ‘How will your audience react?’

When considering whether to use emoticons and emojis, also consider the platform and format you are using to communicate.

It’s far more common and accepted to use emojis in messages sent via informal digital channels, such as directly between two individuals who know each other via WhatApp or text messaging, or direct message services that form part of tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams or LinkedIn. Or via social media accounts, where they are prevalent.

For example, research published in 2022 found that as working from home increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, people selectively used emojis to forge interpersonal bonds with co-workers online.

But it’s less acceptable to include them in emails, and even less so in more permanent formats such as presentations and reports.

Other research published back in 2014 offered some insights into why people include emoticons in their workplace emails.

Contrary to what may be expected, writers didn’t included emoticons to convey their own emotions. Rather they added them to give clues to the email’s recipients about how a message should be interpreted.

Emoticons such as happy faces or thumbs ups are added to demonstrate that the message should be received with a positive attitude. They are added to humorous sentences to denote to the reader that a joke has been made. They are added to strengthen expressive speech, such as ‘thanks’ or ‘greetings’, and to soften how directives, such as requests, corrections etc., should be received.

Using emoticons makes messages more emotionally extreme, with the use of a negative graphic emoticon increasing the negativity of a message, while a positive graphic emoticon increases the positivity of a message.

They can help clarify an unclear message, and change how the same message is perceived, for example by expressing humour and giving indications of how the message should be interpreted.

But that’s a risky strategy. It implies that the content of an email isn’t being clearly communicated, if further emojis need to be added to provide context.

It’s far better to review the email, and write it appropriately, rather than rely on emojis and emoticons to communicate, especially given they can lower people’s perceptions of the sender.

As we’ve referenced above, distinguish between private versus public, and personal versus corporate communications.

Emoticons are still regarded as a relatively informal language. So the more formal the situation, in terms of either your message or people you are communicating with, the less you should consider including emoticons. Conversely, the more informal your message, the more they are appropriate.

So the more personal and private the message, the more emojis are accepted. But they should be avoided within public and corporate messages.

As we’d perhaps expect, the research generally finds that people are highly mindful when they add emoticons and emojis to their messages; sensitively adapting their use to fit the occasion, the recipient’s status and to match the recipient’s own communication behaviour.

That makes sense. You’re unlikely add them to emails you send to the head of your organisation. But you just might if you know that head routinely uses emoticons and emojis themselves. Or if you are also friends, and you’re messaging to communicate a much less formal message, or a personal rather than professional one.

You should be mindful too. Before you add emoticons and emojis to your content, consider your audience, how they will react, and the format and platform you’re using to communicate.

If in doubt, leave them out. Let your words do the talking, and craft them to communicate exactly what you want to say.

The fundamentals of effective communication

Every now and then it’s useful to be reminded about the fundamental principles of communicating. Because if you forget them, you’ll almost certainly communicate badly, and not get the response you were hoping for. This week’s big tip is this:

When you’ve got something to say, remember. It’s not about you. It’s about your audience. It’s not even about how well you tell your story.

It’s about how well others listen to it.

Because you may have done the greatest thing, and are able to tell it in the most amazing way. But if no-one is there to listen to you, or other things prevent them from listening to you, your story will drift off into the ether, either being lost in the wind, left neglected in a drawer, or absorbed into the 150GB of data sent over the Internet every second.

It sounds harsh. But how many times have you crafted and published a piece of content, that elegant email, witty social media post or deeply analytical report, for example, to realise that no one appeared to listen to a word. You failed to get anyone’s attention.

Each time that happens, it should remind you that communication is a two way process. It requires you the sender to formulate and send a message, ideally in the hope of engaging and influencing another.

To inform them, impress them, educate them, or encourage them to take an action.

But it also requires someone to receive your message, to be present to hear you, to listen to your words, and read or view your work. And that person or persons, that audience, should always be at the forefront of your mind. You should be considering them, before you even begin crafting your content.

To use or not to use AI

The latest release in a flurry of new AI-driven writing tools come from website hosting and design service Squarespace.

This week, the company announced the launch of it Brand Identity tool, which you can discover here.

In the company’s words: “With the new Brand Identity tool, you can teach Squarespace AI how to write in your voice.

Simply enter a description of your brand, select your preferred tone of voice, and Squarespace AI will reflect your inputs every time it creates or updates copy on your site.”

Now that is both good and bad.

Good because it’s another tool you can use to generate quick, effective communications on your website. And we always recommend that any organisation develops a consistent tone of voice. See our lesson ‘Who You Are’.

Bad, because we generally don’t recommend you use AI tools to write for you or your organisation. They can be incredibly useful to help edit your work, but can be counter-productive when generating written content. See this issue of The  Factual Storyteller for more details on our thinking on this.

Editorial Director job alert

There is a brilliant position available that may appeal to experienced factual storytellers specialising in science publishing.

The world-leading Public Library of Science is seeking an Associate Editorial Director to manage a subset of their growing PLOS journals portfolio, with oversight of esteemed publications including PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Genetics and others.

You can view the job advert on LinkedIn here.

Qualified persons from the UK and US can apply, with the position fully remote/home-based.