For better or worse, emojis are now part of the workplace. With remote work on the rise, and face-to-face office communication declining, many employees have been robbed of the nonverbal cues that usually convey mood and tone. Emojis could help bridge that gap, but how useful are they really?
Psychologists from the University of Ottawa in Canada paired positive, negative, and neutral instant messages with positive, negative, or no emoji and asked participants to rate the competence of the sender and the appropriateness of the message. (If you’re curious which emojis they used, this sunny face was the positive one: 😀; while this little grump was the negative one: 😠.) They published their findings in Collabra.
“No emojis” was the clear winner (sorry emoji users). People rated the sender competence and appropriateness of messages without emojis higher than those with them. Positive emojis did enhance perceptions of competence when paired with positive or neutral messages, but only compared to negative emojis. Negative emojis were always seen as inappropriate and made senders seem less competent, but especially when paired with a positive or neutral message (and understandably so).
Read more: “Why You Need Emoji”
They also discovered some gender dynamics at play. Interestingly, women judged emojis sent by other women as less appropriate than if they were sent by men. These findings mirror studies of face-to-face office communications. Previous research has found women are judged as less competent when expressing negative emotions and also report experiencing more incivility from other women than from men. In this study, researchers say women may have judged other women more negatively for “violating gendered expectations of ‘appropriate’ emotional expression for women in the workplace.”
Of course, the study does have some limitations. Because the instant messages were simulated, they aren’t able to fully capture the nuances of real workplace communications and relationships. Similarly, the study’s narrow emoji vocabulary (😀 and 😠), represents only a tiny sliver of the broader range of emojis used in the workplace. Still, it’s an important baseline for future research.
For now, though, the next time you’re asking yourself whether you should cap off a Slack message with a smiley face, the answer is 🙅♂️. 
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Lead image: Sohag sarkar / Adobe Stock
