Despite being the preferred form of communication for teens, the emoji has not yet made its way into the work place.
That might soon change as new research reveals inserting emojis into emails when delivering bad news can soften the blow.
Smileys, thumbs up and the ubiquitous love heart could help workplace communication, a study by German researchers shows.
This is despite fears that using emojis at work could be seen as unprofessional.
The study, presented at the International Conference on System Sciences in Hawaii, found that emojis significantly increase the level of understanding in a message.
Emoticons like the ‘smiling face’ or ‘face with tears’ mimic expressions and gestures and add a new layer of meaning.
Interestingly, this only worked for positive emojis. The ‘sad face’ had little to no impact on how people responded to meaning.
The paper was co-authored by Claus-Peter Ernst, professor of applied science at Frankfurt University, and Martin Huschens, research assistant at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
The pair surveyed 230 people in order to test their theory.
‘The usage of happy and ironic emoticons significantly shapes the subtext of a message, namely the relationship and self-revelation level, whereas sad emoticons do not have such an effect,’ they wrote.
‘Senders can use happy and ironic emoticons to soften their email messages.
‘It has been shown that recipients of a message can largely identify the social and emotional meaning of an emoticon.
‘Our findings suggest that both happy and ironic emoticons have a significant influence on the receiver’s perception of messages at the relationship level and self- revelation level, but that they do not have an impact at the factual information level and appeal level.’
But their findings are at odds with research conducted by a team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, who found that using emojis in the workplace implied incompetence.
That study found the use of smiley emojis had no discernible effect on people’s perceptions of warmth while lowering their perception of competence.
Alison Green, an workplace expert and writer for Inc.com, told The Times: ‘You shouldn’t use them in job search emails or other particularly formal contexts — not only do they feel out of place there, but you should be putting enough time and thought into the wording of those messages that you don’t need a smiley face for shorthand anyway.
‘And if you do, that’s probably a sign that you need to rewrite the message so that the tone is unambiguous without the aid of emoticons.’
