![]() Know your audienceĪs any IC professional will attest, effective communication – in any form – is about knowing your audience. One person’s innocent cheeky wink or blowing kiss icon is another’s sexual harassment claim. But emojis are just as open to misinterpretation as the words they represent. We might assume that emojis, like hieroglyphics, are the clearest and most simple form of communication with no language barriers to muddy the tone. Younger workers raised alongside social media and digital communication are more likely to give them a thumbs up, while workers 45 years and older tend to view the use of emojis in the workplace as ‘lowering the tone’. Studies have shown that there is a split in attitudes to the use of emojis at work. Why type a long sentence when a simple thumbs up or tick will do the job much faster? The generation gap The workplace can be fraught with political undertones and sometimes, adding a smiley face to indicate a friendly intention, feels like a quick way to defuse this.Įmojis also provide visual shorthand. To get around this, we make our language softer or long-winded to appear more approachable, because we feel uncomfortable giving direct commands. But are emojis sliding into acceptability, or are they still viewed as NSFW? Why use emojis in the workplace anyway?Įmails hold a lot of potential for misinterpretation as it’s hard to determine their intended tone. You only need to look at much-loathed corporate phrases such as ‘blue sky thinking’ to see how sticky workplace words can be. Since then, we’ve seen numerous fresh releases, with a drive to make emoji characters more diverse and inclusive.īut what about work? Linguistic trends have a way of making their way into the workplace. A few years ago, the Oxford Dictionary announced their ‘Word of the Year’ was, in fact, not a word at all, but a pictograph universally acknowledged as the default response to jokes, banter and all-round hilarity – the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji. In the world of emojis, a lot has changed in a short time.
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