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Use Emojis In Work Emails? You May Be Tainting Your Colleagues' Opinion Of You

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This article is more than 6 years old.

:( Frowny face. A study just published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that including a smiley emoticon (":)") or an emoji (a picture of a smiley face) in a work email may make people think you are less competent.

Really? (Emoji of a shocked and confused look.)

The study, conducted by Ella Glikson from Ben-Gurion University, Arik Cheshin from the University of Haifa and Gerben A. van Kleef from the University of Amsterdam, actually consisted of three experiments. The first randomly assigned 203 undergraduates (76% female) from the University of Amsterdam to receive one of four things — a photograph of a person with a neutral expression, a photograph of a person smiling, a greeting text without smileys, or a greeting text with smileys — and then asked the study subjects to rate the warmth and competence of the person who was shown in the picture or who sent the text.

The researchers found that study subjects rated the person smiling in the photograph as higher in warmth and competence than the person with the neutral expression. However, they rated the sender of the text with smileys as not significantly warmer and as less competent than the sender of the text with no smileys.

The second experiment recruited 90 English-speaking individuals (58% female) from 29 countries in North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. They had to read an email, rate the sender's warmth and competence, write an email in response and guess whether the sender was male or female. The results? Inclusion of smiley faces in the email didn't affect the perception of warmth but did lower the perception of competence. When the original email had a smiley face, the study subjects' email responses tended to contain less information. In addition, when the email had a smiley face, study subjects tended to assume that the sender was female. However, the assumed gender of the email sender did not affect the rating of warmth or competence.

For the third experiment, the researchers had 85 U.S. citizens (47% female), who were recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, read an email from a new employee to an unfamiliar administrative assistant containing a question about either a staff meeting (representing a formal situation) or a social gathering (representing an informal situation). The researchers then asked the study subjects to rate the warmth and competence of the sender. In the formal situation, including smileys in the email seemed to have no effect on the perception of the sender's warmth but reduced the perception of the sender's competence. In the informal situation, including smileys seemed to increase the perception of the sender's warmth but had no effect on the perceptions of the sender's competence.

The bottom line from this study: Smiley faces in texts or emails may not help you seem warmer but may make you seem less competent.

Note that these studies did not use an excessive number of smileys, such as a smiley after every word; that might suggest that the sender is a bit unbalanced. And the test emails did not appear to put a smiley face in inappropriate locations like "you're going to get fired :)" or pair them with inappropriate text like "I put marshmallows in everyone's shoes :)."

No, the study suggests that the inclusion of merely a smiley face or two can affect how people view you — yet another example of how people can use superficial things to judge people.

This may be bad news (":(") for the 76% of American workers who use emoticons in professional communications, according to a survey commissioned by Cotap and conducted by Kelton Global of 1,000 American workers with smartphones. The survey showed the breakdown of emoticon use: 64% happy face, 16% thumbs up, 7% winking face, 3% heart, 3% surprised face, 3% sad face, 2% thumbs down and 1% angry face.

However, the same survey showed that 78% of all surveyed did not feel very emotionally connected to those they worked with and that 33% wished they had better ways to express emotions when communicating in their workplaces. Moreover, 75% of those surveyed were interested in using emojis more often in professional communications.

One wonders whether the acceptability and perception of emoticon or emoji use will change as everything becomes more digital and mobile and those who grew up using such technology (e.g., millennials) increasingly set the tone at workplaces. After all, more and more work communication is occurring via modes that favor short bursts of text such as Slack, texts and, yes, Twitter. Moreover, as the reliance on electronic communications leads to less face-to-face contact among co-workers, people may need to connect emotionally through digital channels. Maybe one of these days I will be able to fulfill a longstanding ambition to write an entire memo in nothing but emojis.

Moreover, the new study has limitations. The sample sizes aren't that large and may not reflect the diversity of people out there. Could there be a selection bias for emoji-ists? Possibly. The researchers also did not report in detail on the backgrounds of the people, the workplaces or the professions represented in the sample. Some workplaces may be more welcoming to smiley faces than others. (Not sure how many times smiley faces are part of those operating nuclear reactors.) The communications modes of some workplaces may be more restricted than those of others. ("Doctor, why did you put smiley faces all over the patient's medical record?") Additionally, people differ in how much they use superficial appearance in judging people.

What, then, is the real bottom line? Should you use emoticons or emojis in workplace communications?

If you don't like using or have never used them, the workplace is not the place to start. (This holds true with almost any personal habit.) If you'd like to start, gradually ease into it. Begin by smiley facing under "safe" situations: around your friends, family or dog. Don't jump from never smiley facing to excessive smiley facing. Drastic change makes people wonder what happened to you.

If you would like to use emoticons or emojis at work, get a sense of your workplace's culture first. See what others are doing before easing into it. Don't go overboard. Maybe you don't want to be known as that "smiley face" person. Furthermore, individuals react to things differently. While one co-worker, boss or client may welcome smiley faces, another may not. Some tailoring of communication may be necessary.

These smiley face suggestions probably apply more to initial contact. For example, you may not want to email someone you don't know and say: "Can I work at your company :)" or "It would be great if our organization can serve you :)" or "Come by tomorrow so that we can see if we need to remove your gallbladder :)". However, once you've established your competence, smiley facing may be less likely to influence what others think about your abilities.

Finally, if you are at the receiving end of a smiley face, don't judge. It really shouldn't be a mark of competence in any way, unless the person's job is to generate as many smiley faces as possible.

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