Whether it’s a friendly smiley face or a cheeky wink, many of us regularly include emoji in our work emails.
And if you want to give bad news to a colleague, a new study suggests you should increase your emoji use.
Researchers at Chatham University say using emojis or GIFs in emails can help soften the impact of negative messages.
“Emojis can play an important role in conveying negative emotions appropriately,” said study author Dr. Monica Riordan.
“This appropriate emotional expression helps bring virtual teams together, capturing nuances of conversation that would otherwise be impossible or inappropriate to convey via text.”
Whether it’s a friendly smiley face or a cheeky wink, many of us regularly include emoji in our work emails. And if you want to tell a colleague bad news, a new study suggests you should increase your use of emoji (stock image)
In the 26 years since the first emoji was created, the characters have become increasingly popular around the world.
In fact, a 2018 study by researchers at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona found that a A whopping six billion emojis are used every day.
However, it is unknown whether or not the characters are appropriate in the workplace.
For example, a 2018 study claimed that emoticons, thumbs up, and the ubiquitous love heart could help workplace communication, while a 2022 study found that people who include images in their emails of work are seen as less powerful.
In their new study, researchers set out to understand the impact of emoji and GIFs on negative messages in an online work environment.
In all three experiments, the researchers found that GIFs and emoji boosted team morale, whether they were negative or positive.
In the second experiment, which involved 178 participants, the emoji were replaced with GIFs: either a negative GIF without a face, a positive GIF without a face, a GIF with a negative face, or a GIF with a positive face.
The team performed three experiments.
In the first, 105 participants were shown several messages without emoji, with a negative emoji, or with a positive emoji.
For example, one message exchange read, “Our latest issues have just been published,” with the response, “Saw them last night.”
In the negative condition, a thumbs-down emoji was included at the end of the response, while in the positive condition, a clapping emoji was added.
In the second experiment, involving 178 participants, these emoji were replaced with GIFs: either a negative GIF without a face, a positive GIF without a face, a GIF with a negative face, or a GIF with a positive face.
Finally, in the third experiment, which involved 195 participants, the researchers evaluated the impact of facial emoji, emotional words, and punctuation markers.
In all three experiments, the researchers found that, whether negative or positive, GIFs and emoji boosted team morale.
“We discovered that the use of these signals leads observers to perceive greater emotional intensity in the conversation, which is related to a greater perception of closeness between team members and, therefore, greater motivation of participants to join to the team, regardless of the valence of the cue,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in Computers in human behavior.
Researchers say emoji are particularly useful for bringing together colleagues working from home.
“In remote work, as in face-to-face work, the ability to display negative emotions appropriately is important for beneficial outcomes in the workplace,” the team added.
“In effect, the use of emojis, GIFs and punctuation allows remote team members to cross the expression threshold, but not the incorrectness threshold, when displaying negative emotions online.”