Many of us resisted for a few months, or was it years? We thought emojis were banal, frivolous, aimless, even unprofessional. Now they have become an essential part of organizational communications, it seems. Adam McCulloch reports

The change is often imperceptible. Older co-workers often recall what life was like before email and before the Internet. Now, so many people are working from home that the opportunities to reminisce are dwindling, but the conversation is more likely to involve statements such as “It’s amazing to think I used to go to the office every day.” The truth is that we accept huge changes in our lives that at one time may have seemed unthinkable, and we adapt quickly.

For example, there was a time before emoticons and emojis – and that was just a few years ago. For those who prefer direct, functional and emotionless communication, the era of emoji is a disaster. Now most communication should be accompanied by perhaps an icon of a happy face, a hysterically happy face, a sighing eye rolling face, a smug looking face with sunglasses, a symbol of champagne and a party hat, a turd, or for reasons that escape me, an eggplant (at least I think it is an eggplant).

Perfect for the aggressive passives among us, a new mode of communication has been invented based on tone without having to cleverly use words to convey feelings. And, like takeout food delivered to homes and Netflix, a devastating global disease has given it a huge head start.

Personnel Today was contacted by a telecom operator, so often the harbinger of both laughable and profound news, who conducted research into the use of emojis.

It revealed that more than two-fifths of Britons (nearly half, surely, but who cares) use emojis to communicate at work with colleagues or clients.

TextAnywhere looked at the emoji habits of 1,000 employees in the UK and found that 44.2% used emojis in their texts and emails in the workplace.

The company tells us that “With the blurring lines between working from home and working in the office, previous TextAnywhere research has shown that over 67% of employees access their work chat or email through their phone. staff. Following this trend, new data shows that one in three employees use emojis to text colleagues and another 8% use emojis in emails to colleagues at work.

Emjay Lofts, Head of Marketing at TextAnywhere, added: “As the pandemic has left us reliant on technology to communicate with each other, the speed at which individuals want to send their message, email or text message has increased. . Emojis can help tech users relay their messages and emotions while shortening the time it takes to convey the meaning of the message.

“While emojis were initially less common in the workplace, research shows that more than two-fifths of Britons now use emojis to communicate with colleagues. This demonstrates the change in language in the workplace, in particularly when platforms such as Teams and Slack have been introduced to businesses as growing numbers of individuals continue to loan both in-office and remote work.

However, only 3% of workers said they used emojis to contact customers, likely the last bastion to fall.

The most forward-thinking HR professional must wonder what the implications of all of this are. Could discrimination cases be brought based on the misuse of emojis at work? Could internal grievances arise from pressing the wrong icon (“I used the clown symbol because I thought what he was saying was funny – I wasn’t saying he was incompetent!” )? Smartphones can cause people a lot of trouble, as the porn-watching MP found out today; what dangers lurk in the proliferating use of emoticons?

There was a time when you had to pick up a phone or leave a note. We will discuss this on Personnel Today during our next all in. In 2023 maybe.

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