Emojis are not Professional, are They?
Jenny Morse, PhD
Author and CEO
Have you used an emoji in an email at work? Seriously, have you? I bet you have. At least one smiley face. AT LEAST a wink;)
But if I asked you if emojis are “professional,” most of you would probably say no.
…
Why not? Why aren’t emojis part of our professional writing?
Because.
Because they are informal, unacceptable, new, immature, inappropriate…etc, etc.
Sure, but what you are really saying is that emojis are not part of our current work culture.
Yet.
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And who decides what is part of our work culture? Can you wear a hoodie to the office? Probably. People hardly notice what you wear post-CoVID. They are happy you are wearing pants. Right? But could you wear a hoodie to the office in 1983? Ha! Absolutely not. Not even on casual Friday.
What’s changed? Culture.
And who changes culture. People. More specifically, the people in power.
What made it ok to wear a hoodie to the office? Well, some offices? The question is really who. Answer: Mark Zuckerberg. And a few other young tech geniuses who started massive companies and didn’t want to wear suits.
But what did Mark Zuckerberg wear to court? A suit. Like everyone else. And he looked pretty awkward wearing it.
See, work culture, like all culture, is a set of agreed upon but unspoken rules that everyone who participates in a particular culture knows. And those rules change based on the people in power. Whoever has the power gets to set the rules because they choose who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets to interact with customers and who works in the basement. What is “acceptable” is determined by the decision-makers. And in the 2000s some of those decision makers wanted to wear hoodies to their offices, and they didn’t want to wear suits.
And that’s how emojis work.
Right now, they aren’t “professional” because the people in power–the decision makers–typically don’t use them. The unspoken rules around emojis are that you can use them with people you know, but not with people you don’t know. And that’s pretty much the difference between professional and casual, formal and informal.
But unlike hoodies, emojis are actually an incredibly useful tool that solve a language problem. Spoken language has tone, meaning we can see and/or hear the emotional content of a message. We can see facial expressions, posture, gestures, eye contact. We can hear in the voice volume, pace, inflection, intonation, melody, cadence, enunciation, pronunciation, and breath. All the information we gather from the body when a person is speaking has been suggested to make up 94% of our understanding of what someone says. We hear not just what they are saying (6%) but how they are saying it (94%). And that gives us a lot of information about what the person means.
Writing doesn’t have all that. Writing doesn’t convey tone in the same way that speaking does. Because writing doesn’t have a face; it doesn’t have a voice.
Except emojis give it one.
Until the invention of emoticons (the punctuation predecessors of emojis), standard punctuation was limited. We had the period and the comma, the apostrophe and the dash, and of course the colon and semicolon. These marks were invented shortly after the printing press in the 15th and 16 centuries. Think of these marks:
.
,
Put them together, you get the semicolon. Move the comma around, you get the apostrophe. Double the period, you get the colon.
Punctuation marks are simple because way back in the middle ages, those symbols had to be carved in wood (or lead). And the printers made new symbols out of combinations of the old ones.
Just like our emoticons, which were new combinations of those same, simple symbols:
:)
Can you hear the tone change each time? That’s the power of emojis.
Since emojis are a solution to the problem that writing doesn’t have a voice and therefore doesn’t have tone, the future of business writing will include emojis. Someday, they will replace periods because they give us more information than a period does. Someday is not yet today. We can keep using our 15th century symbols for a while yet.
But when the generation that grew up using emojis in everything from text messages to LinkedIn posts to emails become the decision-makers, you can bet their writing will include emojis. You’ll get an official letter from your bank like this:
Hopefully, we’ll all be retired by then!
At present, the standard rule is not to use emojis in your business writing–any writing you do for your job. That standard changes if you know the person, so you might not use an emoji on your first message, but you’ll definitely use one (or 7) by your hundredth message to the same person, depending on the person and context. If the other person has more decision-making power than you, don’t use one until they do, and try to imitate their use of emojis, since the emojis themselves have different meanings depending on generational and other cultural backgrounds.
So, emojis become professional as you get to know the people you are writing to and as the people you know who have more power than you use them.
