Adding a smiley face to a good news message at work can boost perceptions of competence and appropriateness.

Matching emoji meaning to message content is most important for perceptions of competence and appropriateness.

Women judged other women's negative emoji use more harshly than men's, but men didn't show this bias.

“Using Emojis at Work? You’re Not Going to Like This Study!” That’s the headline of a recent Gizmodo article about new research from the University of Ottawa. With a headline like that, you may be worried that the message you sent yesterday afternoon with a smiley face 🙂 at the end could land you in hot water with the recipient. Yet, as is often the case with science reporting, the findings are much more nuanced than the online headlines would lead you to believe.

In fact, the real takeaway from the work led by Dr. Erin Courtice and colleagues is that emojis at work aren’t inherently bad, but the ways we express ourselves in the workplace are shaped by unspoken rules. Failing to follow those rules could result in penalties, but following them might improve how you are perceived by colleagues.

Courtice and colleagues ran a simple yet elegant experiment in which 243 undergraduates were asked to evaluate hypothetical or simulated workplace instant messages (IMs). Each message varied in tone (positive, negative, neutral), emoji type (positive: grinning face 😀; negative: angry face 😠; no emoji), and the message sender's gender (man or woman). The researchers then explored how participants’ ratings of the sender's competence and the message's appropriateness for a workplace environment varied across combinations of the three variables of interest and the participant's gender.

Although messages without emojis were consistently associated with high ratings for competence and appropriateness, matching emojis to the content of the message was very important to overall ratings. For example, a positive emoji paired with a positive or neutral message resulted in competency and appropriateness ratings that were virtually identical to those for messages sent without an emoji. The problems arose when the meaning of an emoji did not align with the message's content. Thus, pairing happy faces with negative........

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