My workplace is somewhat stuffy but I’ve still never seen anyone take issue with a smiley or similar emoji in an email. Tone is hard to assess over text, a simple :) goes a long way sometimes.
I’m afraid I have to give you your notice, as your position is no longer a priority for the company 😢
Well thanks for wasting the last 3 years of my career, you feckless ghouls!!! 😜❤️
Dear Karen,
you are the dumbest bitch I’ve ever had to work with and I hope you die a gruesome death.
:)
As per my last message 🖕🙄
I understand your concerns but ☝️😴
Don’t worry, that’s a valid question 🫵😆
There’s a woman I haven’t met in person but I have to send emails to about once a month to ask for something only her group can do
One time I did something like "could you help us get xxx report from your system by CoB? 😅 " and she replied that emojis could have a hidden meaning and are not professional and I should not use them in emails
Next time after she helped me I went to the greetings system we use and send her a public card for gratitute or team work with some gif of cute cats hugging. I think everyone had a similar experience with her because a lot of people liked the post and then they started doing the same
The worst part is that we have the option to give away points in the system that can be redeemed for gift cards but I’ve never seen anyone give her points, only cute gifs
Same! Especially for client management and working with a broader internal team (as long as you ensure that’s an acceptable level of casualness in comms) it’s incredibly useful to give context for the tone of a message that could without it be interpreted either positively or negatively.
For example: Especially for client management and working with a broader internal team (as long as you ensure that’s an acceptable level of casualness in comms) it’s incredibly useful to give context for the tone of a message that could without it be interpreted either positively or negatively. :)
It didn’t drastically change the content of the message, but it can help someone who’s potentially having a bad day and subconsciously perceiving things negatively to instead see the positive context of the information relayed in what’s on its own a largely neutral message (with neutral messages I find people’s current positive or negative moods tend to have them perceive the message in a manner reflective of that current emotional state).
This is why I hate people. You never know when you’ll meet one of these dumb dumbs that think life is a competition to seem the most adult. They’re the idiots that need to have prefaces saying shit like “the video game industry is actually bigger than the music and movie industry combined” when reading financial times. Get stuffed.
Can you explain a bit more about the preface thing? That seems fine. Are you saying they assume an article is less relevant because they don’t think videogames is a large industry? (This also seems fine to me, the point of news is to educate readers)
Their so into being the most adult version of themselves they have to have gaming explained to them like they don’t already know. I am actually referencing another thing I saw earlier this week on lemmy, where the shared article literally did that, tried to preface an explanation of just how big the gaming industry is, as if the readers, people with money that speculate on stocks etc. don’t already know that there’s gold in them thar gaming hills.
But you could be right, gaming has only been big for like 30-40 years since consoles, and in particular playstation blew up, maybe there’s still 60+ year olds that don’t know wtf is going on in the world.I think that’s more of an investors being stupid thing.
“I’ve never been promoted for my professionalism, but I’ve been promoted countless times for my skill. If you’d rather lose out on the best employee you may ever have because of a smiley face, I’m not sure this environment would be a good fit for me anyway.”
They’re friendlier, and even if you hate them, they make intent a lot clearer over text.
Being courteous and clear in your communications is professional. Being tacit and sententious is not.
sententious
sententious /sĕn-tĕn′shəs/ adjective
- Terse and energetic in expression; pithy.
- Full of or given to using aphorisms, especially in a pompously moralizing manner.
- Abounding with sentences, axioms, and maxims; full of meaning; terse and energetic in expression; pithy. “a sententious style or discourse; sententious truth”
Learned a new word, thanks!
Haha thanks for commenting with the definition. I considered doing that myself, since I too only just recently learned the word, but somehow it feels kind of condescending to do it myself.
lol yeah, would’ve been weird if you did it, and I wanted to save some folks the time. I wonder if it would still be condescending if you just linked a word to a page with its definition?
I have a limit I can tolerate, one emoji every other sentence.
I don’t use them in emails myself, but react emojis to internal work messages are fairly commonplace. A 👍 next to a message is often just a good way to know someone has confirmed reading something rather than needing to write “okay” which is ambiguous (what are you saying okay to?) and takes up space.
But I use a different range of emojis with different people when I do use them, to taste. With colleagues it’s one of 😁😆😅😕😯❤️👍👆, with friends it’s probably one of 🤣🤩😍🤔💀🧐😭🤯🥴😔😏😗💨 or 👀.
There was a legal case in Eastern Canada a short while ago that ruled “👍” is legally binding as an affirmative in terms of a verbal contract.
“Do you agree to XYZ?”
“👍”
I mean, does anyone really consider this not an affirmation? You should only use it as a reply to statements, e.g. “I will arrive a couple minutes later today.”
In this case it was more of a miscommunication. IIRC they used “👍” to say, “Yes, I received your text. Hold on a moment while I prepare things”. Something like that… I think that emoji cost the guy something like three-million dollars.
I totally use 🙃😐😑🤔😔😬 with my team where appropriate, 💯🔥👊🤗🙌 also get used (with like every other emoji you listed) by the entire department all the time, usually as reactions to messages, reaction gifs are also pretty common. Similar thing to 👍 beside a message, just extra descriptive. Client conversations are limited usually to just 👍 reactions. They’re great for symbolic indicators in reporting too.
I like how much extra information emojis bring, definitely used emoticons and the like for that in the past so it’s just a continuation of that to me (I still use emoticons from time to time, ellipsis too) tone is often lost in text otherwise.
Using them to create tone and context is very helpful.
An example of where it’s excessive to me is Martin Wimpress’ Ubuntu MATE blog, like I know what a paper cut is, the emojis don’t add anything and are more of a nuisance to read. I think Martin has toned it down in his more recent posts.
🖕 that guy and his supposed professionalism
🍆
