Why You Should be Using Emojis in the Workplace
By: Christine Mchone
Tags: Slack, Emoji, Workplace, Customer Success

Unnecessary. Unprofessional. Useless.

Those used to be my thoughts on emojis. I didn’t use them personally and could never imagine using them intentionally in a professional setting.

Well, hold on now, let me take that back. Back in 1999 while working at America Online, I used emoticons. We didn’t refer to them as that and I think I only used 6 really basic ones:

:) happy

:-) happy but oh my goodness it has a nose now

:D super happy

:( sad

:’( soo sad, look tears

;-) haha, I was just kidding or no problem, happy to help

If I recall, we mostly used them at the end of a sentence. An emphasis of sorts. We actually used the ™ symbol more than emoticons because someone shared that ALT+0153 on your keyboard could create it. We trademarked everything we typed….for fun and for the sheer novelty of adding a little flair to our text.

We also spent an inordinate amount of time choosing our font type and color. My personal favorite was bold green comic sans. I know, I’m embarrassed for myself too. We watched hamster dance on repeat and perused Blue Mountain for the perfect greeting card to “e-mail” to our pals. My younger siblings — members of the next generation coming up, really took emoticons to the next-level. My sister, who was just 11 in 1999 was using =^_^= on her Angelfire page. I thought it a bit strange.

I suppose it goes without saying that once emojis appeared in my smartphone, I didn’t use them. I held this strong conviction that emojis were for the kids. It was their ™ so to speak. Let them play. I’ll stick to the occasional :) and not get piping mad when it auto converts to an emoji.

Well, as I am sure you can imagine, I had to quickly adapt after joining Slack. We use them in ways which I could never have imagined and they have since made my working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

I know, hard to believe, right?

It’s so true, and now I can’t imagine not using emojis. I am certainly no expert, and there are some that I see and have no idea what I am looking at. Luckily, we have a channel where professional emoji users explain their meanings. If you don’t think you need a channel like this, let me assure you that you most certainly do. Across the varied generations, geographies, cultures, and ethnicities that make up our workplace, certain emojis may mean different things to different groups. While I often would use 😉 to indicate a quick “no problem, happy to help”, I learned to my utter embarrassment that other generations interpret this as flirting. I also learned that 😤 is not an angry little fella to our colleagues in Japan. It denotes achievement or triumph.

In short, companies should most certainly invest time in getting employees informed about emojis to compliment existing initiatives within inclusion and diversity.

Integrating emojis into your day to day operations is simple and will give back time to you and your colleagues.

At a basic level, we use emojis to denote urgency. When someone asks a question in a channel, the question is prefaced with either a 🔴, 🔵, or ⚪ emoji. Obviously, anything that comes in red is the first question swarmed because it’s “red hot” compared to “cool blue” and “ice cold”.

We use emojis to acknowledge. As soon as a question is asked or a request is made in channel, we put a set of 👀 on it to let the requestor know someone is looking at their request. When the question is answered, the responder reacts with a ✅.

Looking to source volunteers? Want to avoid the dreaded reply all emails? All you have to do is ask your question in channel and request that volunteers react to your post with a ✋. Hover over the reacji to quickly see who has volunteered.

Before moving on, let me explain what a reacji is since I didn’t know what it was before joining Slack either. If you write a post and include an emoji, that’s an emoji. When someone reacts to your post with their own emoji, it is called a reacji.

Ok, so let’s say you want to know the best time to have a team meeting your inbox getting filled with responses like:

“Sure, that works.”

“I can’t, but are there any other times that work for most of us?”

“Oh, let me see if I can move this meeting before I commit.”

“Sorry! I know I show as busy but I am actually free.”

“Oops, I forgot to block that time. I can’t make it.”

Me too. All you need to do is ask the team to vote on the post with a specified reacji for the time that works best for them. Opt to schedule the meeting based on the timeslot with the highest reacjis.

Ever ask for an opinion or suggestion and you keep getting the same response over and over and over again — or the “I agree with person a, b, and c” response which makes you go down a rabbit hole to tally feedback by scrolling up or searching your inbox to see what person a, b, and c said?

At Slack, we avoid this by reacting with a ➕ to someone’s response rather than create a never-ending thread. We also have variations of ➕ to denote how strongly we agree like :plusplusplusplusplus:

It denotes absolute agreement but we also have :plus-pulse: which is an animated version of the above but fades in and out. To me, it’s a more playful way to denote agreement and excitement at the same time.

We use reacjis to celebrate achievements, give virtual hugs, congratulate, motivate, inspire, be silly, and I suppose all the things that emojis have been used for all these years while I was sitting on the sidelines.

Just when you thought I couldn’t talk about emojis any more, I must introduce you to Workflow Builder. A very simplistic definition of Workflow Builder is that it’s a tool that allows you to automate manual tasks. What you create is called a workflow.

You can trigger a workflow to run in many different ways, including emojis. The use cases for all types of triggers are endless so I’ll just focus on emoji triggered workflows.

I recently created a workflow whereby reacting with a 🎁 emoji on a person’s post would trigger SlackBot to send the person a direct message with a redemption code for use on our swag site. It took less than 3 minutes to create and saved me from composing personalized emails to the winners.

I created a workflow that allows someone to react to a pinned post with a 🙋 emoji and in doing so results in them receiving a direct message from SlackBot with helpful links and resources related to the channel topic.

I created a workflow that notifies the reactor of the name of the person looking into their request and is triggered by the 👀 reacji mentioned above. This eliminates the need for the user to go back to channel to find out if someone has picked up their question. Likewise, I created workflow to inform when the ✅ is placed on their post and that an answer is waiting for them. What’s even better is that I had the ability to include a link to the original post so the user doesn’t have to conduct a search in channel.

Other departments have used published workflows in channels as a means of gathering product ideas and funneling them into other channels. We have an internal product feedback channel and if enough colleagues support the product request, a :product request: reacji will trigger the workflow to post the request in the appropriate product team channel.

It takes one click. You can avoid the, “Hi Product Team — I just stumbled across a post in channel X regarding x, y, and z and everyone really likes this idea. Is this something you would consider?” — The reacji delivers that same message right to their channel doorstep in 1 second.

I’ve also used emoji triggered workflows for culture building. I mentioned in a previous blog post that I created an internal channel named #askdanpanything. He’s the resident Slack genius I have the pleasure of working with in Customer Success. When Dan responds to a question, more often than not, peers in channel will react with the :danp-wow: emoji — and in doing so, the workflow for this emoji posts a message as a threaded response that reads, “You’re the best Dan”.

Wow emojis at Slack are a sight to behold. They are bestowed upon colleagues who have made it. They are celebrated with the creation of their own personal wow-emoji. Essentially, it’s their face with an animated gif background. Here’s a preview of Dan’s:

I encourage you to re-think emojis in the workplace if you are currently sitting on the sidelines like I once was. They are a wonderful addition to the workday and will most certainly make your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive too!