Here’s a Guide to Emojis You Should and Shouldn’t Use in the Office

Choosing your words carefully in the office is a given, because of the implicit difference between “professional” and “personal” settings…or so you might think: Gen-Z is beginning to shake up some of these norms. And now a new study shared with Inc. by productivity translation and localization outfit Lokalise may make you think carefully about one of today’s funnest and most-used forms of informal communication: the emoji. Should you give them a big thumbs-up 👍for intra-office comms?

Lokalise surveyed over a thousand workers across the U.S., U.K., Germany and Mexico, and the one emoji that everybody agreed is verboten in a workplace setting probably won’t surprise you: the eggplant 🍆. If you’re unsure as to why this is the case, then a quick Google will help you out…though perhaps, ironically, it’s best not to do that googling at work. More tamely, and perhaps more surprisingly, U.S. workers deemed the lipstick-kiss emoji 💋as inappropriate for work, with 91 percent agreeing — the “highest rate for that emoji in any country,” Lokalise notes.

Ok, we started with a bang there, straight into the controversial emojis. But Lokalise’s data shows that many people think that emojis don’t belong in the office, no matter their direct or implied meanings: 47 percent of respondents think this. Gen X (not boomers, for once!) is most in favor of this sort of ban, with 53 percent agreeing. Just 44 percent of Millennials feel this way.

One reason for this feeling may be the risk of an emoji being misinterpreted — either by simple mistake, or by someone coming from a different generation or from a different cultural background. Seventy-four percent of Gen-Z respondents to the survey worry about this, for example. Meanwhile, 30 percent of respondents say they themselves have misinterpreted an emoji from a peer, and 27 percent say that someone’s workplace emoji use has actually offended them 😡. 

Context and digital platforms may be important for correctly understanding an emoji. The data shows, for example, users of the Microsoft Teams work chat system are 71 percent more likely to say emojis are frequently misunderstood than users of the Slack chat service. There may be many reasons for this, of course, with perhaps the more “traditional” office populated by older workers using Teams — or it may be because the emoji implementation in these apps are different. Teams, for example, uses Microsoft’s own quirky interpretation of the emoji standards, whereas Slack has more simplified emojis and also allows users to upload and send their own emojis, perhaps with a personal meaning. (My favorite of these: a dancing penguin: for some text conversations it’s just the most appropriate response).

Speaking of responses to text conversations, Lokalise found 60 percent of workers say they’ve used an emoji to cut a conversation short. And, as you may expect, the tendency to do this skews younger: 72 percent of Gen-Z use emojis like this. 

Signaling exactly how useful emojis can be, however, 33 percent of the respondents said they’ve used an emoji to react to bad workplace news — events Lokalise suggests include “layoffs, warnings, or policy changes.” The survey is sadly silent on exactly which emoji were used here, but it’s easy to imagine someone who was recently laid off fighting the temptation to reply with an emoji that looks a lot like a conical pile of chocolate ice cream.

The one big lesson for your company here is that emojis are hugely popular, and your workers likely will use them for workplace comms. 

There are good reasons for this, including the fact that a single emoji can express subtle emotional meanings in place of typing out a sentence or two 🌈, and for time-pressed staff 😵‍💫 the few seconds it takes to click on a tick emoji ✅ to say they’ve completed a task may give them an extra free minute to relax and sip a coffee ☕️ before moving on to the next task. Emojis are also undeniably fun.

Perhaps it’s not worth issuing a formal emoji policy, since some workers will respond with a shrug 🤷, and others with more, ahem, emphatic emojis 💀. But maybe you should remind your staff that emojis are a form of speech 💬, and probably should follow company policy on what is and what is not acceptable to say at work.