4 ms·

Emojis are in general pretty ambiguous. Don't use them in professional communication.

jraph 5y ago
I don't know. In my (small) team we make extensive use of emojis and it seems to work for us. I guess they end up having an uniform meaning like any jargon word in a team. One of our customer also likes using emojis, at least with me (and not in group mails including people from both of our teams), and it is fine too. I guess she's at ease with me, and it works when you have a good (enough) understanding between people. They can make messages that would otherwise (wrongly) feel a bit blunt lighter (and fix the intent / meaning / mood). So they are a valuable tool for a better communication sometimes! Be careful in your communication, and this includes emojis, that you should not overuse, but you have no other way than getting to know people you interact with to have a good communication, emojis or not. You will end up meeting ambiguity regularly because of many factors, and that is not restricted to emojis. There are people with whom I'll use fewer emojis, or a specific set of emojis, and it also depends of many things. It is also true of the communication style: it is likely a bit different with each people you interact with. I'd avoid specific emojis that are probably unsafe I guess. In my team, the wink emoji was used to say "thank you" for a short period of time. We (unconsciously, as a team) moved to the "pray" emoji, which I dislike a bit less for this purpose but the intent was already clear with the wink emoji.
- aliasEli 5y ago
  It's OK to use emoji's for people you know well, just like it's OK to use inside jokes with them. The problem starts when you are communicating with people outside your cultural circle. There is no dictionary for emojis. For example, take the unicode symbol U+1F346 AUBERGINE. My native language contains a lot of french words so I know immediately what it means. For many English speakers that must be translated to egg plant, and even then there will be some people (especially nonnative speakers) who have never seen one. It seems just a harmless emoji for some vegetable, but that is not how it is frequently used.

I don't know. In my (small) team we make extensive use of emojis and it seems to work for us. I guess they end up having an uniform meaning like any jargon word in a team. One of our customer also likes using emojis, at least with me (and not in group mails including people from both of our teams), and it is fine too. I guess she's at ease with me, and it works when you have a good (enough) understanding between people. They can make messages that would otherwise (wrongly) feel a bit blunt lighter (and fix the intent / meaning / mood). So they are a valuable tool for a better communication sometimes! Be careful in your communication, and this includes emojis, that you should not overuse, but you have no other way than getting to know people you interact with to have a good communication, emojis or not. You will end up meeting ambiguity regularly because of many factors, and that is not restricted to emojis. There are people with whom I'll use fewer emojis, or a specific set of emojis, and it also depends of many things. It is also true of the communication style: it is likely a bit different with each people you interact with. I'd avoid specific emojis that are probably unsafe I guess. In my team, the wink emoji was used to say "thank you" for a short period of time. We (unconsciously, as a team) moved to the "pray" emoji, which I dislike a bit less for this purpose but the intent was already clear with the wink emoji.

aliasEli 5y ago
It's OK to use emoji's for people you know well, just like it's OK to use inside jokes with them. The problem starts when you are communicating with people outside your cultural circle. There is no dictionary for emojis. For example, take the unicode symbol U+1F346 AUBERGINE. My native language contains a lot of french words so I know immediately what it means. For many English speakers that must be translated to egg plant, and even then there will be some people (especially nonnative speakers) who have never seen one. It seems just a harmless emoji for some vegetable, but that is not how it is frequently used.