Emoji are everywhere. From gurning faces to the occasional grinning poo, these modern ideographs have wormed their way into our lives. You can find them on smartphones, text messages, in social networks and on T-shirts. Last month, a French man was handed a six months sentence for threatening his ex-girlfriend by sending her a gun emoji.

We should prepare ourselves for a tidal wave of winking characters. But are they ever acceptable in the workplace? Research suggests they are...in the right circumstances.

Emoji and their precursors have served a useful role in communication for nearly 35 years. Their Neanderthal forebear, the emoticon, emerged on the early text-based internet as a way of presenting some nuance and inflection to emails and chats. The first emoticon, a clumsy combination of punctuation, was the now-ubiquitous smiley :-). Its purpose was to indicate levity.

Scroll forward to 2011 and the use of these pictograms proliferated as Apple began to ship iPhones with an emoji keyboards. Instagram, the social network focused on images, saw the number of messages containing emoji jump from less than 5 per cent to more than 40 per cent three years later.

What mattered was who you were talking to. The more senior your recipient, the more buttoned-down you needed to be. A pity, our bosses might be missing out.

The question remains, is using emojis at work just one step too far? True, language is always evolving, but there are some words we still don’t use at work. Should that apply to emojis too?

We can agree they don’t have a precise semantic value. Take the dollar bill with wings. Does this mean profits flying high? Or that money is flitting away? All our training around precision and clarity in communication seems in stark contrast to these ambiguous icons. Yet many emoji remain useful. My sense is that it is their fuzzy-edged sentiment that gives them their value. In themselves they may not be much but, they add nuance to sentences.

In The Communicative Functions of Emoticons in Workplace E-Mails, an academic paper recently published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, researcher Karianne Skovholt and her co-authors, argue that emojis are used to intimate texture to workplace communication. One particularly important use is as a modifier to hedge messages. In expressive phrases, such as greetings, emojis strengthen the message. In more demanding dispatches, such as requests, they are used to soften the tone. In other words, they play similar roles to body language.

More prosaically, emoji also bring humour and emotion to the office. A quick emoji can signal a sense of triumph or tiredness, victory or delight, the things that make us human.

But it is best not to use them willy-nilly. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that different phones and computers render emojis differently — enough to change their meaning. A grinning, smiley face (”well done on the sales figures!”) sent using Microsoft software can render as a grimace on your subordinate’s iPhone (“the sales figures look terrible”). Hilarity might not ensue. Best also to avoid their use when firing someone, writing a legal document or in your annual Chairman’s letter — for such messages they are still not yet universal or precise enough.

And there are some emojis that one should ignore completely because a recipient will never interpret them well. The top contender? Probably the gun.

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