So I’ve been working from home now for about 6 weeks, and I’d like to talk about one little thing that I wish everybody did:
I wish everybody used emojis when using instant messaging services at work.
Now I know this sounds a bit silly, but it’s for good reason.
Many of us are so used to interacting with our coworkers face to face and have now been forced into a remote environment. In person, we understand their mannerisms, we can use our body language, we both have a real voice. So when that interaction is suddenly moved to a text based exchange, it feels really different.
Written correspondence is hardly a new experience, if anything it’s extremely old technology. 5000 years ago, the first instance of written communication was becoming a reality, so we can’t really blame the technology, it’s been around for ages! But back then, writing to people usually meant that physically, they weren’t near you. The written word could have travelled thousands of miles to get to you, which meant you had to say a hell of a lot at once!
Nowadays, the technology is so instant, that we can send over small messages, in quick succession. In some cases we can send over one letter to get our point across… I’m looking at YOU, people who send ‘K’.
The way we use written communication to speak to each other is completely different now. It’s such a common way of communicating, yet I still find it suboptimal. It doesn’t fully do the job.
When I’m at the office and I speak to one of my co-workers, I can convey the tone and the intention behind my message very easily, through my voice. That same sentence can sound completely different when it’s written down. In some ways it can even come across as negative.
The tone in which I intend my written message to sound, isn’t necessarily the tone in which the recipient is going to read it in.
That is the point I’m trying to make here. It’s a problem.
So, my solution is to simply send my message along with an emoji, a visual guide to help that recipient decipher how I intended the message to come across. It’s a small little change, that can do wonders.
Now I grew up in the time of MSN messenger, SMS messages, MySpace and the like, and I think this way of thinking has been baked into me since then. Emojis (or emoticons as we called them back then) were a staple of almost every back and forth on those platforms. We created our own way of speaking.
Emojis can transcend language, in fact they ARE their own language in some way. A universally recognised communication tool.
So please…use them!
Note: I scrolled through my work’s Slack, trying to find examples of my way of messaging. I found about 90% of my messages on Slack used Emojis. It’s just who I am.
