In a recent article I explored some research from the University of Michigan, which examined how emoticons could help us to regulate our emotions at work.
monitored the use of emojis in online communication to act as a proxy for the emotions of employees, with the emoji use then enabling them to accurately predict the dropout of remote workers.
Obviously, in a remote-working environment, it’s very difficult to pick up on the kind of emotional clues that can be intuitive in a face-to-face setting. Even video calls are no real substitute as evidence suggests that we spend most of the time on video calls looking at ourselves rather than our companions.
As such, the Michigan researchers were looking at what nonverbal cues might be available within online communication to better allow us to communicate our own emotional health and interpret that of our colleagues. They gathered data from GitHub’s remote worker communications, which contained information from millions of posts made on the platform.
The analysis found that people who regularly use emojis to signify emotions would have better emotional health, regardless of whether the emojis they used were positive or negative. This then translated into higher engagement and less likelihood that the developer would leave the project or the platform.
Loss of prestige
While this may sound good, research from Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management urges a degree of caution. The researchers suggest that using emoticons instead of words can diminish the signals of power that we give off to colleagues.
The researchers examined the way people responded to pictorial and verbal messages in a number of different contexts. The results show that more power tends to be attributed to those who chose verbal forms of communication.
“Today we are all accustomed to communicating with pictures, and the social networks make it both easy and fun,” the researchers explain. “Our findings, however, raise a red flag: in some situations, especially in a work or business environment, this practice may be costly, because it signals low power. Our advice: think twice before sending a picture or emoji to people in your organization, or in any other context in which you wish to be perceived as powerful.”
Presenting authority
The researchers produced a range of everyday scenarios that were pitched to volunteers. For instance, one experiment saw participants asked to imagine they were attending a retreat run by a company called Lotus. Half of the volunteers were told that staff were wearing t-shirts with a verbal logo of the company, with the other half wearing t-shirts with a visual logo. The respondents thought the staff wearing the verbal logo had more power.
The researchers explain that the move to virtual meetings during the pandemic has made the use of pictures and emoticons more commonplace to try and convey a sense of context to communications. While this can undoubtedly be useful and effective, their findings suggest that their use may diminish our perceived power somewhat, which should perhaps be born in mind, especially by leaders and managers, when we converse online.
“Research shows that visual messages are often interpreted as a signal for the desire for social proximity. A separate body of research shows that less powerful people desire social proximity more than powerful people do,” they conclude. “Consequently, signaling that you’d like social proximity by using pictures is essentially signaling you’re less powerful. It must be noted that such signaling is usually irrelevant in close relationships, as in communications between family members.”
“However, in many arenas of our lives, especially at work or in business, power relations prevail, and we should be aware of the impression our messages make on their recipients. Our findings raise a red flag: when you want to signal power think twice before sending an emoji or a picture.”
