Delivering bad news at work? Use emoji! Inserting pictures or GIFs into emails can soften the blow, study finds

Whether it’s a friendly smiley or a cheeky wink, many of us regularly include emoji in our work emails.

And if you want to deliver bad news to a coworker, a new study suggests you should ramp up the emoji.

Researchers at Chatham University say using emoji or GIFs in emails can soften the blow around negative messages.

“Emojis can play an important role in appropriately communicating negative emotions,” says study author Dr. Monica Riordan.

“This appropriate expression of emotion helps bring virtual teams together, capturing nuances of conversations that are otherwise impossible or inappropriate to convey through text.”

In the 26 years since the first emoji was created, the characters have become increasingly popular around the world.

In fact, a 2018 study by researchers at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona found that a as many as six billion emoji are used every day.

However, the verdict is on whether or not the characters are suitable in the workplace.

For example, a 2018 study claimed that smiley faces, thumbs up and the ubiquitous love heart could boost communication in the workplace, while a 2022 study found that people who include images in their work emails are perceived as less powerful.

In their new study, the researchers wanted to understand the impact of emoji and GIFs on negative messages in an online work environment.

In all three experiments, the researchers found that GIFs and emoji increased team morale, regardless of whether they were negative or positive

In the second experiment, which involved 178 participants, the emoji were replaced with GIFs: a negative non-face GIF, a positive non-face GIF, a negative face GIF, or a positive face GIF.

The team conducted three experiments.

In the first, 105 participants were shown different messages with either no emoji, a negative emoji or a positive emoji.

For example, one message exchange read “Our latest songs were just released,” with the response “I saw them last night.”

In the negative condition, a thumbs down emoji was added at the end of the response, while in the positive condition, a clapping hands emoji was added.

In the second experiment, which involved 178 participants, these emojis were replaced with GIFs: a negative non-face GIF, a positive non-face GIF, a negative face GIF, or a positive face GIF.

Finally, in the third experiment, which involved 195 participants, the researchers assessed the impact of facial emoji, emotional words and punctuation marks.

In all three experiments, the researchers found that GIFs and emoji, regardless of whether they were negative or positive, boosted team morale.

‘We found that using these cues leads observers to perceive greater emotional intensity in the conversation, which was associated with higher perceived closeness between the team members and thus higher motivation of the participants to join the team, regardless of the value of the signals,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in Computers in human behavior.

The researchers say emoji are especially useful for bringing colleagues who work from home together.

“When working remotely, as with face-to-face work, the ability to appropriately display negative emotions is important for favorable workplace outcomes,” the team added.

“In fact, the use of emojis, GIFs, and punctuation causes remote team members to cross the threshold for expression, but not the threshold for inappropriateness, when displaying negative emotions online.”