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Emoticons in the Workplace
Platonic writes "According to the New York Times, the Emoticon has become much more than something the kids do after school. The little guys seem to have found their way into the workforce: being used by stock brokers and even the U.S. Military.
From TFA: 'I mean, it's ludicrous," said Ms. Feldman, 25. "I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.'"
:-O
While there are places emoticons clearly do not belong, such as in formal business documents, there are also quite reasonable places to consider using them, such as informal communications between people engaged in business. Smiling, at its most basic form, is a signal that something is not a danger, and acts as a tool for bonding. This has intrinsic value for business, and it's why people also sometimes smile while conducting business in person. Why not extend this capability to less formal electronic communication for business as well since the tool already exists?
I can only speak for myself, but I always get the feeling that I'm dealing with the lowest possible tier of CSR when I start getting emoticons or excessive punctuation in my communications.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
The gist of the article seems to be, "This is the way it is now, so it's acceptable." I don't really agree.
It's an informal style, so sure, where informality is allowed, sure, why not? If you feel comfortable dropping your boss a joke email, then there is no reason you shouldn't throw in a random emoticon in routine correspondence, but I would seriously recommend against using the "unhappy face" to deliver any sort of bad news, or adding in random emoticons on anything resembling official correspondence, or anything that might get passed on up the line.
It's just not professional.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
We need a war on emoticons! And the parents have to stop leaving these latchkey children unattented.
Multiple studies have shown that use of emoticons is a gateway to hard punctuation.
But, I just became legal again to use the frowny: http://www.despair.com/acompromise.html
Star Pirates
It's not always about YOU! It's not supposed to 'make you feel better' you addled-brained twat, it's supposed to clarify the state of mind of the sender! Would you have preferred that the sender put a big ol' grin in there? :D That said, I use emoticons for team communication, but not for formal documents. A yes/no email regarding a potential deal doesn't sound like a formal document to me.
Blar.
This display of unprofessionalism is most upsetting. As a result, I've sent out a memo to the office banning the use of emoticons in work-related matters. It's written in Comic Sans MS.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Quite frankly, a large majority of what we understand in face-to-face conversation comes from body language. A smaller section are the vocal cues and intonations we pick up on. The smallest part of what we understand in a conversation is the actual words. Since e-mail is only words, and completely lacks the body language/intonation cues we're used to in real life, can you really blame someone for trying to add some of those cues back in?
Apparently yes. I, for one, welcome our "naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled" overlords.
Of course she's not going to feel better, but I guess smileys have become part of the culture, which is already very superficial. There's a lot of smiling and compliments and smalltalk going on, and that's probably a good thing, to a degree. A certain "buffering zone" between what someone wants and thinks and what they'll tell the world keeps everything more civilized. It won't make a difference when losing 100Ks of dollars, but in the long run, I prefer some "syntactic sugar" in my communication. Of course, if there's too much lying and fake niceness going on, that'll do more harm. In a nutshell: don't mind the occasional smiley face.
After the market damage from last week my broker sent me this
IM IN UR PORTFOLIO
SHORTING UR GUGULS
at age 25. Seriously, this is not a concern of the average person, and those who do have it as a concern are free to take their business to other brokers who are more reserved.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am in the IT industry and internet slang and emoticons are pretty much the norm. Mainly in IM communication in out department. We use Jabber and in daily communication it is not unusual to have a smiley or lols thrown in the chatter. i think it all depends on what field you are in an the type of communication you are using. In an email generally these aren't accepted practice for business, but we do throw them in here and there for less formal occasions.
Today's Tomorrow is Yesterday's Future! --- "Where Ever You Go, There You Are" -- Diablo 1
One of the biggest flaws of text-only communication is that it doesn't include the "side-channel" of body language. A sentence sent as an instant message or email might fit well with many different tones of voice or facial expressions, and that can affect both the meaning and the likely reaction to it.
(IANAL)
Emotions are part of human life. Most business and email communication is too starchy now for emotion, which wasn't always the case, if you look at how clear letters from 100 years ago were. Most people are also emotionally easily inflamed, and so we're all afraid that others are flaring up or running off to cry over their Wellbutrin. We need emotions for online communication and yes, they're overused, but until we find a better way to communicate "mood" or "emotion" email, IM, blogs and forums will be dependent upon the icky little emoticons we've come to loathe.
technical writing / development
"I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.'"
;-)"
I don't know what she is complaining about. If they are using them in the military it could be a lot worse. Imagine the text message after the next friendly fire incident:
"Sorry we didn't mean to blow you up
...in establishing online relationships (be them work, personal, friendship, etc). An emoticon gives you the ability to express the emotions that you can't when you're typing words on the keyboard. I really don't know how chat could be established without emoticons (well, acronyms help but i don't want to RTFM just to find out WTF does an acronym mean). And custom emoticons (i.e. in MSN) are very valuable to express your personality online, and this is a feature I miss in other instant messengers. I have around 30 custom emoticons that I use on a daily basis, and help me express a part of myself that I find difficult to express even offline.
I wonder what the story is behind this Ms. Feldman, 25, and her multizillion dollar real estate deal?
My guess is she got herself real pumped up and greedy over what was probably only passing interest expressed by some buyer. If she's enough of a looney to get this bent out of shape over an "emoticon", then I wouldn't put it past her to grossly overstate the importance or her deal and the notion that it spontaneously fell through at the "23rd hour". I'm guessing her buyer may have been spooked for reasons that had nothing to do with the property...
I once had one of my (less astute) bosses come to me and ask me about email styling. Specifically, he wanted to know if the guy was YELLING at him in the email. The problem? The email was written in 18pt, Dark Brown, Comic Sans font. Obviously the (fairly important) guy used it as his standard email style. Of course, the more amusing part was that this boss "joked" that I had too much time on my hands because I knew Comic Sans on sight...
Though I have to say that the only thing more annoying than seeing Comic Sans in an email is seeing one of those hideous background templates. No, I don't want to see your email decked out in roses. No, I don't want to read your email in blue text on black background. No, I don't want your 4pt font that matches your "professional" faded background. Black on white, 10-12pt font works fine, thankyouverymuch.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Whatever became of Microsoft's new fangled "emotiflag"?
I understand where these people are coming from. Emoticons have no use outside of 13 year olds instant messaging. Anyone else using them needs to grow up. ;)
There have been various movements over the years to add an "irony" punctuation mark to the language.
:)."
I often see the smiley emoticon used in this fashion, to defuse an insult or make sure the reader understands that what is said isn't meant to be taken literally, such as "You're such a jerk
Best Windows Freeware
A few years ago, I received an email filled with bouncing hearts from a person at a client company. WTF?!? I had no idea who this person was. I didn't recognize the name and knew I'd never communicated with her in any way in the past. I sent her the information she'd requested being careful to use the most neutral, professional prose I could muster. Then I looked at the code on her email and saw it was pulling images from one of those "free emoticons" sites. Turns out she'd installed a toolbar that added a bunch of crap to all of her outgoing emails. It was early February so it was adding valentine hearts to everything. Sure enough, after valentine's day, it switched to shamrocks. Apparently someone told her about it because the graphics disappeared before switching to bunnies and eggs.
While I agree that it is no longer reserved for tweens who can't type, people need to realize that it is and always will be part of informal writing. To say "it is for expressing feelings, but via a text message" is stupid because we have WORDS to do that. Hence, using emoticons in formal writing is just your signal to the world that you have no writing skills. It doesn't just apply to emoticons:
Informal:
"wtfm8?"
Formal:
"Sir, I am absolutely flabbergasted that you would insult my intelligence with such incoherent dribble."
I hate all styling past the very most basic, and have all my email clients set up to display text only, no pictures, etc.
Anything else is just making my life more difficult...The whole point of email in the first place is quick, simple communication. If you need more than that, pick up the damn phone, or do a face-to-face.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Emoticons can be annoying.
Whats the consensus on punctuation and grammar in business? Are we all heading towards l33t speak? (shudder)
Anybody else seeing emails with no capital letters? (and yes, I have sent some myself before)
Sarcasm and certain witticisms don't translate well to text as Dr. Fahlman noted back in the day. A smiley or "!" at the end tends to deflect misinterpretation on the receiver's end. Example response(exaggerated for clarity):
F*ck you.
F*ck you :)
Sadly, I get several email responses like this a day. The presence or absence of the smiley determines the office exit I leave through at the end of the day :)
F*ck!
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
This is news? Emoticons came into popular use along with email back in the 1970's.
Even with the ":D", your words above can be taken as insulting. I don't know about you, but I've been insulted to my face while the insulter had this nice smile on their face.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
(.Y.)
/. This font doesn't do it right.
damnit
You mad
Well, at least I *tried* to post the original Smiley doc...but I got: Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Fucking SD. And here was the place I thought I'd never have to worry about the content of my reply. These filters are starting to piss me off.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
film at 11.
But I was using emoticons (we just called them "smileys" then... real computers didn't HAVE icons) on BITNET in the 1980s when her biggest concern was whether her My Little Pony or Care Bears collection got put on the top shelf in her room. They're not a recent phenomenon.
*grumble* damn kids need to get off my lawn :-(
Smileys do clarify matters (and don't seem juvenile to me - hell, we were using them back in -93. Whining about smileys seems kind of anal retentive, and people who do that probably would better stick with sending paper envelopes and word/excel documents to each other.
However, suffixing a sentence with lol communicates quite a bunch of negative things about the other end.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
What kind of incompetent business woman gets angry at an emoticon when they apparently just lost a huge deal at the last minute. It sounds like this did happen, but it was a small deal, it was cancelled right at the beginning and the woman got angry because she didn't get the deal and as a result just completely overexaggerated to make herself feel better.
"I get an e-mail from the broker saying, 'Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn't make the big bucks' -- then there's a frown face!"
Maybe she should've made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Then she wouldn't have anything to worry about (except blowback).
"Emoticons, she added, should be reserved for use by "naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled."".....says Alexis Feldman, 25.
.... since what, you graduated from college in ... 2005?
:)
Alexis, perhaps you could understand that the mores of communication are constantly evolving. In the same sense that it used to be de-rigeur to have to wear a suit and tie to work, the pendulum overswung during the dot-com era to where NOTHING was ever formal, to now where business casual is the norm. It's the same with language, and yes, even styles of email. We can of course forgive you - you're hidebound by all that time you've spent in the high-power business world
Pardon me for not taking the opinion of a 25 year old so terribly seriously.
-Styopa
2005 called to tell you that the kids stopped using emoticons a few years ago. They say "It's lame."
An old guy with kids
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
My job is basicaly to answer emails for an ISP. And I would never ever dream of using an emoticon in one. These are supposed to be professional communications.
;/
Saying that, in other communications I am a chronic overuser of them
I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.
:(
You mean like:
Dear xyzxyz,
I regretfully inform you that due to an unsuccessful financial maneuver the company is now critically indebted.
oops..
Yours,
Looking For a New Job Joe
ftw
Emoticon has become much more than something the kids do after school.... being used by stock brokers and even the U.S. Military
:-)
Blowing stuff up is fun
Table-ized A.I.
Am I the only one who thought of messages like
when hearing that the US military uses emoticons?
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
"Bla, bla, emoticons allow us to express feelings! Accept them, they are okay." What a bunch of crap.
First of all, it implies that old-fashioned written language does not allow you to express emotions. That is simply wrong.
Second, it assumes that emoticons do allow to express emotions. That is also wrong, albeit not obvious. They don't express anything, they merely describe it. There is a huge difference between sounding angry and saying "I am angry."
Third, in its attempt to seem cool and "modern," NY Times forgot to mention that one of the primary reasons people use emoticons is that they allow to fake "feelings" without any effort or consequence. Put a smiley next to an insult and you are likely to get away with it due to ambiguity.
You can abuse emoticons just as liars and scumbags put on a grin as they stab you in the back.
Ms. Feldman surely wouldn't expect a stone-faced monotone from a person informing her of a lost deal in person....would she?
Blar.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
I'm sure that to many people, emoticons display a poor reflection of the person using them in a professional setting. To others I'm sure they are downright annoying. But as numerous people have already stated, they most certainly have a purpose.
When people communicate over the web, obviously, the vast majority is conveyed through text. Emoticons easily display emotions that would otherwise typically be difficult for the average person to communicate through written word. Now, unless the vast majority of people communicating through this medium somehow manage to develop writing skills akin to those of a great author, I can only imagine that the way we interact through the web will expand on multiple platforms.
Overall, the web is still relatively new. Furthermore, the concept of form and design (in relation to the web) is even younger. I'm sure there are quite of few of us who primarily used Usenet, then moved on to the clunky, terribly formatted web sites, and so on. The use of the emoticon developed through small groups, and is still going quite strong, simply because at the current moment, there is no better way to easily display an emotion. And while some people truly disapprove of it's use, I'm quite certain that it is exactly these kinds of development that slowly inch the medium forward.
p.s. Since you're looking at a change of career, I know a large, treasure-filled cave that's an almost perfect match for you
the result you produced may have an equally hypnotic effect upon /. residents as would mesmer
Beauty is just a light switch away.
I regret to inform you that your position no longer exists. You have until the end of the day to clean out your desk. :-(
:-)
Go down to HR to pick up your severance package.
...as long as my boss doesn't know what "Kiss my (*)" means, I guess I'm safe.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_emotic ons
If problems with pasting, maybe a link would do. And this one seems to cover the first use of plain chars smiley, in 1982. Tho in other system there were tricks to overlay chars and create single "cell" smileys, in the 70s. I also found a huge list of smileys.
Emoticons are training wheels for the syntactically impaired.
We got complaints once that the IT department was being rude and offensive. I sent out an IT staff wide email:
:P"
:("
Apparently there are complaints going around that the IT staff are being rude to the [other office's] staff.
We in IT are quick and to the point and that can often times come off as being rude and inconsiderate towards others. Unfortunately, this is as much a fault of our smug sense of superiority as it is the emotionless nature of text over jabber.
As such, here are a list of suggestions designed to make your conversations with the sensitive people in [the other office] seem less harsh:
1) Smiley faces. An abundant use of smiley faces whether negative or positive, will add a nice light hearted touch to whatever it is your trying to explain to the user.
eg:
"That ticket is pointless and your suggestions irrelevant" seems pretty harsh just as is, but a few touch ups and you get:
":( That ticket is pointless, and your suggestions irrelevant
That makes the message look cute and innocent, something that none of us are, except for [a fellow coworker], but are nonetheless necessary to convey that image to [the other office].
2) Diplomacy. It is said that a good leader compels, he does not force. Telling someone outright that their mental capabilities are sub par to that of the IT staff will only result in conflict. Making them BELIEVE it however will allow operations to continue on more smoothly and effectively.
"This is not a smart idea. This is in fact, a very dumb idea."
That is just downright insulting, and invites the user to contradict your response, however right it may be.
"See, the issue here is that your idea doesn't fit into the grand scheme of things. Sorry
That sounds more profound, not too profound as to make the recipient of your negative response feel inadequate, but profound enough to make them believe that their idea is in fact stupid. This also has the added benefit of them not bringing it up again.
3) Costs too much. If the user's proposal sounds ridiculous, even after you've rearranged the proposal in 100 different ways to account for user error, and you need to tell them this but don't feel like being diplomatic, just say it costs too much. Since most of the users you will be dealing with have probably accused you already of not being in a money-making mental state, this will be a double edged sword to making the user shut up.
"Your proposal is a waste of my time, closing ticket."
vs.
"Your proposal's cost is too high and after careful examination, I've concluded that the ROI (return on investment) is simply too small."
Lower echelons of the business world will accept that, but higher echelons may not be entirely convinced, which is where you use diplomacy as described in point #2.
Yes, these suggestions do involve a greater number of keystrokes per conversation, but it will avoid unnecessary headaches in the future.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I use them all the time with colleagues, but I'd never put one in an e-mail that a client would see.
"I cringe when I see them," says the movie critic Roger Ebert, interviewed via e-mail. On the other hand, he adds, "smileys might be a real help for today's students, raised on TV and unskilled at spotting irony without a laugh track."
"The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent." -- Russell Turpin
"...the hateful :) which means 'just kidding' and is used by people who would dot their i's with little circles and should have their eyes dotted with Drano." -- Penn Jillette
Many flamewars have raged because someone missed humor or sarcasm.
OTOH, it is easy to overdo emoticons and they should only be used to clarify meaning. I can see use for smilies, but my imagination doesn't stretch so far as to conceive a situation that needs a frownie or others. When used redundantly, emoticons can be insulting: how else am I supposed to feel?
I was hesitant to sprinkle emoticons into informal emails and chats at the workplace until I determined acceptability by others. What was surprising to me, however, was not that they were acceptable but WHO was actually using them. Here I support dozens of painfully non-tech people everyday. Sometimes, they don't even know which device on their desktop is the actual computer when I ask them to reboot during a troubleshooting call. Yet, these same folk are tossing smiley faces, frowns, and even some pretty good multi-line ASCII art back at me all the time. Some of them are even twice my age!
"A sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention."
*sarcasm detector explodes*
[I'm not sure there's a smiley that can convey Comic Book Guy-level sarcasm.]
For some reason, the one in the story asked me to log in. Here's a non-registration link.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Man I wish I had mod points and there was a 'Insightfully Funny' kind of point. As neither are available I merely congratulate your "insightfully funnieness".
http://stoploudness.org/
I for one, once wrote something as a joke and put a winking smiley at the end so the person would techincally guess that i was joking
;) fellow, i got bar rap from my boss, the other employee's boss etc..etc.. and they were not even harsh words nor insulting, nothing sexual
WELL not everyone is aware of the winking
So to me putting smiley to let people know how you feel is a gamble and can be used against you if the other person DOES NOT GET IT.
Somehow, I don't think that e-mail and emoticons will ever come into certain conversations in communication with patients.
:-(
:-)
Mrs. Smith, you have a tumor on your leg and need an amputation
or Mr. Jones, your ESR is 10
I actually don't talk to patients with e-mail, as it is too hard to misconstrue, or patients take small facts and run with the idea. I have been using computers for 25+ years (Apple II -> Linux), so it's not a comfort issue. Physicians are mixed in this issue, some say it saves much time, others don't for the same reason as I do.
..........FULL STOP.
>_ -- my new favorite :-)
The NYT article contains this gem:
;-)
B-)===>
They preface it by stating "And for bearded, sunglasses-wearing celebrities, like certain members of the band ZZ Top:"... but that's not the first thing that comes to mind looking at it in the article.
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
see? *sigh*
In any non-legal document, I feel that emoticons are useful communication tools. We don't have easy access to some type of "vidmail", but "tone" is incredibly important in communication. It's often stated (based on studies) that 80%+ of verbal communication rests on "tone" and "body language" with only 20%- resting on actual words.
As humans, we have years of experience interpreting and understanding "tone" and "body language". To the point of even forgiving wording and phrasing based on these other factors. Truth is, we're actually pretty bad at communicating without those cues, we're just not used to writing and measuring words at face value, we're always tinging what we say with how we say it.
E-mails aggravate the complexities of communication b/c we're removing 80% of the actual human conversation. We're then leaving the other 20% to words that are often poorly defined or poorly understood (or both) and then polluting the waters with people who don't appreciate/understand the differences inherent in written communication. We've all been part of at least one office e-mail that caused us to walk over to the writer's desk and engage in verbal communication b/c the written communication was not clear or concise. We've probably all seen or written horrible technical documentation that failed to correctly convey meaning or structure or importance.
The use of emoticons help us bridge that gap (except for the technical docs). Using "smilies" to replace facial expressions helps to bring in part of that 80% that we lost when we started writing e-mails. Effective use of bold face, italics, ALL CAPS, punctuation and spacing / paragraph structure are also very important drivers in bridging that gap (as you'll note in this very post). Correct bolding and italicizing and punctuation help to fill in those little things we do when we talk: emphasize words, pause for effect, and add physical motion to what we are saying.
e.g.: something THIS BIG is clearly larger in size than something This Big. We would normally convey this with "body language", "tone" and subtle lengthening or shortening of the words. Here, I'm just hoping that capitalization and bold facing do the job.
As people improve their ability to write you'll see an expanded use of all of these tools of communication. But "smilies" (I hope) are just the beginning of our e-mail improvements.
I feel the same way. If it's an emoticon, it's a waste of effort as I don't understand them, refuse to use them and totally disallow them and certainly don't consider them to be a valid form of punctuation or english communication. You've got an "F" Student and now have to retake the class with me, the only instructor that teaches it here. And yes, I've nailed several of them for a summer and let me tell you, the others passed the word very quickly you don't use IM Speak in my class if you want to pass.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
They're just Valspeak for nerds. so...
Here's a summary of the process (you'll have to imagine bunnies singing "It's the Circle of Life!" in the background):
1. New innovation in communication invented.
2. Adopted by younger people, who have no personal investment in "the way things are always done".
3. Disdained by older people for not being "the way things are always done".
4. Young people get older, their way of doing things becomes "the way things are always done".
We're using this between offices at work. Please tell me what possible use I could have for a love heart emoticon here. No offence to my co-workers but have you got any idea how offputting even the thought of using it is. Ewwww!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Another reason why we all should speak Lojban instead