Decoding office emoji
Team chat apps are hitting the workplace — here’s what you need to know
I T was bad enough that Julie was stuck on the train traveling from New Jersey to Penn Station during the morning of the April 3 train derailment, but when she broke the news to her coworkers via Slack, the group-communication app her team was using, her boss responded with two emoji.
“One was a pile of poop; the other was a clock. ‘What the f- - k?’ I remember thinking,” says the 43-year-old account executive, who works at an advertising firm in Midtown. (Julie asked that her last name and her company’s name remain confidential, for obvious reasons.)
Confused, Julie sent her co-worker a private, one-to-one message to get an explanation as to what the emoji were supposed to convey. The answer she received, again in Slack, was, “Don’t worry,” followed by three bananas.
If all of this seems strange, then you probably haven’t yet encountered the new generation of collaboration apps that are taking the workplace by storm. Instead of communicating with colleagues via e-mail, workers are now talking with one another in short phrases, emoji and stickers using tools such as HipChat, Jive, Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook, among many others.
These tools, which typically move seamlessly between your desktop computer, your phone and anywhere you have an Internet connection, are being adopted at a furious pace. Consider that Microsoft Teams, which premiered in November, is now being used by more than 50,000 organizations. Workplace by Facebook, which came out last October, is already being used by 100,000 groups. And Slack, which has been available since 2013, recently passed 5 million daily active users. The reason for the rapid uptake? “People don’t want to type formal e-mails anymore. These new apps allow you to convey a thought or update a status quickly, with a few words and/or emoji, so there’s speed to value,” says Alan Lepofsky, vice president at Constellation Research and an expert on workplace collaboration. He adds that chat is more entertaining and therefore more engaging. “People like it,” he says.
And Lepofsky knows of what he speaks.
Steve Goldsmith, general manager of HipChat, says that 95 percent of workplace-collaborationapp users add emoticons (HipChat’s version of emoji) to their updates. His data comes from a survey HipChat conducted with Nielsen.
One of the reasons that chat apps are supposedly better than e-mail, besides brevity, is tone. “People can read a lot into a message and find aggression or hurtful tones when that wasn’t the intention,” says Goldsmith. Conversational apps can provide context and can bring lightness to an otherwise serious conversation, he notes.
“An animated dancing parrot can easily convey your excitement,” says Goldsmith. Not only that, but “a well-placed emoticon can lighten up even the driest of budget conversations.”
Lepofsky notes that workers sometimes string emoji together. “It’s a lot more interesting and fun to express something like congratulations with a picture of fireworks, hands clapping and someone dancing,” he says.
Microsoft Teams offers not only emoji but fun stickers, too. There’s a collection specially for office drama, which features comic-book characters saying things like, “Oops, my bad,” “I don’t like the look of it” and “Gee, that’s swell.”
But that’s not all. Many chat platforms include voice and video interfaces as well. So if you’re having a text-based conversation with co-workers and then decide that something face-to-face might be better, you can push a button and, voilà, you’re on a group video call.
What’s it like? If you’re using Microsoft Teams, for example, you and your co-workers appear as if you’re speaking from individual boxes, à la “Hollywood Squares.”
This kind of communication is especially handy when everyone doesn’t work in the same location, according to Dan Schawbel, best-selling author of “Promote Yourself ” and “Me 2.0.” “Remote workers feel a deeper sense of connection to their teams despite not being in the same office,” he says.
Lepofsky notes that if you’re using these apps for the first time, you should be a voyeur before getting involved. “Observe before you dive in,” he says, recommending that you consider the context of the conversations and the culture of the team you are engaging with.
These are things that Julie had to learn the hard way on the day of the train derailment.
“The pile of poop and clock was just my boss saying ‘bad timing.’ I was supposed to lead a client presentation that morning,” she says.
And the bananas? “My coworker was just telling me not to worry and that she was busy, going bananas,” says Julie. “I should have taken her literally.”