Beyond 🙏 and 😂: Unravelling the World of Emojis in the Global Workplace

Emojis are usually there to add levity — Adobe’s own research found that a majority of Americans think adding emoji to a message makes the sender come across as friendlier and funnier. But in professional communication they do more than lighten the tone: they carry empathy, signal intent, and fill in the emotional context that plain text strips out. That job hasn’t gone away now that so much of our writing at work happens in Slack, Teams and email threads that move faster than anyone reads them. If anything, it’s got bigger. The etiquette around it, though, varies enormously by workplace, generation and country — and getting it wrong lands differently depending on who’s reading.

App-creation company F4S surveyed over 2,000 people across 94 countries and found emojis are a clear winner at work: the large majority of respondents use them, and a substantial share use them at work every day. Only a small minority avoid them entirely.

Personality affects emoji use

The same research found personality type predicts emoji habits fairly reliably:

• Fast-paced, tech-comfortable early adopters embrace emojis readily, using them as shorthand to move through messages quickly.
• People who value structure and see themselves as long-term planners tend to use emojis as organisational tools — a quick visual flag rather than decoration.
• People with a strong focus on precision and context, architects and designers among them, are the least likely to reach for them at all.

Emojis and connection at work

Generational habits differ by channel as much as by choice — older colleagues have tended to favour emoji in email, while younger ones reach for them in chat and text first. In teams, managers often use emoji to signal support or praise — a thumbs-up, a clap — while more junior team members lean towards warmer, more expressive ones. None of this is a hard rule; it’s a pattern worth knowing before you assume your own habit is universal.

It varies enormously by country

The F4S research, drawn from 94 countries, found real regional variation in which emoji get reached for and how often — national flags feature heavily in tweets from large parts of Africa and Europe, certain emoji carry locally specific meanings in Japan that don’t travel, and preferences for laughter or affection emoji shift by region. The detail changes year to year as platforms add and retire symbols, but the underlying point doesn’t: an emoji that reads as warm and harmless in one office culture can read as unprofessional, presumptuous, or simply confusing in another. Some workplaces and some jurisdictions treat certain emoji — a heart, in particular — as carrying a level of intimacy that’s inappropriate in a professional exchange, which is worth knowing before you use one with a client or colleague you don’t know well.

A quick rule of thumb for work

None of this means avoiding emoji altogether — stripping all warmth out of written communication has its own cost, particularly on distributed teams that rarely see each other in person. It means treating emoji the way you’d treat any other piece of tone: appropriate to the relationship and the channel, not the default setting. A thumbs-up to a colleague you know well reads very differently from the same thumbs-up on a first email to a new client. When in doubt, match the level of formality the other person has already set, rather than assuming your own habit is the neutral one.

Inclusivity is improving, slowly

Like language itself, the emoji set keeps evolving to reflect the people using it — gender-neutral family and pregnancy emoji have been added in recent years, and requests for better representation of disability, from wheelchairs to mobility aids, continue to outpace what’s actually released each cycle. It’s progress, but a meaningful share of people who use emoji regularly still don’t feel represented by the set available to them.

What this means beyond internal chat

The same caution applies once emoji move from internal chat into anything customer-facing — a marketing email, a support reply, a social post. What reads as approachable in one market can read as unserious or over-familiar in another, and a brand voice guide that specifies tone but says nothing about emoji use is leaving a real decision to whoever happens to be writing that day. Worth a line in your style guide: where emoji are welcome, where they aren’t, and which ones to avoid entirely given how differently a handful of them are read outside your home market.

The takeaway

Emoji offer a genuine, useful signal of how colleagues perceive and express themselves at work, and they’re not going anywhere now that so much workplace communication is written rather than spoken. What matters, especially as teams get more international and more distributed, is not assuming your own habits are neutral. What reads as friendly in your inbox might not read that way in someone else’s — and a two-second pause before you hit send is cheaper than the misunderstanding.