Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Why gen-Z emojis may be better for business than email
www.fastcompany.com: I’ll admit I was late to the emoji party. For years now, people have been texting me thumbs up, fire bursts, and the occasional unicorn. But I held out, responding with plain old text. Then one day I finally decided to dive into my emoji keyboard.
That’s when I discovered the incredible communicative power of something as simple as a high-five icon. One tiny drawing. A whole world of emotion and context.
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Emojis have opened a whole world of communication. Emojis have been around since at least 10 years now. And they have become the main way of communication in platforms like Venmo, where people need to send a short message. Adding Emojis to messages has lowered the chances of misinterpretations, because they help set the tone of the message sent. Furthermore, sending messages without emojis are often read as angry messages or the recipient is feels like they don’t have any context behind it. Whether they are just smiley faces, a star, or just a dumpling, it provides clarity in a way words do not. It is true that we are moving towards a more visual society, costumers respond better to images than words.. I am not a fan of using them in ‘professional’ or serious conversations, but I use them in short emails and such. Adding emojis in text messages and emails provides a middle ground for faster processing of information
This article seemed a little drastic to me. Sure I use a quick :) and the end of many of my messages to convey the tone, but in any semi-important setting email is a must. Email provides a professional note that is able to be saved and referenced later unlike texts which can very quickly become a tedious process of scrolling and scrolling to find an important piece of information sent to you months ago. Its very drastic to say Gen-zers just simply dont use it. We as students are practically required to check our emails and respond in a timely manner. Where I do agree with the author is his comment that both text and email have their benefits. An unimportant check-in may be sent over text if you need a quick response time but email is a much more applicable for having different email threads for different subjects. For instance if the drama all email was one giant group chat (Now that's a nightmare) the semester reviews might get lost in all the weekly updates and community events and cause confusion among students. Overall I’m glad we are able to use both text and email and as a member of the Gen-Z generation I find the author's statement “Gen-Z employees don’t do email” over generalized and incorrect.
I found this article really interesting because I have found that I have always preferred visual platforms over text-based platforms when it comes to learning styles and forms of communication. This realization is one of the factors that played into my decision to go into an art-based field for my future career. I really enjoyed the section about the fact that “using fewer words can actually increase understanding.” I have always thought that text-based forms of communication were bad because there is not a clear way to display emotions, which often leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. I think using more visual forms of communication in workplace settings will be beneficial because it gives the business world much more humanity and emotion, that I so often think it is lacking. I think using visual based forms of communication in the business world will make businessmen a bit more empathetic, and realize they are talking to other real, live humans, not just computer screens.
I was surprised by the amount of emojis and gifs that were used at work during my internship this summer. Part of it came from the communication platform we were using (Slack) making it very easy to respond with emojis and gifs. I think it was helpful in terms of being able to get tone across and keep a friendly atmosphere. I find the idea that it could make a $167 billion difference to be pretty surprising, but it certainly made me more cheerful over the course of the day. I think that a lot of the issues with email stem from the fact that it lacks the tone, facial expressions, body language, and similar features that come with face to face communication. I think emojis and similar help fill this lack. That being said, I don’t think I’d want to go all the way to video messages. In theory they fully fill the lack of social cues that comes with email, but in practice it is much easier to quickly reference information in an email, proofreading is faster and easier than rewatching the video and re-recording it, and everyone sitting at their desk watching and filming videos when they need to check their emails seems like it would be a bit overwhelming. I could see it working if everyone has their own office, but the second you have cubicles or desk pods, it would start to get loud.
This article was funny to me since I generally don’t use emojis aside from an occasional “:)” or “:D.” If I do, it’s when I’m trying to either be annoying or sarcastic, but never when I’m actually trying to convey information. Maybe I’ll use one when I think it’s cute. I think that sometimes the use of an emoji could be helpful in communicating something quickly, if there isn’t much being said, but putting together a string of emojis in place of an actual text is more confusing. For a short period of time, me and some of my friends tried to communicate in our group chat only using the emoji keyboard, and trying to get information across or planning things was a lot more difficult. I also think that if you’re in a serious conversation, the use of emojis makes it seem like a light topic, or that it doesn’t matter too much. Emojis seem like a pretty casual thing, so I don’t think that this keyboard will actually replace real text anytime soon.
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