Leaders have often relied on physical cues, such as facial expressions and body language, to gauge and communicate emotions or intent. But doing so is more difficult in the remote workplace, where facial expressions and physical gestures are difficult to both read and convey.

Anecdotal evidence, as well as conversations we’ve had as part of our ongoing research into effective leadership in the digital age, is pointing to the growing use of emojis in the virtual workplace as an alternative to physical cues. They can help clarify meaning behind digital communications, as well as the type and strength of emotions being expressed. But they can also be an intergenerational and cultural minefield. For example, Gen Z’s are reportedly offended by their colleagues’ use of the smiley face emoji, which they see as patronizing. And cultural and geographical differences can mean that one person’s friendly gesture is another’s offense.

To lead in the remote or hybrid workplace, managers need to be aware of these pitfalls and need to understand how to use emojis effectively.

Using Emojis to Connect with Your Team

Based on recent research on emoji use in the workplace, our interviews with leaders who self-identified as using emojis for team management, as well as our own research into effective leadership, we identified four ways using emoji can help you connect with employees and enhance your leadership in a hybrid or remote environment.

1. Get deeper insight on how your team is feeling.

When employees at Danske Bank A/S, a Danish banking and financial services company, log on to join their remote management meetings, they share an emoji. “Our virtual meetings start with capturing the mood of the day. We each post a sticker with our name and an emoji that represents how we feel,” explains Eduardo Morales, a Danske Bank product owner. As these meetings usually are attended by more than 40 people, emoji sharing allows attendees to get a sense of each other’s moods, as well as the collective mood of the group, with just a single glance at the screen. “It saves time, and yet our interactions are richer,” Morales says. “Emojis allows us to reflect upon and express a broader range of feelings beyond the standard verbal response of ‘I’m fine.’”

The simple task of emoji selection gives team members a moment for self-reflection, which has been found to positively impact performance. And those with higher self-awareness become more thoughtful in expressing their emotions, which results in a better accuracy of emoji selection to represent their given mood.

2. Build your own cognitive empathy.

Your employees’ emotions are a data point that can help you understand what motivates them and how they experience their work.

“How do I as a leader understand what my team is working on and how they’re feeling about their work when everybody is remote?” asks Luke Thomas, founder of software startup Friday.app. He decided to start using emojis as part of his weekly check-ins. He asks direct reports to select an emoji to indicate how their week went, and then follows up with open-ended questions, such as: What went well this week? What was the worst part of the week? Is there anything I can help with?

Thomas explains that these updates allow him to have richer one-on-one discussions and then act on his employees’ needs. “I spend less time doing status updates and check-ins, and more time engaged in building better relationships, removing blockers and coaching,” he says.

3. Model appropriate emotions.

Emotions are contagious, and research suggests they may be even more amplified in the digital space. Managing your team’s emotional state and mood is a critical element of leadership, and emojis can help leaders express and role model emotional cues suitable for certain situations.

One senior leader at a global consumer products company explained that he uses emojis and GIFs to help motivate his team members and colleagues: “I use them as “pick-me-ups” to energize and to drive positive moods and behaviors within my team.” He described a recent example of how he used a humorous GIF and emoji to bring a moment of levity to a challenging financial discussion that was taking place on an online chat. The digital cue served as a transition, enabling the discussion to be steered towards a more positive orientation.

Leaders can greatly influence an organization’s emotional culture. Using emojis that represent positive workplace emotions, such as happiness, pride, enthusiasm, and optimism, is a first step for leaders looking to effectively role-model digital cues.

4. Reinforce your company’s culture.

Organizations have emotional cultures that can impact everything from employee satisfaction to burnout to financial performance. Emojis can both reflect and enhance the emotional culture of your organization in your daily communications.

“Our corporate culture is very fun and friendly — we hug a lot,” shares a manager at a global home furnishings retailer. After moving to remote work, managers at the company had to find a new way to express this aspect of their culture. “We can’t close a single department meeting without sending emojis and GIFs. A lot of them,” one told us. If the emotional culture is ebullient, as was true for the one described above, emojis can be used liberally and without necessarily having the leader set the norm.

In other workplace cultures, leaders use emojis to reinforce their organization’s core values. Take the example of material science company, DuPont. “We like to show appreciation and recognition for each other, so I often use the applause emoji to recognize people’s accomplishments,” explains Lori Gettelfinger, a DuPont global brand leader.

Take the time to gauge your organization’s emotional culture, which may be codified in mission statements, values, and daily behaviors. Then think about digital gestures, such as emojis, that can help reinforce it.

Minimizing Opportunities for Offense

If you are new or hesitant to using emojis in the workplace, we advise starting with simple emojis (e.g., thumbs up) rather than emojis that represent complex emotions (e.g. laughing emojis with tears) in order to decrease the likelihood that an emoji will offend.

Offense usually stems from a misinterpretation of a sent emoji or when someone uses an emoji that they think means one thing but really means another. For example, if a manager sends the emoji that features two hands pressed together, does it send a message of gratitude? A request for a favor? Or is it hands clasped in prayer? And is the emoji with the smiling face and two hands signaling a friendly wave “hello” or giving a hug? If you’re not sure, better to avoid using the emoji and to stick with something that is more straightforward and less open to interpretation.

Employees don’t check their emotions at the office door — or Zoom room. And when you’re leading in a virtual space, it can be harder to read how your team is feeling. Using emojis can help managers connect with their employees and strengthen their organization’s emotional culture.

 

In 2015, Laszlo Bock wrote Work Rules!, which laid out a set of guidelines for how to combine data analysis, academic rigor, and human resources best practices to create a world-class company culture, based on his time at Google. Six years later, he’s seen firsthand how experienced leadership teams are struggling to navigate the shift to hybrid work and maintain a culture of excellence. So he’s revisited what he originally wrote to identify the five new rules of hybrid work. This article shows how leaders can apply them to build great teams, even when those teams aren’t together in-person all the time.

 

As CEO at Humu, where we help Fortune 500 companies build world-class cultures, I’ve seen firsthand how experienced leadership teams are struggling to navigate the shift to hybrid work and maintain a culture of excellence.

• One technology CHRO told me that her 80,000 employees are pulsed weekly on how they are feeling, but admits her boss, the CEO, has no idea what it means when the scores move around.
• The CTO of a 30,000-person consulting firm told me the pandemic has been great for senior partners who no longer have to travel the world and are moving to low-cost havens like Bermuda, but miserable for associates who miss out on the coaching and apprenticeship of the “before times.”
• A CEO of a 50,000-person retailer told me they don’t think it’s fair that retail staff have to be in their stores while executives and senior managers work from home, but the office workers don’t want to come back and he’s afraid of losing technology and data science staff.

While hybrid is often presented as a new model, the fundamentals of what transforms a group of people into an exceptional team haven’t changed as much as we might think. When I was the senior vice president of people operations at Google, we had many employees, especially in engineering and sales, who worked from home a few days each week (even if we didn’t call it hybrid back then). And Google was named by Fortune as the best company to work for in the United States eight times.

In 2015, I wrote the book Work Rules!, which laid out a set of guidelines, based on my time building Google’s culture, for how to combine data analysis, academic rigor, and human resources best practices to create a world-class company culture. It included rules like, “Make work meaningful,” “Hire only people who are better than you,” and “Be frugal and generous.”

Based on my time at Google and now at Humu, I revisited what I wrote in 2015 to identify the five new rules of hybrid work. Some I’ve kept from the old guidelines: Meaning and purpose, for instance, matter more than ever in a hybrid model. But others are brand new. Here’s how leaders can apply them to build great teams, even when those teams aren’t together in-person all the time.

1. Make work purpose driven.

Purpose matters more than ever. Our research at Humu shows that people who don’t feel their work contributes to their company’s mission are 630% more likely to quit their jobs than their peers who do.

The way to help employees rediscover the purpose in their work is to make every task and project mission driven. For example, CommonSpirit, the largest nonprofit health system in America, starts important meetings with “reflections,” stories or videos recognizing how hard it is to be a health care worker in a pandemic while also connecting to all the good they do for their patients and communities. Managers can do the same by tying each team member’s work back to the bigger picture of why what they do matters to the world. When assigning tasks, managers should consistently outline answers to: Why is this project important? How will it impact others? How does it fit into the company’s broader mission?

2. Trust your people more than feels comfortable.

Encourage managers to offer direction, not directions. To help hybrid teams succeed, managers should clearly outline the milestones they’d like their reports to hit — and then let them figure out how to get there.

At Humu, in the midst of the pandemic, we decided we wanted to offer a product for mid-sized companies. Our leadership team set a clear timeline and success criteria, and then stepped back to let our product managers and people scientists take over.

It felt uncomfortable at first, but by giving our team the freedom to decide their process and work product, we ended up with a better end product — and were impressed by the innovative approaches that arose. Indeed, research from when I was at Google shows that teams that index the highest on trust and psychological safety are 40% more productive than those who are low on these areas.

3. Learn in the small moments. Send people — and yourself — nudges.

Hybrid work means it’s easier to miss out on the small moments that make teamwork magical and spark innovation. Google News, for example, was the result of a casual conversation between two employees standing next to each other in line for lunch. In an office, these types of interactions happen naturally; in a remote setting, they fall by the wayside and over time this is highly detrimental.

Nudges can offer an opportunity to spark these moments in a hybrid environment. At Humu, we personalize nudges based on a range of signals including individual learning goals, team focus areas, and job level. For example, if team members are eager for opportunities to learn and their manager would like to build mentorship abilities, we might deliver a nudge to the manager ahead of their next 1:1 that offers recommendations for how to have a growth-focused conversation with a report. After six months of receiving these types of personalized nudges, 90% of teams at a Fortune 500 company told us they noticed their managers making clear improvements.

You could send nudges encouraging employees to “Reach out to a team member today” or ones that explicitly communicate unwritten norms, such as “It’s okay to ask a lot of questions.”

4. Provide clarity. Be more decisive than feels comfortable.

While you should offer your people autonomy, you also shouldn’t shy away from putting a stake in the ground. When it comes to company direction, policies, and values, being clear is the kindest thing you can do — even if your decision is unpopular. When people know what’s happening, they can make the best choices for themselves. It’s ambiguity that is more punishing.

For example, rather than leaving it up to managers to determine when people should come into the office, bring everyone together on Wednesdays. Or Tuesdays. Or Thursdays. The important thing is to pick a day when the majority of employees will be together in person — and to not place even more burden on already exhausted managers. Imagine the poor manager who has to justify why her team has to be in the Glendale office each day when another manager allowed an employee to work from Hawaii. Suddenly her fiercest talent competition is from inside her own company.

5. Include everyone. Take a long hard look in the mirror.

Many leaders I speak with ask for ways to maintain their culture in a hybrid model. But most cultures could benefit from some improvement. Part of the reason people don’t want to come back to offices is likely that they weren’t inclusive spaces to begin with, particularly for people from underrepresented backgrounds, introverts, and newly hired employees.

Use the shift to hybrid as an opportunity to identify cultural gaps, and to set new norms to create a better, stronger culture. Encourage managers to take notice of who often dominates the conversation in meetings or receives the most recognition for a project’s success. Make the evaluation criteria for projects as clear as possible: The more explicit the rubric, the less room for bias.

Leaders today are operating against a backdrop of unprecedented uncertainty and amid nearly two years of teams being cooped up at home. Those conditions are not likely to change in the next 12 to 18 months — instead, leaders need to change. By following the five guidelines laid out above, they can support their workforces and create world-class cultures, no matter where their people work.