The formal tone is not always appropriate in a professional exchange:the ties forged with a colleague or a friendly working atmosphere can justify the fact that we allow ourselves some familiarity, including in emails. Thus, it is not uncommon for some employees to slip a "smiley", also known as the "smile emoji" ("☺") into a virtual conversation, except that this habit would be frowned upon by most people. the open space. Ouch… This is confirmed by a study carried out jointly by researchers from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Haifa, both in Israel, and the University of Amsterdam. They solicited 549 participants from 29 different countries, asked them to read a professional email written by an unknown person and rate the "warmth" of the sender. The emails submitted contained similar text, except that some included smiley faces, some did not. And surprise:the smileys had no influence on the perception of the degree of “warmth” of the sender. Worse still, they impacted the perception of competence of this one.
In other words, the more smileys we use, the more the correspondent thinks we are not very good at our job. Another finding:when the participants had to respond to the various emails, the emails were more detailed and more effective in cases where they had received a message that did not contain a smiley. That suggests they were considering the person - who hadn't used a smiley face so you're still following? – as being more competent and therefore more worthy of having a proper response. The scientists took the study a step further:they later included photos of the sender in the email, some in which he was smiling and some in which his face remained impassive. In contrast to the first experiment, smiling faces made the person seem more competent and likeable. Dr. Ella Glikson explains:“People think the smiley is a virtual smile, but our findings show that in the workplace […] it is not. For the first exchanges with a person, it is advisable not to use smileys, regardless of the age or sex of the correspondent ". Noted!
