An emoji with a certain skin color, if sent to a minority employee by a supervisor, can later serve as evidence of a racially hostile work environment. In other words, emojis can convey a credibility issue.įurthermore, emojis can be racially coded or coded for gender without the writer even knowing it. If a boss receives an email from a subordinate that contains a smiley-face emoji, she may not take the message seriously. Secondly, the use of emojis can be said to imply a lack of seriousness and can take away from the significance of your message. For example, I saw tennis star Roger Federer being interviewed on TV, and a reporter asked him, “Why are you called a GOAT? Do you raise farm animals?” The reporter did not realize that GOAT is often used in sports slang as an abbreviation for the Greatest of All Time. The use of slang leads to misunderstandings in many contexts. For example, the “hands-up” symbol is a positive sign for most Americans, but for Chinese people, it is dismissive and means “stay away from me.” In different cultures, a symbol may mean widely disparate things. First, they are slang, and slang means different things to different people. I see three basic issues emerging from the use of emojis in the workplace. It’s quite appropriate to ask, “Is that winky-face emoji friendly, flirtatious or an instance of sexual harassment?” In fact, employment attorneys should now start thinking about setting up emoji-awareness seminars for companies on how emojis are creating new questions, and perhaps conflicts, in workplaces. and, at the risk of being a buzz-kill, can get you in a whole lot of legal trouble. As a labor and employment lawyer, I have seen that “emoji law” is becoming a larger and larger factor in litigation, particularly in cases that involve allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination. The term is only a couple of decades old and derives from the Japanese words e, a picture, and moji, a letter or character.Įmojis are cute, fun. Emojis are small digital images or icons used to express an idea or emotion online. We may not all know the term emoji, but we have all seen them or used them.
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