Emojify your Work

By Karin Hawley, Engineering Manager

I’m a self proclaimed emoji addict. Quick to use them anywhere and everywhere — often to the delight and confusion of others. As my usage has grown and changed, folks have asked me to share my emoji wisdom with a wider audience. Below, I share some of the productivity and engagement achievements I’ve unlocked by peppering my workday with emoji.

Building Team Morale

The team names at Juniper Square don’t have a cohesive theme — Team Rocket, Mario, The Club, Feisty Ferrets, LGTeaM — but were created and chosen by the founding engineers on that team.

I won’t lie. I lobbied hard for our team name The Feisty Ferrets. And, at the time, the other two members didn’t feel strongly about it or any other name. So, we went with my proposal.

Being an effusive emoji user, I went about searching for as many ferret based emoji as I could. I found a few great image libraries and proceeded to chop and resize to Slack-appropriate readability. I then began to pepper them everywhere, both as a source of pride and as a way to promote their usage among the team.

Fast forward 6 months later, and my current team make-up is entirely different than at its formation. We lost some founding members, added one from another team, and hired a bunch of new teammates. None of my current team has a history with our team name. And at least one or two aren’t the biggest fans of it. BUT, they love all the ferret emojis at their disposal. The emoji have become branding for our team, and are used profusely within our team channel as well as the broader engineering channel. I’ve even had the pleasure of seeing other departments discover and embrace them, often wondering who created them in the first place. 😂

When we introduced team based on-call (a rotation of every two weeks during business hours for all the software components my team owns) I wanted to be explicit in differentiating it from our general support on-call (a one week rotation that triages and assesses bugs from our customer support team across our entire product). We tossed around a few different names before landing on Flex Ferret, which I of course created a new emoji for.

Today, I’m the last remaining member that can share the name’s origin story, but due to the continuing legacy of the ferret emojis, our team name has grown in recognition and is quickly embraced by new members.

If you can pick a team name and build theming around it — it can really bond the team members. The Club has an origin story in Spongebob (which I admit zero familiarity with) but it has led to an increase in Squidward, SpongeBob, Patrick and magic conch themed emoji. As well as a Magic Conch slackbot that acts as a magic eight ball.

I love seeing how my team and others have found creative ways to bond and build on a team name and theme.

Increasing engagement and enjoyment

Whether it’s a certainty or just an assumption on my part, I’ve found that including lots of emoji in long or important messages leads to more people reading and retaining the message. (There’s probably a commentary about our interactions with short form media like Twitter and Instagram that lends some relevancy to my observations.) As a result, you can bet money that any announcement I make (unless it’s truly somber in tone) will include at least one emoji.

When sharing an announcement with the team, I’ll often include a :pika-wave:

or 🚨 to snag attention. (Or if in the ferrets channel the :ferret-wave:

or :ferret-coffee:

For building hype, I try to include as many topically relevant emoji as I possibly can. This has definitely led to some of my favorite slack reactions. 🤣

And when I’m not the poster, creative emoji reactions are always quite fun. Sometimes they require some thought.

To add some flair to our team page, I added an icon to represent our different types of links, and also a character that embodied each role on the team. I spent a long time thinking about what to use for our QA role, but felt that 🕵🏼‍♀️ was the best fit.

We also utilize emoji reactions in our Sprint Retros, to emphasize our feelings or commiserate.

Space efficiency in productivity tools

I learned pretty quickly that Jira had a limited number of characters for sprint names. Which made it difficult to name a sprint with our team name, project name, and a number. “Feisty Ferrets Automated Payments Sprint 11”. In frustration, I stumbled upon the fact that I could add emoji to the sprint name, which made it significantly shorter. “FF — 💰➡️🏦 Sprint 11”. (The automated payments project was all about setting up transactions to flow money from one bank to another, so the concept of money moving to the bank seemed like a good abbreviation.)

This soon led to me matching a single (or sometimes multiple) emoji with every project we worked on and every component we owned.

💰 - Payments (a shortened version)

🌊 - Waterfalls (a stand in as there is no waterfall emoji in the Unicode set, but this component is very complex and often feels like a deluge of information, making an ocean wave a good equivalent)

🏔 - Project Shasta (a secret codename until our partnership with Crowdstreet was official, but kept reminding me of Mount Shasta)

🔂 - SAML Single Sign On

Once I had these emoji short hands, I began to incorporate them everywhere. My Slack channels and project members were now grouped by their emoji.

Chrome tabs, which I found useful but still took up a lot of space with a text based tab group name, became a lot slimmer.

In Jira, I use a fair amount of quick filters to navigate our team board, and having shorter filter names makes it cleaner. (Though new members were definitely more perplexed until the symbology was decoded.)

And confluence pages utilized them, too.

And of course, they are used for celebrating or commiserating a project related event.

Representation matters

One of my prouder slack emoji contributions was to add a plethora of LGBTQIA++ flags shortly after our ERG’s founding. While I do appreciate the 🏳️‍🌈, I don’t find myself represented in it. Instead, I wanted the (asexual):

or the (grey-sexual and demisexual):

. There are so many groups under the LGBTQIA++ umbrella that I thought there might be others missing their representation as well, which led me to add all of these.

In the same vein, while I identify as female, I appreciate the recent inclusion of nonbinary versions of the various people emoji, just as we added the various races (beyond orangish people 😂).

Representation matters. Both for identifying yourself 👩🏼, specific peers 👩🏻👨🏾‍🦲, or to represent a general unknown group of people 🧑🏽‍💼👩🏻‍💼👨🏼‍💼. Slack and other social communication platforms have made it easy to expand the iconography that is missing. The Unicode Technical Committee has also made efforts to increase the diversity of emojis — races, genders, abilities 🧑🏼‍🦯🧑🏼‍🦽🧑🏼‍🦼, professions, cultural norms 🙇🏼🤦🏼, hobbies 🧶🧘, and symbology ⚧🏳️‍🌈. If you don’t see yourself reflected there, make an addition.

— — —

These small pictures are fast becoming the norm in all forms of communication and, in my case, productivity. I hope you can take some of my musings above and utilize them in your own work setting. Don’t be afraid to adopt them, or ditch them if they end up adding more confusion than clarity. 🙃

👋🏼🍀🤞🏼😊