Sixty-nine percent. That’s the share of workers who told researchers that a coworker who uses emoji comes across as more likable, according to Adobe’s Future of Creativity: 2022 U.S. Emoji Trend Report.
It’s a striking number for something as small as a smiley face at the end of a message, and the easy read is that emoji simply make people seem friendlier. The survey’s own framing points somewhere more specific than friendliness, though. It points to everything a face and a voice normally carry that a typed message doesn’t, which is a different claim with a different set of implications for how you’d actually use the finding.
Here’s what the data, and the research sitting underneath it, actually says about why a small colored icon can move the needle on how a coworker gets perceived, and where that effect is strongest.
The number is about likability, not warmth
The 69 percent figure sits inside a specific context in Adobe’s report: “With many of us still working from home, there are people who still haven’t met their co-workers in person. Not only did 68 percent of those surveyed say they like it when people use emoji at work, but they also stated that it positively impacts likability (69 percent) and credibility (59 percent).” Likability and friendliness sound like the same thing from a distance, but the report ties the number to a much narrower situation: coworkers who have never actually met.
It’s also worth being precise about what was actually measured. This is a self-report survey, workers describing their own impressions, not an independent test of who actually got promoted or befriended more often. That doesn’t make the number meaningless, but it does mean the finding is about perception, not about a measured change in how anyone was treated.
Adobe’s own explanation names body language directly
Kamile Demir, a computer scientist at Adobe and the company’s representative on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, connected the finding to hybrid work specifically rather than to friendliness in general. “One of the challenges of hybrid work is that it can be harder to interpret written communication from our coworkers without that face to face interaction,” Demir said in the report. “Emoji are a great way to mitigate potential misunderstandings,” she added. “A quick smiley face on the end of your message can go a long way.”
Notice what’s missing from that explanation: any claim that emoji make someone seem warmer as a person. The claim is narrower and more mechanical than that. Emoji are filling in for tone of voice and facial expression, the two things a coworker in the next room gets for free and a coworker on a chat thread does not get at all.
Researchers have called emoji “quasi-nonverbal cues” for almost two decades
This isn’t an idea Adobe stumbled onto in 2022. Shao-Kang Lo studied a version of the same question in a 2008 paper for CyberPsychology & Behavior, years before hybrid work was a common phrase. Lo’s paper predates the pictographic emoji most people picture today. His subjects were using text-based emoticons, symbols like a colon and a parenthesis read sideways as a smile, rather than the small illustrated icons built into modern keyboards. The underlying function he described still carries over cleanly to the newer symbols.
Lo’s study starts from the same observation Adobe’s report leans on decades later: “Most past studies assume that computer-mediated communication (CMC) lacks nonverbal communication cues. However, Internet users have devised and learned to use emoticons to assist their communications.” His conclusion gave the pattern a name: “This study examined emoticons as a communication tool that, although presented as verbal cues, perform nonverbal communication functions. We therefore termed emoticons quasi-nonverbal cues.”
A quasi-nonverbal cue is not a substitute for warmth. It’s a substitute for the raised eyebrow, the half-smile, the tone shift that tells a listener a comment was a joke and not a jab. Text strips all of that out, and an emoji is one of the few tools available to put a rough version of it back in.
Credibility rose too, and that’s the more surprising number
Friendliness would predict a boost to likability and not much else. Adobe’s data shows credibility moving as well, up by 59 percent among the same group of surveyed workers. That’s harder to explain with a simple “emoji make you seem nicer” story. It fits more easily with the body-language explanation: a raised eyebrow or a knowing look can signal that someone understands the stakes of what they’re saying, and in a text-only exchange, an emoji is one of the few ways left to signal that same thing.
Put the three numbers side by side and a pattern shows up. Sixty-eight percent said they simply like seeing emoji at work. Sixty-nine percent said it affects likability. Fifty-nine percent said it affects credibility. All three move together, which fits one underlying cause, a missing channel of information, better than it fits three separate and unrelated reactions to a smiley face.
The gap is largest for coworkers who’ve never met in person
Adobe’s own framing singles out remote and hybrid relationships specifically, not workplace communication in general. A coworker you’ve shared an office with for years already has years of in-person impressions to draw on when a message lands ambiguously. A coworker you’ve only ever messaged has none of that history, so a text-based stand-in for tone carries more weight in that relationship, because it’s doing a job that would otherwise be handled by a face across a desk or a voice on a call.
That also suggests the effect should fade as a working relationship matures. Once two coworkers have enough shared history to read each other’s tone from context alone, an emoji stops doing rescue work and starts being just decoration.
Matching the tool to what’s missing beats just using more of it
None of this argues for sprinkling emoji into every message. The data and the research both point to a narrower rule: emoji help most exactly where in-person cues are absent, and they add little where those cues are already available through a shared history or a face-to-face relationship. A message to someone you talk to in person every day doesn’t need an emoji to soften it, because the tone is already coming through some other channel. A message to a coworker you’ve never met in person is missing something real, and a small icon is a reasonable, well-studied way to fill part of that gap.
