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Face It: Emojis Are Vital in Business
The start of emojis
A Japanese artist created the first emoji back in 1999. Before that, emoticons used a standard text pictographically.
The smiley face got a major lift with smartphones, where the Unicode Consortium began adding thousands of new emojis to its catalogue.
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Key Ideas
All people read much in the same way
People everywhere read words in a very similar way regardless if it is made from pictures, such as pictographs (Chinese characters), or words made from letters.
This knowle...
Writing developed as a response to a need
Some of the earliest writing is from 3000B.C. Mesopotamia. They recorded entries on tablets about the quantities of goods in some kind of bookkeeping.
They wrote down in order to keep account of who delivered what when. But this system was still far away from expressing ideas and writing great works of literature.
Moving from pictures to the alphabet
- Ancient writing took the leap from drawing a picture as a picture (a logogram) to using it to depict a sound (or phonogram). A "bee" can be used for the sound "be", and when used together with a drawing of a "leaf", they produce the meaning "be-lief."
- But ambiguity arises when we don't know when a bee is a bee, and when is it a sound. Classifiers were added to clear up the confusion. Chinese still uses this system, with pictures, classifier elements, plus phonetics.
- Around 4,000 ago, the alphabet was invented, where symbols only depicted a sound.
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The quick rise
Slack makes it possible for tens of millions of employees to have online conversations, ask questions, share information, make decisions. The platform reproduces the culture of the open-plan office...
Slack became indispensable
Investors had been wary of Slack since it went public in June 2019 because of its slowing growth, lack of profitability, and competition from Microsoft's competing product called Teams.
But as business swerved to avoid contagion, people were flocking to Slack's product to cope with disaster. Slack became a critical service, like Wi-Fi or electricity.
Work from home
Although Slack also runs on Slack, the company had a work-at-office culture. As the company closed its offices in March, the executive made a series of decisions to make its mission clearer: Slack would take care of its people first during this crisis. In turn, those employees would take care of their customers.
- They offered to reimburse each employee up to $500 for whatever equipment they needed to do their jobs at home.
- When the schools closed, they advised people to work when they could.
- They encouraged their employees to log out and take care of their kids and families.
- They offer to pay employees their full salaries.
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Key Ideas
The lack of verbal and nonverbal social cues
Any email message we send has the potential to be read in the wrong context, or misinterpreted entirely by the recipient. Even if we have smiley faces in the email, it is no match ...
A Goldmine of Miscommunications
Due to the limitations and the multifacetedness of language, emails often lead to miscommunication, guessed intentions, or total awareness of what the person is trying to convey.
The problem is further complicated if you are writing to someone whom you haven’t met in person.
Subject Line Emails
These types of emails (with the entire email is a sentence in the subject line, with no email body, just the signature)are usually sent by a very direct person, that either feels very busy or that the problem can't be solved simply in an email, so it's too much for them to go into it all.
If you respond with more than 2 sentences, they are probably not going to read it, so you should just get on the phone or get over there in person.