If there is a recurring theme brough up by the people I interview in my podcast about building and leading remote teams, it’s that we all have a very fragile ego when it comes to written communication. It is easy to feel that others are disrespecting us, or our work. That they are interrupting our workflow or unloading chores on top of us as if we had nothing more important to do.

I call it the “Twitter Effect”: we write a short message, and someone, somewhere, gets offended for some reason.

At team management level, this is a big problem, because it’s not practical to always be in calls with each other. There has to be a way to express ourselves through text, but with more empathy, right?

If only there were some way to transmit body language by text …

Of course there is! Those of us who have grown up with the culture of IRC and SMS know this technology well, and many online games have never stopped using it: emoji.

It is available in all chat programs. But for some reason, it is rarely used in conversations that happen in professional contexts. But why? When people work in an office, do not they smile? Do they not use facial expressions?

Let’s Make Emoji Great Again! 🙂