Slack, Teams, email and LinkedIn
At work, emoji mostly do jobs. A reaction confirms you saw something, a tick says it is done, a status tells people you are away. The feelings still come through, which is where the trouble starts: a colleague reads a tone you never meant.
👀 ✅ 🙏
seen · done · thanks
Quick answer
The ones that acknowledge, confirm, thank or celebrate. They carry information more than feeling, so they are hard to misread, and they are the professional choice in almost any office, from a start-up’s Slack to a formal Teams channel at a large business.
Beyond those, follow the room. If your manager and the people around you react with 🔥 and 😂, you can too; if the channel is all ticks and thumbs, a string of hearts will stand out for the wrong reason.
Slack and Teams
On Slack and Teams, reactions stand in for the nod you would give across a desk. Slack describes them as a way to respond to messages quickly, and many teams have settled on meanings nobody wrote down. These are the common ones, and where they go wrong.
| Emoji | Usually means | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| 👀 | Seen it, looking at it now. | In a busy thread it stops people chasing you. In a social channel it can read as watching drama unfold. |
| ✅ | Done, or approved. | Teams disagree about which. On a request, agree whether ✅ means finished or signed off before relying on it. |
| 👍 | Acknowledged, fine by me. | Efficient between people who know each other. Alone, in reply to a long message, it can feel curt. |
| 🙏 | Thank you. | Also means please, and some people see prayer or a high five in it. |
| 🫡 | On it. | Friendly in most teams; from a junior to a senior person it can look like mock obedience. |
| 🎉 | Congratulations, it shipped. | Safe for launches, promotions and welcomes. Almost nothing can go wrong with it. |
| 💯 | Completely agree. | Informal. Fine among peers, a little loud on a message from leadership. |
| 🔥 | Great work. | Enthusiastic and casual. In a status channel about an incident, it can mean something is on fire. |
| ❤️ | Appreciation. | Some teams use it freely; elsewhere it feels personal. Follow what others in the channel do. |
| 💀 | That was so funny. | People who do not use it that way read death or disaster. Keep it for colleagues who share the joke. |
The one people argue about
It depends who reads it. For many people 👍 is the most neutral acknowledgement there is. For others, often younger colleagues, a bare thumbs-up in reply to a long or careful message feels like being waved away. Neither reading is wrong, and you cannot tell in advance which one you will get.
The fix costs three words. “Sounds good 👍” reads as friendly to everyone. When the message was a favour, 🙏 says thank you more clearly, and when it was a task, ✅ says it is done.
Status emoji
A status emoji sits beside your name in every channel, so it is read more often than anything you post. These are the conventions most workplaces share.
In Slack, a status with no emoji shows a 💬 speech balloon by default. You can set a status to clear itself after a meeting or at the end of the day, and schedule one in advance for a holiday, which saves the familiar sight of a 🌴 still showing a week after someone came back.
A first business email, a formal request, anything to a client or a senior person you have not written to before: no emoji. They cost nothing to add once the tone of the relationship is clear, and they are hard to take back if it turns out to be formal.
Once a thread is warm, a single 🙂 or 🙏 at the end of a sentence softens a request without making it casual. Emoji in the middle of a sentence or in a subject line look like marketing.
Outlook can AutoCorrect :) into a smiley taken from the Wingdings font. Recipients on another mail app, without that font, see a capital J where the smile was. Insert a real emoji instead, as the Outlook emoji guide explains.
Every mail client draws emoji its own way, and older ones may show an empty box. An emoji that carries meaning the words do not is a risk in email; one that decorates a sentence that stands on its own is not.
LinkedIn and your CV
In posts, emoji work best as structure. A ✅, ➡️ or 📌 at the start of a line makes a list easy to scan, and a 🎉 on news of a new job is expected. A post with an emoji in every sentence starts to look like it was written to game the feed.
Keep them out of your CV and your application documents. Some applicant tracking systems drop or garble characters they do not expect, and a recruiter skimming a page of text does not need decoration to find your experience.
Better left out
Custom emoji
Many workspaces add their own: a company logo, a :shipit: for releases, a :this: arrow to agree with the message above. Slack recommends square images under 128 KB with a transparent background, in JPG, PNG or GIF, and animated GIFs can have up to 50 frames.
A custom emoji only exists inside its workspace. Paste it into an email or a document and all that arrives is its name between colons. How to upload one, and why they vanish, is covered in emoji in apps.
Questions
The ones that do a job: 👍 to acknowledge, ✅ for done, 🙏 for thanks, 👀 for seen, and 🎉 or 👏 to celebrate. Faces that show a clear, mild feeling, such as 😊, are also safe. Leave winks, smirks and anything with a second meaning for people outside work.
Not in itself, but a lone 👍 in reply to a long or personal message can feel dismissive, and many younger colleagues read it as curt. Add a word or two, or use 🙏 or ✅, which say more precisely what you mean.
Usually that you have seen the message and are looking into it. It is a quick way to stop someone wondering whether their request landed. In a social channel it can also mean you are watching something interesting unfold.
Not in a first email, a formal request or anything to someone you have not written to before. In an established, friendly thread, one emoji at the end of a sentence is fine. Keep them out of subject lines, and remember that email clients draw emoji differently, so what looks warm on your screen may not on theirs.
The conventional ones are 📅 for a meeting, 🌴 for holiday, 🤒 for off sick, 🎧 for focus time and 🏠 for working from home. Slack shows your status emoji beside your name everywhere, and a 💬 speech balloon if you leave the emoji out.
In posts, sparingly: a ✅ or 📌 as a bullet point is common and easy to read. A post full of emoji looks like engagement bait. Leave them out of your CV entirely, because some applicant tracking systems drop or garble characters they do not expect.
Sources
Keep exploring
🙏
From a quick 🙏 to heartfelt thanks, and which ones suit a colleague.
Read more:fire:
Why Slack draws its own emoji, and how custom emoji and shortcodes work.
Read more⌨️
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