Emojis predict dropouts of remote workers: An empirical study of emoji usage on GitHub.

Xuan Lu,Yanbin Cao,Wei Ai,Zhenpeng Chen,Qiaozhu Mei,Christopher M Danforth

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0261262

Abstract

Emotions at work have long been identified as critical signals of work motivations, status, and attitudes, and as predictors of various work-related outcomes. When more and more employees work remotely, these emotional signals of workers become harder to observe through daily, face-to-face communications. The use of online platforms to communicate and collaborate at work provides an alternative channel to monitor the emotions of workers. This paper studies how emojis, as non-verbal cues in online communications, can be used for such purposes and how the emotional signals in emoji usage can be used to predict future behavior of workers. In particular, we present how the developers on GitHub use emojis in their work-related activities. We show that developers have diverse patterns of emoji usage, which can be related to their working status including activity levels, types of work, types of communications, time management, and other behavioral patterns. Developers who use emojis in their posts are significantly less likely to dropout from the online work platform. Surprisingly, solely using emoji usage as features, standard machine learning models can predict future dropouts of developers at a satisfactory accuracy. Features related to the general use and the emotions of emojis appear to be important factors, while they do not rule out paths through other purposes of emoji use.

Highlights

The future of work is less dependent on centralized workplaces and in-person collaborations
We further investigate the predictive power of emoji usage on an extremely negative outcome: whether an active developer is going to log no activity on GitHub year
Using features extracted solely from their emoji usage, standard machine learning models are able to predict the future dropouts of emoji users with impressive accuracy

Summary

Introduction

The future of work is less dependent on centralized workplaces and in-person collaborations. Working remotely has become the new norm through the COVID-19 pandemic, and the trend is likely to continue afterward. While to what extent working remotely influences work outcomes is still debatable, a more visible concern is its impact on working (and organizational) practices. A good example is to handle emotions at work, which have long been identified as critical signals of motivations, attitudes, and mental health status of workers, as well as culture, organizational justices, and other environmental factors of workplaces (e.g., [2,3,4]).

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Conclusion