I recently sent a message to a peer at work, asking if I could assign one of his guys to one of my projects for a day to do some remote support. My peer gave me a thumbs-up as a response, but nothing else.

Does that mean he’s saying yes, or that he’s merely acknowledging my message?

Tapbacks are a way of sending a message without using words. I use them sometimes when replying to Instagram memes, or to acknowledge messages my employees send me instead of saying “okay” all the time. But if someone sends me a message that requires a definitive response, I will reply with words. I might also include an emoji. However, when someone asks me something direct that needs a direct response, a tapback isn’t enough.

Emoji are just modern-day hieroglyphics, except that unlike hieroglyphics many emoji require the receiver to understand what the sender meant. For example, I’ve heard that if you send a cat heart-eyes emoji 😻 it means you are flirting or thirsty (in a relationship way, not in an “I need some water” way). When was this agreed upon? Why was I not told?

For a while we had tone tags — such as /s to indicate one is being sarcastic. I much preferred those to using emoji, as a tone tag doesn’t require interpretation. It’s very clear what you mean. And, speaking of sarcasm, someone actually trademarked the “Sarcmark“, a punctuation form that means “I am being sarcastic.” But of course we’d all have to agree to use it, and to not be sarcastic when we didn’t use it.

I wish there was some sort of business communication standard we could use across the country (or the world) to set the meaning for each tapback, especially now that tapbacks are so easy to use in Teams. I guess if I ever become the CEO of a company (which seems unlikely) there will be a lot of changes made to business communication for that company. For starters, people will have to write their emails more formally — no more “Hey Fred” as a salutation, for example. And it will be known that if someone asks you to do something, you have to answer with words, not with a tapback or emoji.

Can I get a thumbs up for that?