communication·Published 2025-06
Slack Reaction Emoji Frequency and Strategic Document Length: An Inverse Relationship
Principal investigator: Dr. Percival Ashcombe, Chief Research Officer.
Teams that use more Slack reaction emojis per message produce significantly shorter strategic planning documents.
Methodology
Two thousand one hundred and forty teams across 318 organizations agreed to share anonymized Slack metadata and the word counts of their five most recent strategic planning documents with the Institute's research division. Emoji frequency was computed as the total number of message reactions divided by the total number of messages in a ninety-day window. Strategic document length was averaged across all qualifying documents per team. Teams without at least three qualifying strategic documents were excluded, a criterion that disqualified 22% of the original cohort.
Funding disclosure: Funded by a productivity software research consortium that requested the data be segmented by emoji category, a request the Institute declined.
Instruments cited in this study
Full citation
Ashcombe, P. (2025). Slack Reaction Emoji Frequency and Strategic Document Length: An Inverse Relationship. Institute for the Study of Pointless Metrics. r = -0.83, p < 0.001, n = 2,140.