[Merem]

Hm, I don't know. From my experience, communication without emoji of any kind works perfectly fine in a workplace and so far, I don't think I've ever received work-related communication that contained it. After all, it's not exactly difficult to write in a rational and neutral way what you want to say. If people want to interpret some kind of not-explicitely-said something into a written text, that's pretty much on them then. If anything, I consider emoji to be rather unprofessional, same as excessive usage of punctuation marks. In the days when forums were still doing fine, anyone who wrote a sentence ending with "!!!!!" would usually get a response like: "Satzzeichen sind keine Rudeltiere!" or some more eloquent but mean one which I can't remember.

Anyway, in the end, it might just be a cultural (German) thing but it seems to work since I've never seen an issue arise from the lack of emoji, smileys etc.