  Although remote working is increasingly adopted during the pandemic, many are
concerned by the low-efficiency in the remote working. Missing in text-based
communication are non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language,
which hinders the effective communication and negatively impacts the work
outcomes. Prevalent on social media platforms, emojis, as alternative
non-verbal cues, are gaining popularity in the virtual workspaces well. In this
paper, we study how emoji usage influences developer participation and issue
resolution in virtual workspaces. To this end, we collect GitHub issues for a
one-year period and apply causal inference techniques to measure the causal
effect of emojis on the outcome of issues, controlling for confounders such as
issue content, repository, and author information. We find that emojis can
significantly reduce the resolution time of issues and attract more user
participation. We also compare the heterogeneous effect on different types of
issues. These findings deepen our understanding of the developer communities,
and they provide design implications on how to facilitate interactions and
broaden developer participation.
