Your Role in Improving Employee Writing

Writing costs a company big bucks. Bad writing costs a company even more.

Everyone agrees. Bad writing sends the wrong message to others about the quality of the organization, its employees and their reliability. Every letter and email sent out communicates an image of your company. Managers must ensure that image is the right one.

Bad writing causes inefficiency, wasted time and resources. The lack of clear communication is continually flagged as a significant problem in business, whether it's internal or external communications.

Bad writing forces a business to spend more money than it needs to on communications. What is your company's annual writing investment? Probably more than you think. Try this simple exercise. I've filled in numbers for a medium-size business. The minimum hours of week spent writing (8 hours) is a figure that comes from research conducted by The American Society of Business Communicators.

Acme Meat's Annual Writing Investment

ACME'S ANNUAL WRITING INVESTMENT = $600,000

Two questions that managers at Acme Meats or any business must ask themselves about an annual investment of that size:

• Am I getting my money's worth?
• How can I save money and improve my company's writing?

The answer to the first question is almost always, "No, not by a long shot."
The answer to the second isn't much better:

What are Acme's options to improve its ROI in employee communications?

The three most common are:

1. Writing Consultants. They cost about $75 per hour, per employee, for on-site training. Ten employees may cost Acme $7,500 for a two- or three-day course. Add  travel and meals if  employees go off site. Typically, employees attend a workshop or seminar and receive general instruction and some one-on-one tutoring.

2. Manuals and books. These require a highly-motivated and self-disciplined employee in order to be effective.

3. Online courses and tutoring. Distance learning via the Internet is increasingly popular. It usually provides cheaper and more extended instruction than consultants do, but lacks immediate, face-to-face interaction.



What are the drawbacks of these options?

• Lack of one-on-one. Because writing is a skill, improvement in it is best achieved by performing that skill in the presence of a coach or expert and receiving hands-on guidance. It's difficult to improve a skill merely by talking about it in a group setting or via the Internet.
• Lack of follow up. Studies show that, without follow-up, retention of learned material quickly degenerates to 10% in three days, then tapers off gradually until approaching zero.
• Lack of context. The litmus test for all instruction is the student's ability to apply knowledge to specific, real-world tasks. The transfer of knowledge from learning models to messy reality can be difficult. It's one thing to talk about wordiness and to complete drills on reducing wordiness, but it's quite another to actually employ that skill consistently in the context of your own writing.
• Lack of accountability. If a company invests in improving its employees' skills, how can the company monitor results over time and determine its ROI?

In short, classroom courses, online courses, and self-teaching manuals can be inefficient, ineffective and wasteful. They often leave the company still looking for a way to improve employee communication that is:

• Effective
• Measurable
• Cost effective
• Long term

Is it any wonder that today's companies are looking to you, the manager, as a solution to their runaway writing costs?

Is it any wonder that in today's competitive environment, your communication skills are, as the National Commission on Writing put it, your "ticket to work"?

Note: No response required to this thread other than the shock of knowing that your company will likely be looking to you to help improve writing in the workplace.