Businesses lose $1 billion daily from poor writing–here’s what you can do about it.
Is poor writing costing your company money?
If staff members go back and forth trying to clarify a murky email, the team loses time and productivity. Foggy communication also affects engagement as employees tire of trying to decipher unclear messages.
If business development team members fail to accurately present the value of your offering to their prospects, you lose sales.
If customer service representatives offer ambiguous solutions to customer problems, customers may become dissatisfied, which ultimately leads to lost repeat sales and a poor reputation.
And let’s not forget the typos in websites, blog posts, and templated emails that damage branding.
If your organization suffers from any of these problems, writing needs to become a priority.
Studies indicate that corporations lose upwards of $400 billion annually because of poor writing. That’s over $1 billion daily. This staggering figure points to the losses in sales, productivity, staff, morale, and branding that are directly connected to unclear or careless writing.
As a business leader, you might think that coaching your team in writing skills is outside your core responsibilities. However, investing time and energy to develop this vital skill in your workforce will pay off in the long run.
Here’s what you can do to improve writing in your organization.
1 – Lead by Example
Good business communication starts from the top. As a leader, your communication standards affect all levels of the organization. Your team will make the effort to write better if they know that good writing matters to you.
Hone your writing skills so that your staff can use your writing as a standard to which they should aspire.
2 – Offer training and resources
Writing is a learnable skill. Your employees might never have had a solid writing course, even if they are college graduates. They need knowledge.
Build your team’s skills by offering writing workshops and training programs to enhance their comprehension and practice their skills. Many programs are available, including from my company Worktalk. I recommend you choose one that customizes its training materials by consulting with management and analyzing writing samples. Plenty of off-the-shelf programs are available, but if you go that route, make sure they pertain to your business.
Tools such as Grammarly are helpful at weeding out basic errors in grammar and punctuation, and AI-assisted writing programs are useful too–up to a point. Be careful about adopting the suggestions of AI-writing algorithms such as ChatGPT without giving them a careful, human look-over.
Some organizations create style guides to establish companywide norms for emails, reports, and other documents. If you choose to create a guide, make it brief. Format it clearly, and make sure everyone knows about it. There’s no benefit in having a style guide that sits on a shelf.
3 – Give specific feedback
In my experience as a corporate writing consultant, I see many managers who look at the poor writing of their subordinates and think, “I can fix this in less time than it will take to send it back to them.” Then they swiftly revise the document and send a marked-up copy to the original writer. If you think this way, you are probably right: It will take you less time to fix the person’s errors than it would to sit with them and explain what they did wrong.
However, this is only true once. If you add up the time you spend correcting the same mistakes over and over, you might see that coaching the writer is a worthwhile investment. True, it takes time. But if you do not help your team learn, you will be correcting the same mistakes 10 years from now.
Don’t just redline bad writing and send it back. Explain your corrections so the writer will do a better job the next time. An old proverb says, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” Let your team members become lifelong writers of powerful prose.
Reward good writing and invest in it
In addition to following these three tips, recognize and reward good writing. If employees consistently produce high-quality written work, acknowledge them. Let everyone know that you consider writing skills important when making decisions about who gets promoted.
Improving writing skills takes time. To promote a culture of writing excellence, commit to making it a priority when coaching your direct reports and establishing your training budget. Your investment in written communication will pay long-term dividends in the form of increased productivity, sales, and employee engagement. Savvy leaders recognize that strong writing is fundamental to running an organization that outpaces the competition.