Let’s get to the point: Poor business writing skills are costing businesses billions of dollars.
Businesses are paying this high price due to time wasted on many back-and-forth emails, brands damaged by careless content, poor communications that bog down projects, and more.
Employees aren’t doing this on purpose! Employees want to be more effective and productive, but if they lack the skills, how can they?
It’s in your best interests to help employees improve business writing skills.
When you improve business writing skills
The benefits to improving business writing skills are invaluable. When employees strengthen their business writing skills, they:
- Get more done in less time because they communicate clearly.
- Help others get more done for that same reason.
- Improve team collaboration.
- Become all-around better communicators.
- Improve your brand and build trust with your customers.
- Have time for higher value work.
Every one of these benefits leads to dollars for your business…and possibly happier employees.
How to improve business writing skills at your business
I’ve convinced you of the importance, right? Now, how do you make that happen? You can easily improve your employees’ writing skills simply by doing these four things:
- Recognize and praise good writing. If you’re not recognizing it, neither is anyone else.
- Allow time for better writing. Encourage employees to take their time, especially with email. Spend more time with one email and you’ll send fewer emails.
- Consider training. Online classes abound, and simply subscribing to my newsletter can be an easy way to improve.
- Set a good example. There’s no point in encouraging your employees to slow down and improve if you’re dashing off curt and confusing emails.
And when you are filling a position, look for strong writing skills among the job candidates.
How I can help
As I said above, even subscribing to my newsletter can help your employees improve. I only get it out about 10 times per year, so it’s not overwhelming anyone’s inbox. And you’ll find that your employees like my approach to helping them improve. I’m not an English professor or a strict grammarian. I’m a former copywriter who spent 20 years constantly striving to write quickly, clearly and effectively. The lessons I learned during those two decades are the lessons I pass along to your employees (and you, should you decide to also improve).
While others who teach business writing focus on the mechanics of writing correctly, I focus on helping people write clearly yet in an engaging style. There’s a huge difference, in both the approach and the results.
And isn’t that what you want for you and your employees? Stronger writing skills? Emails others will read? Documents that clearly communicate? An end to the confusion and wasted time and money?
Let’s make that happen.
Photo by Lex Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silver-magic-keyboard-1109543/