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The
Return on Investment of Better Business Writing
By Susan de la Vergne
You know how intense the focus is
at work on keeping cost down. Reducing expenses is on everyone’s mind—from
executives in the corner office to student interns in the break room, from
company gurus in the coffee line to customer service reps on the phone,
everyone has in mind the importance of reducing expenses.
When you’re looking for new ways to save expense dollars, here’s a
possibility that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: Improve your
organization’s business writing.
Why? Because bad business writing wastes time. It takes longer to read
something that’s poorly written than something that’s well-written. You
want your written communications to impart information or penetrate a
message, but poorly organized, badly worded, dense, confusing writing
won’t do the job.
How many times have you started to read something—a status report, an
organizational announcement, a how-to document—and after five minutes you
put it aside. “I’ll try this later, after another cup of coffee” (or maybe
a long refreshing vacation). And you try it later. You read, re-read, and
re-re-read. It’s still difficult to slog through, but you put in another
ten minutes. Thinking you get the gist, you stop reading before the end,
where there’s important direction given you never get to. You therefore
can’t take action as the author requested because you don’t know what it
is.
What does that have to do with expense savings? Whether it’s time spent
reading, or time spent in re-work (i.e., re-reading), or time spent doing
damage control because the message was misunderstood or it never landed at
all, it’s wasted time. Bad writing takes longer to read. And time is
money, isn’t it?
Take, for example, a high tech company, full of well-compensated technical
professionals. A group of 15 of them are working on a project, and their
average salary is $60,000. That means that a minute of their time is
worth, on average, 50 cents. (This is exclusive of benefits and overhead,
just their salary divided by the number of work minutes in a year.) Let’s
say this group of well-paid technical professionals has to read a product
evaluation report. Someone on the project team wrote it, describing all
the products evaluated, the results of the evaluation, and which product
is now recommended.
But the writer of the report did a terrible job. It’s poorly organized,
vaguely worded, too long, and he doesn’t know a comma from an asteroid.
(Ever tried reading a long list of technical product names without commas
separating them?) His writing is drab, lifeless, not to mention the
several typos throughout. It’s not particularly well-formatted either. And
somewhere along about page 6, there are a couple of paragraphs that seem
remarkably out of place. Oh, look, it’s marketing text lifted directly
from a product website (without citation). Frankly, that’s the best part
of the whole document. Too bad it’s plagiarism.
So back to our 15 highly paid technical folks. They each spend about 30
minutes reading this thing, in part because they have to go back and
re-read parts that don’t make sense, or they put it down to answer the
phone, relieved to have an excuse to stop reading. Had the report been
well written, they could have knocked it down in 10 minutes.
That’s 20 wasted minutes, per person, times 15 people. That’s $150 wasted
on just this one occasion. Multiply that by 100 occasions (that is, twice a week,
50 weeks a year),
and it’s up to $15,000. Multiply it by hundreds of people, and the cost of bad writing quickly ranges in the
millions.
Of course these aren’t dollars you can take to the bank and deposit. But
it is wasted expense, time that could instead be spent productively. As it
is, it’s just lost opportunity—for innovation, problem-solving,
team-building, and more.
There is a financial return on better business writing, so helping your
employees be better writers is a good investment.
I hope you don’t mind if I leave you with a
suggestion, something you can do to help improve business writing, and to
save time otherwise squandered on inefficient communications. My
suggestion is to take a writing class, one that is aimed at business
deliverables, and one that offers participants many opportunities to
actually write and get feedback from a qualified instructor because
the only way to become a better writer is to write, get feedback,
incorporate suggestions, and write again. One- or two-day
workshops don’t offer that. They may help you brush up on a few things
you’ve forgotten from freshman English, but substantive improvement comes
from writing and getting feedback.
You won’t be surprised if we tell you that Auxilium has a new class that
might be just the thing: Business Writing Online.
Click here to
learn more.
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