Toning up communications: business writing courses can help employees and managers learn to clearly express organizational messages - Training & Development Agenda

HR Magazine, March, 2003 by Kathryn Tyler

Two years ago, when KeyBank began developing an online reference system for its call center professionals, managers realized they needed to offer more guidance to the employees who were writing the E-manual.

"We had 10 people [writing] and they were all writing differently," says Nicole Raumberger, E-manual development manager for the financial institution based in Brooklyn, Ohio. The multiple styles would have made the instructions difficult to decipher, slowing down call center response time. "We needed to set a standard so that [the manual] made sense to our [call center professionals] and looked to them like only one person was writing." Raumberger hired E-Write, a Maryland-based online writing consultant, to help develop a format and to teach employees how to write for the web. "They helped us bring our writing styles together," she says.

The results were clear: Raumberger's staff slashed each call center procedure by up to 10 pages and made them easier to understand. This, in turn, drastically reduced the average time needed to handle client calls.

Raumberger expects the streamlined procedures to save between $64,000 and $72,000 in 2003. 'We calculated the savings by timing the [call center staff] as they answered a call with the old procedure and comparing it to the time it takes them to answer a call with the new procedure;' she says. Using the new procedures, the center shaved an average of five-and-a-half seconds off each of its 22,000 monthly calls for a total savings of more than 32 hours per month.

Like Raumberger's staff, many of your employees may be asked to compose memos, sales letters, e-mail messages, reports or other documents that can have a profound--although not always immediately recognizable--impact on your organization's bottom line. Yet many of those employees may also lack the business writing training or experience they need to succeed.

Writing Skills Matter

Writing skills are becoming increasingly important in the workplace. More employees are required to write effectively, even if their jobs never included writing previously.

One reason for this change is that nearly every worker is connected via email--to each other and to your customers. For instance, customer service agents who used to spend 95 percent of their time on the telephone are increasingly required to answer customer inquiries via e-mail.

Also, downsizing has eliminated the administrative assistants who used to edit, correct and type business correspondence. Now, all but the upper echelon of executives write and send their own letters and e-mail messages.

"It is embarrassing when executives send out [correspondence] with misspellings and bad writing," says Yvonne Alexander, owner of Alexander Communications, a Sebastopol, Calif., company that offers writing seminars. "As managers move up the ladder, their writing gets more complicated and the quality deteriorates. They write in this oblique, dense style. You can't make sense of if."

No matter whether the writer is a CEO, a sales manager or a customer service representative, poor communications can lead to loss of business.

"If you send out a sales letter that is filled with errors, you're losing credibility. You send the image that your company is careless," says Dawn Josephson, president of Cameo Publications, an editorial and publishing services firm based in Hilton Head, S.C.

Credibility is not the only issue. Email messages, sales letters and policy manuals are meant to communicate. Bad writing can muddle the message. Alexander recalls an HMO whose policy stated that customers who receive money from a third party for their injuries would reimburse the company. A woman insured by the HMO broke her leg in an auto accident, then collected $200 from the other driver. Her HMO, which had paid her medical bill, took the woman to court to collect the $200 she had received. However, the judge ruled against the UMO "based on the fact that the policy was written so badly that no one could understand it," Alexander says.

Identifying a Need

Peggy Ann Anderholm, director of training and development for Marvin Windows and Doors in Warroad, Minn., began offering business writing courses last year after managers pointed out that employees with little business writing experience were being asked to write and that their lack of skills was evident in their correspondence.

For example, after the sales support department at the 3,000-employee manufacturer switched from telephone communications to e-mail, workers were sending messages without proofreading them for correct grammar. In one case, a manager pointed this out to an employee, but she didn't see a problem. However, after a writing class in which she learned that e-mail is an organizational communication, she acknowledged the need for proofreading.

Anderholm realized that managers, as well as their employees, often need coaching to write more effectively, and she opted to train them together. Employees "could recognize that lots of them needed help," she says. "It made it OK to say, 'I'm not the best writer in the world; and ask someone to proofread. The instructors helped everybody feel this was a common problem across the organization," says Anderholm.