Miscommunication in manufacturing environments is expensive, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous. Unfortunately, it’s also common.
“Imagine a QA technician catching a recurring defect three steps too late, leading to costly rework and delays,” writes John Bye, Quality Manager at Bailey International LLC, a hydraulic components and electronic controls manufacturer, “or a production manager finding out about a crucial process change only after it has disrupted deadlines and impacted productivity.”
These kinds of impacts all have one thing in common: information broke down somewhere between “sent” and “understood.”
And all too often, that breakdown happens in writing.
The Cost of Miscommunication
Rework can cost as much as 2.2% of annual sales. That can easily add up to six or seven figures (or more) for a mid-size manufacturing organization. And miscommunication is clearly a major cause of rework. In construction, at least, it accounts for 48% of all rework. It’s likely similar in manufacturing, given that manufacturing environments can suffer many of the same communication breakdowns between different teams, departments, shifts, and more. In fact, if anything, manufacturing floors are likely especially prone to communication failure:
The workforce is often multilingual, increasing the potential for misinterpretation.
Often, front-line workers don’t have regular access to the same communication channels as back-office workers. For example, 83% of “deskless” workers, like those on the front lines of a manufacturing operation, don’t even have a corporate email address.
Different teams in manufacturing tend to operate on different rhythms and even platforms (think frontline vs. back office, or day shift vs. night shift, or engineering vs. assembly), making consistent communication difficult.
In this context, improving writing skills isn’t about polishing prose or perfecting grammar: it’s about operational efficiency born from clarity, consistency, and control. And it starts with the people who already bear the burden of daily communication: the engineers and industrial designers, team leads and supervisors, quality assurance testers and analysts, and more.
Where Communication Fails
Across manufacturing floors, miscommunication tends to show up in a few predictable ways:
Unclear Work Instructions: Shorthand like “install per spec” might make sense to one shift, but not to another, especially if the spec document is outdated, vague, or poorly labeled.
Ineffective Shift Handovers: A rushed or poorly written log can leave the next team unaware of safety hazards, incomplete work, or urgent issues.
Production Schedule Confusion: When timelines change (as they often do), a lack of written clarity about what, when, and why can create hours or days (or more) of disruption.
Interdepartmental Disconnect: Operations, assembly, quality, and maintenance often operate in silos, where even small miscommunications can compound into big inefficiencies.
Every one of these problems stems, at least in part, from poorly written communication. But that also means every one of them is an opportunity for improvement.
Why Writing Is the Key
It’s tempting to approach miscommunication like a process problem. If you want to fix internal misalignment, suggestions for solutions are a dime a dozen online, but these proposed solutions are almost always procedural in nature.
In other words, they presume that if you can implement the exact right mix of procedural changes, you can get your operation into perfect working order. Certainly, fixes such as cross-functional training, earlier feedback loops, lean manufacturing principles, and other process-oriented changes can help. But they can only help if the people within those systems are equipped to communicate effectively in the first place.
Without strong writing and communication skills, these procedural improvements just create new touchpoints for confusion. A newly implemented feedback loop doesn’t help if the feedback is vague, incomplete, or misinterpreted. A liaison can’t bridge departments if their written updates leave critical context behind or fail to consider what the intended reader does or does not already know. Writing skills are the foundation that makes other communication systems work.
Enter the Manufacturing Writing Workshop
So, what if your leads wrote clearer handover logs? What if your floor supervisors documented issues with precision and context? What if department managers structured their communications to be easier for multilingual teams to understand?
That’s the goal of a Manufacturing Writing Workshop: it enables participants to sharpen both communication skills and communication strategy in day-to-day operations. Workshops like these don’t waste time diagramming sentences. Instead, they focus on:
Writing for action and accountability
Clarifying roles, tasks, and timelines in written instructions
Simplifying complex information for diverse (and sometimes “deskless”) readers
Structuring documentation to be scannable, usable, and memorable
Developing better handoff templates, logbooks, and vendor reports
Typically, a good manufacturing writing workshop will even use your team’s writing samples to ensure it is maximally relevant to your team’s actual work and needs. This isn’t about turning your team into writers. It’s about helping them communicate better, faster, and more reliably, so they can perform more effectively.
Why It Matters: Communication Is a Core Job Function
We often think of manufacturing as physical and/or technical, but let’s take a closer look. Think about a frontline supervisor’s day. How many of his/her tasks involve writing or documentation?
Submitting maintenance requests
Logging quality issues
Writing shift reports
Emailing suppliers
Summarizing safety incidents
Updating status boards or project management systems
Communicating production goals
Answering questions from partners or management
For people in such roles, writing is a core job function. It’s what they do. And every document, message, or logbook entry is a potential point of failure…or a lever for success. After all, if a supervisor writes 20 brief communications a day, and each one is even 5% clearer or more actionable, the compounding effect on productivity, accuracy, and morale will be enormous.
And here’s the kicker: that clarity doesn’t just flow downward. It flows upward. Executives who rely on field reports or frontline insights will receive better, clearer, and more actionable information, which leads to better decisions.
Fundamentally, when the team writes better, the business runs better.
The Bottom Line
Miscommunication is a bottom-line risk. It slows work, causes rework, damages vendor and customer relationships, and compromises safety.
But it’s also a challenge that can be solved with no need to overhaul the workforce or invest in complex technologies to start fixing the problem. Instead, you need to invest in your people, in their ability to communicate more effectively and professionally, especially the people who already write every day and whose words steer your operation forward (or backward).
Training those individuals through targeted manufacturing writing workshops is a high-impact, low-friction way to reduce rework, improve interdepartmental alignment, and build an overall stronger manufacturing operation.
If you’re ready to build your team’s communication skills and boost performance levels, Hurley Write can help. We offer a portfolio of workshops perfect for manufacturing organizations. Get started today and immediately improve operations.
