Whether it's standard operating procedures; emails to colleagues, vendors, or customers; sales presentations or proposals; or any other type of business document or content, writing isn't an add-on task for workers to try to get through before getting back to their "real" job. It is their real job. It's how they – and the organization that employs them – connect with customers, stakeholders, and clients. Without writing, you don't have a business.
Unfortunately, far too many workers and managers (and even entire businesses) treat writing as though it's a separate activity or task that can be separated from other duties. They fail to see it as an essential or as necessary part of their business ecosystem, even though workplace writing plays a key role in:
- Persuading customers or clients to make buying decisions.
- Educating your audience in your area of subject matter expertise.
- Understanding the state of business and mapping future strategy.
- Solving problems (internally or for customers).
- Establishing credibility and building reputation.
- Avoiding miscommunication.
In other words, writing is the connective tissue between goal and achievement, the bridge between business objectives and personal and organizational success.
Problems when the importance of writing is underestimated
Unfortunately, underestimating its importance can cause all kinds of secondary problems:
- Writing tasks get shortchanged and rushed, and thus writing output is subpar and ineffective.
- Managers hold writing duties to be separate from primary job duties and apply a different set of standards, often tolerating unskilled writing output in ways they wouldn’t tolerate unskilled work in other areas.
- In turn, this can lead to huge “communication shipwrecks,” major operational and reputational disasters that track directly back to poor writing output.
- Then, organizations can miss opportunities to increase success. For example, improved writing can directly lead to greater productivity and more sales.
Often, the issue is a fundamental devaluing of writing (and communication in general) in pursuit of business or organizational goals. Workers and organizations may not realize they could be writing more effective documents because they don’t have a basis for comparison. They accept a low benchmark for writing performance because they don’t understand how much better – and more effective – their writing output could be.
As a result, they end up misdiagnosing their problems. Just as they undervalue writing as a job task, they overlook it as an underlying cause in business failures or underperformance.
Steps to ensure writing is front and center
- Understand that writing is the true deliverable; in other words, even if your organization manufactures widgets, those widgets must be marketed and instructions written. If the marketing isn’t written to appeal to potential buyers and the instructions result in lots of questions, the business suffers.
- Diagnose underlying problems. That said, identifying and understanding writing lapses or areas of opportunity can be challenging, especially for organizations that are unaware of what they could be achieving if their writing output was stronger.
- Develop your team’s writing and communication skills. Too often, organizations have no process in place to teach new employees how to write the documents the organization expects or upskill the writing of longer-term employees.
To learn more – and have us help you develop strategies that will improve your team’s start-to-finish writing process – contact Hurley Write for a custom, no-obligation consultation.