1 Putting a dollar value on writing skills
2 A real-life example of how writing skills can be improved quickly
1 Your junior-level staff member writes a couple of emails more quickly. Saving: about $600 in a 282-day year.
If his/her emails become better communications, the cost benefits multiply. Effective writing helps create productive processes, happier customers and better teamwork.
If a senior manager writes a couple of emails more quickly each day, the payoff moves up to about $3,000 each year. It is impossible to put a price on the benefits of senior managers writing clear, persuasive, effective communications, as these are so valuable in an economy where customers, suppliers and knowledge workers communicate by writing.
Good read on the subject of the value of writing skills: Will Helmlinger, author of “Gain the Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition” and “7 Secrets to Successful Hiring and Retention”.
2 A real-life example: Johan was employed as an inspector by a national safety association (similar to OSHA, outside the US). He was a mining industry specialist, but now his wife was leaving him, and taking his two boys with her.
Johan worked weekdays, doing inspections, and then worked nights and weekends writing reports. His reports often took 20 hours to complete. Two other inspectors had recently divorced, and two others had resigned to save their marriages. There was a shortage of mining inspectors, but Johan also wanted a life with his wife and sons.
I sat down with Johan’s manager. Many other safety inspectors also spent over 20 hours writing a single report. They needed a more systematic way of using inspection time to record details, so they could drop this information into a template, with support staff help if necessary. They needed delegation skills, to allow others to edit and proofread their reports.
But their greatest need was for a thinking skill: different parts of these reports were read by different people. The inspectors needed to toggle between writing narrow technical instructions for supervisors, and wide conceptual overviews for senior management. Their previous training from a “canned course” source - in “Tips for Better Writing” - had not been any help with their specific problem.
I designed a one-day custom workshop, which cost a lot less than the one-size-fits-all “Tips for Better Writing” course. It included new checklists. It reminded them that they were engineers not editors. Afterwards the safety inspectors wrote their reports in an average of four hours. Soon the old “writing time” became family time, relaxation time, time for exercise, games with their kids, barbeques with friends, and marriage renewal.
CPS staffers have succeeded with very large thinking-and-writing skills projects, that have saved companies many thousands of hours each year. Clients include Volkswagen, BMW, Ernst & Young, Coca-Cola, Iscor and Sasol (the giant South African steel and oil-from-coal industries).
HR gurus repeatedly stress that written communication skills are a common key to job and organization success, and that they are becoming more and more important in a knowledge-based, global economy.