Your company is only as good as your written messages

The typical executive today spends approximately 20-25 percent of their time writing. Yet too often, business writing is one of the last skills people feel is important to work on. But look around your workplace: do your leaders write effectively? Do people tend to listen to good writers? Are good writers able to persuade or convince effectively?

Interestingly, many great leaders consider communication to be an essential competency in the workplace. So what about companies in general?

Should effective business writing be a company-wide initiative?

Let’s look at some facts here:

• More and more of our work today is done in writing rather than in person or over the phone.
• We depend on our writing skills to influence, persuade, encourage, collaborate, lead.
• Very often, the entire workflow depends on our writing skills.
• Practicing good writing can mean the difference between business or no business, action or no action, collaboration or conflict, relationship building or relationship destruction.

Writing well in business is not easy

One of the reasons writing well isn’t easy is because there are so many considerations:

• You have to think about your reader, about style and tone, about the words to use, about sentence construction, and there is also the matter of grammar and punctuation.
• Your business writing is closely related to the identity of the company. You need to consider what your business stands for and where it’s headed: what is the “voice” your business wants your customers to hear, and how do you want your business to be perceived by the general public?

These considerations are not easy to determine, but they cannot be ignored. Conversations about these things are crucial to the success of the organization, not just the individual.

Why not start conversations like this in your organization? Why not get a team together to see how you can improve communication and writing skills in your workplace? It’s important that people are on the same page about this, and you have to start somewhere.

If your organization is serious about success, it’s essential to encourage effective business writing throughout the workplace.