Sometimes it seems like corporate America has adopted a new standard; one in which typing I have cechked yet is just as acceptable as writing I haven’t checked yet. After all, errors are bound to happen, and people can always figure out what others are trying to say. Right?
Well, maybe not. As it turns out, a sloppy approach to business communication is not only annoying to the pickiest among us (ahem) – it’s also a math equation with a negative result: Bad writing times many workers equals wasted time and unnecessary cost.
And that means money down the drain.
In most offices today, e-mails, reports, and those ubiquitous slide sets are generally typed quickly, often by someone who’s “multi-tasking,” and they’re likely to be full of little slip-ups. Most people excuse the errors, though, because getting a lot done in today’s highly productive atmosphere means not sweating the small stuff. Right again?
Yeah, except the “small stuff” has a way of growing.
Imagine this scenario, which isn’t at all unusual: Fourteen people read an unclear e-mail two or three times apiece, trying to understand it. Five people ask for clarification, the original writer sends another e-mail explaining what he or she meant to say, 15 people read the updated message, and 7 people spend several minutes joshing about similar errors they themselves have made or read about in Dilbert. Altogether, a couple hundred worker-minutes are spent on one little blunder.
If those workers are paid an average of, say, $40 an hour, it all adds up to roughly $130 in time blown away for one sloppy e-mail.
When it happens 10 times a week (and in a big company, it certainly does), that adds up to $1,300; and if it goes on for 50 weeks a year (which, once again, it certainly does), that’s $65,000 in squandered time. All because the general understanding is that it’s more efficient to write things quickly without proofreading our work or considering whether we’ve said precisely what we mean to say than it is to write things well in the first place.
Got it?
Sloppiness is one thing in private industry, but a recent study by the National Governor’s Association pointed out that careless writing is expensive in government work, too. In fact, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee noted that when workers’ writing is unclear, “It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate cost of lost productivity because people have to read things two and three times.”
Let’s see . . . impossible to calculate equals hidden costs, and government work equals taxpayers’ money. So that means – Hey! We’re all paying for a culture of shoddy work!
Clearly, it’s time for reform.
Most people could vastly improve the quality of their business communications by quickly re-reading what they’ve typed before they send it out. Sure, it may take a minute, but proofing saves time in confusion and clarification down the road. Careful typing plus simple corrections equals saying what you meant in the first place – for less time and money.
Hmm, maybe math isn’t so hard.
(This classic Miss Communications column was originally published January 5, 2007.)
