Email Has Made Writers of Us All

Some executives claim to receive upwards of 150 messages a day. It may be hard to see a bottom-line benefit to good writing skills. But the cost of poor writing skills can be measured in dollars and cents, simply by applying statistical research, specific HR variables, and a basic math formula. Read through our example below or go right to our calculator to see how much poor writing skills may be costing your company.

Hypothetical Example

The cost of poor writing skills to the hypothetical company below is $1.5 million per year.

Consider the following variables:

• The company has 1,000 employees who send and receive email daily.
• They write and send, on average, 10 email messages per day.
• On average, they send or copy each message to 3 different people.
• By conservative estimates, 5 percent of email messages require clarification.
• The estimated time to clarify each email lacking a clear purpose or request is 10 minutes. This includes reading and rereading the first message, calling or emailing the sender for clarification, and assimilating the new information.
• Employee salaries average out to $50,000.00 per employee per year (approximately $24.00 per hour or $0.40 per minute).

Now do the math:

• 1,000 employees x 10 emails = 10,000 email messages sent each day
• 3 recipients per email message = 30,000 readers
• 5 percent require clarification = 1,500 messages
• 1,500 messages x 10 minutes to clarify each one = 15,000 minutes of productivity wasted, daily, deciphering unclear messages
• 15,000 minutes of lost productivity @ $0.40 per minute = $6,000.00 of lost productivity per day
• $6,000.00 x 250 working days per year = $1.5 million per year in productivity lost due to poor writing skills

Our example considers only the cost to clarify unclear messages. It doesn’t take into account the time and cost of tasks carried out poorly—or not at all—due to unclear requests for action.

What the Research Shows

National and local surveys show that writing is a threshold skill in business and that many employees don't do it very well—especially those right out of school. If email has dealt writing skills a blow, instant messaging may start ringing the death knell. Check out the information and links below.

• The National Commission on Writing determined that writing is a threshold skill in business today, and that executives expect concise, clear, correct writing from employees. In the Commission’s 2004 report, A Ticket to Work or a Ticket Out: a survey of business leaders, concerns are raised that not only do entry-level employees lack writing skills, but recent college graduates have the weakest skills of all. Witness the following statements from survey respondents:
  
  “The skills of new college graduates are deplorable—across the board; spelling, grammar, sentence structure . . . I can’t believe people come out of college now not knowing what a sentence is.”
  
  “Recent graduates aren’t even aware when things are wrong (singular/plural agreement, run-on sentences, and the like). I’m amazed they got through college.”
  
  “Apart from grammar, many employees don’t understand the need for an appropriate level of detail, reasoning, structure, and the like.”
  
  
• In 2007, Capital One determined it had added 11 days of productivity per employee per year after the corporation required 3,000 employees to take an email writing course. Read the Fast Company article here. If each of those employees earns $50,000.00 per year (about $200.00 per day), that computes to $6.6 million in annual savings!


• Also in 2007, nearly half of the HR executives surveyed by the consulting firm of Challenger, Gray, and Christmas concurred that recent graduates lack writing skills, and 27 percent said they lack critical thinking skills as well. In “Young Workers: U Nd 2 Improve Ur Writing Skills,” the NY Times reported, “It seems that some young employees are now guilty of the technological equivalent of wearing flip-flops: they are writing company email as if they were texting cell-phone messages with their thumbs.”

See the results of our joint email survey with the Wisconsin Institute of CPAs.