Five Tips to Coach Employees on Writing Skills

Oakland, CA, May 12, 2015 (Newswire.com) - ​​​​Coaching efforts pay off in the form of greater employee engagement. Supportive coaching on communication skills yields high returns on managers’ investments of time and energy because communication is an essential skill across virtually every dimension of professional life. That fact builds short- and long-term ROI into coaching efforts on writing skills.

Two months ago in Forbes, behavioral statistician Joseph Folkman studied on-the-job coaching and reported the following:

"Writing skills are a silver bullet. Strong writing advances every aspect of business — from effective problem solving to clear analysis, inspiring leadership, cooperative teamwork, and effective customer and client support. Coach employees to become better writers, and their general work is bound to improve."

Natasha Terk, Managing Director, Advanced Communication Designs

• Over 60% of new hires who “are thinking about quitting” jobs have supervisors who are not good coaches (contrasted with only 22% who think of quitting although their supervisors are excellent coaches)
• There’s a precise correlation between these two statements:
  • “Overall, I feel that my supervisor is doing a good job”
  • “I receive the needed coaching and feedback about my experience”

“Writing skills are a silver bullet,” says Natasha Terk, Managing Director of consulting firm Advanced Communication Designs and author of The Write It Well Series on Business Communication. The firm offers the professional world coaching services, customized trainings, and train-the-trainer kits on a full range of communication skills.

Terk says, “Strong writing advances every aspect of business — from effective problem solving to clear analysis, inspiring leadership, cooperative teamwork, and effective customer and client support. Coach employees to become better writers, and their general work is bound to improve.”

Folkman and Jack Zenger emphasized in the Harvard Business Review last year that “talented individuals are more inclined to stay with organizations when they feel they are progressing.” Writing skills transfer across any job — fueling career progress even for people who change fields.

Terk offers these five tips for managers who need their employees to focus their internal email-writing skills, or to use their external writing to project a more polished image of the organization:

1. Remember that writing can feel personal — even in a business context. “Don’t focus more on an impersonal grammar rule than on your employee’s reactions,” Terk says. “Stay constructive, and show faith in people’s ability to grow.”
2. Start your feedback by acknowledging something positive. “Maybe they’ve assembled all the right facts, although a different order might work better. Or maybe they’ve settled on exactly the right idea and just need some tips on concise writing. Start with the positive before introducing a new technique.”
3. Ask open-ended questions about your employee’s writing purpose. Terk suggests asking, for instance, “With this particular memo, is there a key topic you wanted to simply inform readers about? Or was your purpose to persuade readers to take action instead?”
4. Provide specific feedback with examples — not vague comments about trying a different approach. “Asking people to analyze a specific paragraph is much less intimidating than suggesting their whole writing strategy ‘needs work.’”
5. Focus on planning and writing processes that employees can modify and replicate. “Take email subject lines,” Terk says. “You could show employees how to include a persuasive call to action in the subject line of one email they wrote last week. Then you could ask them to repeat the process for the last five persuasive emails they sent out.”

Managers can use Terk’s workbooks to model effective communication and to coach their employees. The seven books in The Write It Well Series on Business Communication include writing exercises with suggested answers, and the firm also coaches and trains managers directly on ways to improve their own writing skills.

“Better writing will save time and improve results every day,” Terk says. “Reliable writing skills prevent misunderstandings and help an employee provide just the info or persuasive ideas that everyone benefits from.”

These outcomes guarantee a solid ROI for the time and effort managers invest into coaching employees to grow as on-the-job writers.

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