Learning to Write Well Pays Off

The Executive Writer workshops can quickly produce a return on investment (ROI) and pay for themselves. For example, The Business Writing Workshop shows participants how to reduce the amount of words they write by up to 66%. Even using a more conservative figure of 33%, the time and money each employee can save by learning to write succinctly is considerable.

For example, if employees read an average of 10 pages worth of internal documents (reports, e-mails, website copy, etc.) a day during a 250-day business year (50 five-day weeks), that amounts to reading 2,500 pages each year. With an average reading time of 1.5 minutes per page, a single employee will spend 3,750 minutes or 62.5 hours reading those pages.

If the employee earns $30,000 a year ($15 an hour), your organization will pay that person $937.50 each to read those 2,500 pages (see Figure 1). If all of your employees learn to convey the same information in 1,667 pages instead of 2,500—that is, one-third fewer—reading time will also be cut by one-third for an annual savings of 20.25 hours and $303.75 per person.

If your organization employs 100 people, the total annual savings will be 2,025 hours or 253 eight-hour business days and $30,375.00 in salaries. That's just for reading 10 pages a day—most businesspeople read much more—and doesn't take into account the time and money saved by employees who spend less time writing the documents. Depending on the number of people your organization employs and the amount of internal documents they produce, you could see a complete return on investment (ROI) for the Plan, Write & Proofread Twice workshop within just a few weeks.