A favourite sketch of mine from Bette Midler involves her complaining about the futity of housework. Her point: no sooner is a task complete than it needs repeating. The washing up gets done. Several hours later it needs doing again. The ornaments get dusted. A week later they are dusty again. The humour in the sketch comes from the question she repeats at the end of each complaint, 'Why bother?'I noticed recently that quite a lot of people visiting our website had arrived after searching using the phrase advantages of report writing. This is interesting because inherent in this search phrase is Bette's question. When you spend many hours of your waking life thinking about how to make business writing and communications better, it is easy to lose sight of that basic Bette question, 'Why bother?'
So this post takes us back to basics to think about the advantages of report writing and answer the question, 'Why bother?' Why write a report rather than shove everything in an email?'
I'm going back several years, but I can think of an organisation we worked for who had gone the route of communicating almost entirely by email. Worse still, (because they could), employees copied each other in on almost everything. Everyone spent hours sifting through piles of unformatted, poorly written guff - just in case there was a nugget of information relevant to them. Email communication was totally out of control.
Our role was to re-introduce the skill of report writing. I like to think we did some good, but in honesty, our intervention felt hopeless - at that particular moment, it was clear we were swimming against the tide.
Not long after this, the company in question was taken over and their brand vanished for ever. I'm not suggesting their obsession with email was the cause of their demise, but I'm fairly clear it was a symptom of the organisation's wider dysfunction; and this wider dysfunction was definitely a factor in them getting swallowed up by a more successful competitor.
So my first point is this: bother with report writing because an email only culture almost always brings more problems than it solves - even though, at first, email only may seem an attractive solution.
So why else would you bother writing a report - what are some of the other advantages?
Structuring and sequencing content
If you read my recent comments on using post-it notes, you'll know I believe an audience focused structure and information hierarchy is fundamental to the success of a report or similar document. Up to a point, you can create this in email format, but because email was never really designed with this mind, you have to work twice as hard to achieve success. When most people struggle to adequately structure even short emails, I wouldn't hold out much hope for it happening with longer communications.
Formatting to reinforce the hierarchy
If you are serious about your structuring and sequencing, you will also be diligent about applying a simple but consistent set of formatting styles to help your audience identify and understand the different elements of this hierarchy and sequence. Not impossible to achieve using email; but much, much easier in a word processed format.
Referencing content
Individually, simple things like tables of contents, headers and footers, hyperlinks within documents and good old page numbering make small but important contributions to an audience being able to navigate around and make sense of what's going on. Collectively, they make a very powerful contribution to the understanding of content and an audience's sense of where they are in the bigger whole.
Distributing the end product
As the now-defunct company demonstrated, it's the easiest thing in the world to cc almost everyone into an email. When you are distributing a paper-based report or emailing it out as an attachment, you are far more likely to think about who should receive a copy.
The act of writing
There's no question that emails are perceived by both writers and recipients as a bit light weight - something that can be polished off in a few minutes. The very act of writing a report or a document immediately adds to the significance of the content. Writing a document or report means you are far more likely to:
- carry out an audience analysis
- give serious consideration to your content and how it should be organised
- see the document's creation as an important and time-consuming task (of course, this last point can be both good and bad)
Finally, viewed from the audience's perspective, would you sign off an important business case proposed only by email? Unlikely, I think.
So next time you are faced with the task of writing a report or document and you hear Bette Midler's question echoing in your head, remember the alternative: dysfunctional, email hell.
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