Training Your Team to Write: Why Workplace Writing Training Matters—Even in the Age of AI
How can you empower employees to build their writing skills?
Professionals of all ages and levels of experience feel uncomfortable writing at work: from email anxiety to prolonged procrastination on delivering that report. Employees report spending up to 19 hours per week just on writing tasks like emails and reports, and managers might spend valuable time fixing others’ typos or just sending deadline reminders.
While AI LLMs have helped employees navigate spelling and grammar issues more easily, they don't usually make up for the lack of a crucial writing skill: how to convey ideas to a specific audience. This gap results in the stilted, one-size-fits-all approach to workplace writing that takes up a lot of your inbox and delivers little value. The grammar and structure are there—but a better writer could have reduced it to one precise paragraph that cuts to the chase.
For all the fears about AI taking over the workplace, overuse of LLMs is not currently the heart of the problem: it’s a symptom. The professional who delivers a fully AI-generated report in that all-too-familiar format of Big Title > Excessive headings > Three short bullet points with bolded titles > Call to Action isn’t just careless: they fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of writing a report and underutilize their professional voice.
Workplace writing is about conveying ideas efficiently. While AI might speed up standard email exchanges or generate meeting summaries, it won’t deliver new insights unless your employees can put their knowledge into words.
Why does workplace writing matter?
“Why do we write?” is the most helpful question an organization can ask itself. Is it to maintain institutional knowledge of processes and client history? Is it to help clients learn how to use a product? Is it to propose a service?
When employees write with their audience in mind and understand the why behind their words, writing stops being about churning out that weekly report and becomes about delivering value and contributing to a growing body of knowledge—one they, as skilled employees hired specifically for their role, are in a unique position to deliver.
What can organizations do to improve employee writing skills?
1. Assess your existing processes.
What kinds of writing do you require employees to incorporate into their daily work? Do employees have a lot of writing on their desk that no one really reads—or that is in an excessively complex format? Conversely, do your employees not write much at all, and some of your meetings could simply be emails or short reports?
The answers to these questions might help reduce manager workload, freeing up time to find better ways to support a team.
2. Understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Many teams suffer an overabundance of ideas and no one who can put them into writing. Employee A is great at talking but can’t write anything shorter than twenty pages. Employee B is a hard worker, but his grammar skills make reports unreadable. Employee C has a unique vision but can’t put it into words; the report just never comes.
Different employees require different approaches—and they can learn from each other. A and C probably need to find a happy medium, and B might benefit from more writing practice and strategic use of grammar tools.
3. Focus on skills building.
This looks different for different teams. In our work, three approaches seem to be particularly helpful: collaborative writing, spaces for discussion, and specialized training.
Collaborative writing can look like getting a team together (usually two to five people; there is such a thing as too many cooks in a kitchen!) to write a document together. While one employee might take the lead by physically typing things in, the entire group contributes ideas of what to write and how to word it, making improvements and questioning approaches together. This process helps employees benefit from each other’s experience and perspectives. By adopting each other’s wording and language, they even start to create a collective voice.
Spaces for discussion don’t have to be long meetings—they can be brief check-ins where a team exchanges experiences and questions. This approach is particularly helpful for customer-facing teams, where high standards and a unified front are crucial to success. By problem-solving communication issues together, managers are often spared from micro-managing and new ideas can be more easily socialized.
Specialized training takes different shapes depending on a team’s needs. From shared workshops to self-guided virtual courses, employees gain the most from training when they can immediately put their learning into action. Make sure the training is relevant to your employee’s daily work and that they can test new strategies out right away.
Workplace communication is constantly in flux in every industry, but you can equip your team to face writing challenges with confidence. Explore Word Conscious’ programs and sign up for our newsletter to get experience-based tips in your inbox—to build your own skillset or to share with your team.
Get access to four self-guided modules that you can deliver to your team over the course of six months, including videos, exercise prompts, and printable handouts.