Remote Workers Need Better-Than-Average Writing Skills 

Whether you and your team are fully or partially remote, you’ve probably found that being remote has made you better at some tasks than you were when you worked in an office. You’re better at active listening because your remote office workspace is quieter. Or you’re better at long-term planning because colleagues aren’t interrupting you every 15 minutes.

You’d better be better at writing. Remote workers write more than in-office workers. They use writing to advance everyday tasks and blue-sky projects more than in-office workers do. A remote worker who can’t make a clear point in writing will be a weak link on any team.

Four Reasons Remote Workers Need Great Writing Skills

• Email is poor at conveying tone, so remote workers need to be better at building rapport through writing. At some point, we’ve all had our email tone misinterpreted. Our reader haswondered, “Why are you angry at me?” or “Who do you think you are??!” In person, it’s easier to convey a tone that builds rapport. Via email, it’s harder to make your tone come across the way you intended, so remote workers must be better at this skill.

• We’re communicating higher stakes topics via writing, so we have to be persuasive and detailed. In-office workers can schedule in-person meetings when they want to brainstorm about a new project or propose a high-investment expansion. But when we work remotely, we must know how to brainstorm in a Google doc or write a convincing proposal to pitch that big, expensive idea. 

• Managers are too busy to coach remote workers on their writing. “Excellent writing skills” has long been on the list of must-haves for employees, but some people who lacked these skills were fortunate enough to develop them with the support of an attentive manager. These days, remote managers just don’t have time to help their team members become better writers.

• Set-your-own-schedule remote work means fewer opportunities to talk to colleagues, thus more writing. Your coworkers may be in another time zone, another country, or right down the street from you but on a different schedule. You’re working together…asynchronously. If meeting is impossible most of the time, you’ll be writing instead.

Three Writing Skills Remote Workers Must Have

Put the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Remote workers need to know how to begin with the main point, the bottom line. They need to be able to write content that helps readers understand, right away, what they should do or know. Putting the Bottom Line Up Front prevents misunderstanding and avoids wasting the reader’s time.

Use a tone that develops relationships. Remote workers need to know how to use a professional, connected tone to build their relationship with the reader. A person who thinks it’s pointless fluff to start an email with “Hi Robert, I hope you’re doing well…” will not succeed as a remote worker because they’re dismissive of the simple courtesies that show people you care.

It’s harder to create connection when we’re apart, and many of us just don’t know our colleagues or customers the way we used to. Remote workers must be able to respond with a careful tone in high-emotion situations, such as telling colleagues that a senior leader has unexpectedly resigned or reminding a deadline-missing contractor that they’ll be fined if they don’t complete tasks on time.

Make content scannable. Remote workers need to know how to make their writing easy to read, which means making it scannable. Scannable writing makes the topics of each section easy to see and uses bulleted or numbered lists to display the subpoints of a main idea.

Making content scannable is a skill remote workers need whether they’re writing knowledge base articles, customer service emails, documentation, blog posts, or white papers. One of the highest compliments a reader can give a writer is, “You wrote this so I wouldn’t have to read the whole thing. I could easily find the sections I need.”

Many prospective employees have made it clear that remote is the only kind of work they will consider. But if permanently remote work is going to actually work, we’ll need to hire people who can put their thoughts down in writing — accurately and with care.

Leslie O’Flahavan is a get-to-the point writer and an experienced, versatile writing instructor. E-WRITE owner since 1996, Leslie leads customized writing courses for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations.

Leslie helps the most stubborn, inexperienced, or word-phobic employees at your organization improve their writing skills, so they can do their jobs better. As a result of her work, Leslie’s clients improve their customer satisfaction ratings, reduce training cycles, improve productivity, and limit legal risk. Leslie is a LinkedIn Learning author of six writing courses including Writing in Plain Language, Technical Writing, and Writing for Social Media. She’s the cohost of the monthly LinkedIn Live broadcast “Fix This Writing!”

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash