Effective documentation isn’t a “hot” topic in business circles and you won’t find many keynote speeches at major conferences dedicated to it. But improving documentation is essential for any business looking to grow and achieve a high level of success.
The Importance of Effective Documentation
Let’s start with why effective documentation is so important. What benefits will your company experience in exchange for prioritizing the development of team documentation skills? There are four specific benefits that we want to cover in this article:
1. Increased Productivity
Effective documentation improves workplace productivity and efficiency. Think about it: easy to understand documents help new employees learn their jobs faster. And when important company documents are always stored in the same secure location, your team won’t have to waste time looking for them.
2. Better Progress Monitoring
A commitment to effective documentation will also help you monitor the progress of your team on specific projects and initiatives. You’ll be able to easily see how deep Stuart is into the new content marketing campaign or how many applications Jenny has been able to sift through.
3. Improved Customer Service
If you’re creating documentation that’s to be consumed by your company’s users, you’ll also be able to provide top-notch customer support. Rather than typing out long emails when a customer asks your team a question, they can simply direct the user to a specific document.
4. Boosted Company Value
Lastly, effective documentation can help boost company value . If you own the business you operate, then you might want to sell it someday and cash in on all your hard work. This will be hard to do if you haven’t documented things properly along the way.
Improve Documentation in 5 Steps
Whether you’ve been a business professional for years or you’re just now getting started in the workforce, you can use the following five tips to help improve your documentation skills:
1. Minimize Passive Voice
Time for a quick grammar lesson:
- Active Voice: Billy hit the ball.
- Passive Voice: The ball was hit by Billy.
2. Use Catchy Headings and Bullet Points
People today are constantly inundated with content. They read and watch videos online, scroll through social media feeds on their phones, stream TV and movies at night, see thousands of advertisements anytime they walk down the street or enter a store… The list goes on.
3. Reduce Buzzwords and Acronyms
Effective documentation will allow you to increase productivity levels, improve customer service, and boost company value, in large part, because it makes the consumption of important information easier. But you lose this advantage by using buzzwords and acronyms.
4. Invest in Visual Content
Visual content is another way that you can make your documents more engaging and easier to read. Are you sensing a trend here? You should be! Work related documents aren’t what we’d call “fun reads.” They’re designed to transfer knowledge, that’s it.
- Use Your Phone: Just about every one of us has a powerful camera in our pockets. Use it to snap pictures and videos and add them to company documents. You can even use free apps to spruce up the content you create and make it more effective.
- Find Free Templates: Graphs and charts do a wonderful job of illustrating information and making it easy to understand. Resources like Canva are available for free and allow just about anyone to assimilate company details into eye-catching graphs.
- Use the Right Tools: You can also invest in visual content applications such as Zight (formerly CloudApp), that will allow you to record your computer screen, create GIFs, and annotate images in just a few clicks. We’ll talk more about Zight (formerly CloudApp) in a later section.