An Exercise in Brevity

The Case for Setting a Word Count Limit at Work

I love when my work in organizational leadership and my work in creative writing intersect in intriguing ways, and I’ve recently discovered a new way to marry the two. Over the last year, I’ve participated in lots of virtual creative writing workshops and prompts where a specific word count target was provided (e.g. “write a love story in 210 words”). The tricky part here is that it is not a word count maximum but a specific word count target. What a fun little game this was! I simultaneously loved and hated the exercise as I found myself adding five words here, deleting three words there. I challenged myself: “Okay, this sentence is important – but long. How can I convey this same detail in ten words instead of seventeen?” Key words negotiated their importance in my thoughts, insisted on their criticality, and other words – like “any” and “so” – floundered to keep up with the striking adjectives and essential nouns.

As I worked through the activity, I couldn’t help but keep my inner HR spirit from bursting with excitement, thinking how I wished this exercise was practiced in every workplace, even if the organization’s mission wasn’t focused on words. I could picture myself with my Organizational Effectiveness team a few years back, when I was head of internal communications and tasked with drafting a letter to employees explaining why we were moving to an open space layout in the new office, or editing our CEO’s latest announcement about changes within the leadership team. We went through this weekly, my team and I, bargaining over words, fighting for our favorites and mercilessly chopping those that did nothing for us, or for our purpose.

Another thing we are taught in writing workshops is to edit with an eye for the purpose of the message. Before you review, you write down a brief statement describing what the purpose of the story or poem is, and then you sweep through it analytically, dissecting each sentence to determine if it is contributing to that purpose. Yes it is: keep the sentence. No it’s not: delete it. Maybe/I’m not sure: revise, revise, revise.

I had learned as a writer to differentiate what I wanted to write from what I intended to say, and what my audience needed to hear. I can’t count how many leaders I have worked with who did not understand the importance of this, who crafted lengthy emails and team newsletters that came off as self-indulgent to their readers, were skimmed over by recipients, or just simply marked “read” without anyone reading.

So here’s an idea: try this practical exercise in brevity at work. Whether you work in HR or you lead a team (or perhaps you just want to work on your own written communication skills), come up with a purpose for a message that needs to be communicated and then set a word count target. You can try this exercise yourself or prepare it for your team in order to hone their communication skills.

A Practical Exercise in Brevity

The message should be something relevant to your work – something you would normally write a communication about. It can be hypothetical, but shouldn’t be completely fabricated. Here are some HR examples but any somewhat complex message to deliver will work:

• After seeing the success of remote work arrangements this past year, we’ve decided to make remote work flexibility a permanent option. 
• We’ve had a tough year financially, and have decided that we will not be awarding bonus incentives this year. [If you’re actually in this situation – try tasking your leadership team with this instead of punting the communication to HR to handle in isolation.]
• We care about the mental health of our team members. We’re granting all employees a full day of paid mental health leave this quarter.

Decide what method of communication is appropriate for the message (email, memo, newsletter brief, etc), and set a word count target that is appropriate for that format.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For the purpose of this activity, the word count is not flexible. It certainly is not “250 words or less.” The point is, when you start focusing on the total word count, trying to achieve a very specific target, you become very picky about what you say and what you don’t say. You focus on the purpose of the message. You edit yourself.

The best thing about this activity is that you’ll learn about the strengths and weaknesses of your writing on your own. If you are tasking your team with this, they’ll figure it out without your feedback. This is great not just because it saves you time and effort, but because our brains respond better and thus perform better in response to self-criticism, as opposed to social threats or rewards, like performance feedback and ratings (checkout David Rock’s book “Your Brain at Work” for more on that topic). 

You can also use this exercise as a team to learn about each other’s communication styles. Have a small group tackle the writing prompt using the same purpose of message and the same word count target and see how different each person’s written communications are. Is each individual’s voice showing through in their writing or do some teammates struggle with that? Do you notice differences in the tone? If so, maybe the purpose wasn’t clear enough. 

If you don’t already have set expectations around communication channels at your workplace, ask yourself why not. Do folks consistently know when to send an email versus schedule a meeting versus just pick up the phone? Are your meetings generally efficient? (Hint: If every meeting is scheduled for one hour, then the answer to this is probably no. How could every topic take the same amount of time to discuss or solve?) If you have an internal communications team, this is something they should be doing, but if you don’t, consider setting aside a half or full day with your leadership team to collaborate on your internal communications plan.

The Case for an Email Word Count Limit

And if you really want to make a difference in written workplace communications? Set a hard word count limit on email length for your staff (I like 300 words max). 

Why a word count limit? Think about this: analysis on email length has shown that the average email is usually around 500-600 words. That’s equivalent to two pages of a novel, and takes 3.33 minutes of your time to read. Multiply that by the number of emails you receive in a day. Let’s say you get 120 emails per day  and each one takes two minutes to read… that would consume four hours of your workday – just reading emails! Initially, it may take email senders a few extra minutes to edit their message for brevity before sending, but they will save each recipient valuable time spent reading. That adds up. In this example, if you limit word count to 300 words per email, you have saved each recipient two hours in their workday. What do you imagine you could do with that extra time?

If an individual can’t convey their message within a 300 word count, it probably shouldn’t be an email but perhaps a link to a reference document, or a phone call. In an ideal world, all emails are disposable. To achieve this effectively though, you have to have solid expectations and tools in place for your employees to facilitate and document interactions.

If you start small by setting a word count limit in email, it will become a habit for individuals to focus on brevity in all of their communications, and the benefit of this is not just shorter messages, but higher quality writing and communication.