Next Gen HR Pro Competency #9: Be Human & Write Like One.

I know… this blog post starts out like a cliché. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. The next Connie Chung, to be exact. To help get me there? I used to sit in front of the TV, muted and closed captions on, reading the news as if I were the one on TV.

And then I was fortunate enough to do a screen test in high school where I realized that the camera added ten pounds. Which ended my TV dreams. Yes, even then I was that vain.

So I moved on to print journalism desires after that. High school newspaper editor, freelance writer on the side for some local newspapers… but I kept on finding that I had difficulties writing news. I didn’t want to write anything objective and just “report”. I wanted to insert my opinion everywhere and anywhere I could… and so I found that I kept gravitating towards opinion pieces. Music reviews, first-person P.O.V. columns, op-eds and the like… it was where I felt most comfortable.

Which means… I’ve never been good at “business writing.” Ask me to write a policy, memo, a piece of employee communications… and I struggle. First person references will be all over it. What I am better at? The conversational stuff. I like to write using “I.” I like to write referencing “you.” I don’t always use complete sentences, my grammar is less than perfect… and it’s because I like to write so that we both have the feeling that we’re actually talking one-on-one about an issue over coffee.

But that doesn’t work for everyone. So I send drafts of my “business writing” pieces to my boss for cleaning up, and she makes it sound more corporate. (Thanks, boss!) I think she even identified improving my business writing as an area of improvement on a past performance review. And while I know there will always be times where the business writing skills are essential – in a proposal to ask for money, to roll out a new program, you get my drift… I can’t help but to think more and more lately about the importance of writing like a human.

I’ve been making my way through the book Trust Agents (good read!) and the other day I hit the chapter in which the importance of being human was discussed.

“Gaining the trust of another requires you to be competent and reliable. It also requires you to leave someone with a positive emotional impression… Though it’s a part of trust many don’t take into consideration, intimacy is one of trust’s most powerful elements.” Be human. Have a voice. People want the real thing, Brogan and Smith write.

Which got me thinking about how HR pros communicate. We need to be trusted. It’s vital to our effectiveness. But do we communicate externally to create a sense of intimacy or to leave positive emotional impressions? Not so much. So what if we were to take a step back and strip away the legalese? Would it hurt so bad? We can make our content more friendly to the layman – especially if we’re talking about benefits or some policy derived from a piece of lovely employment law. That’s important. But how about making it more human?

Next gen HR pros need to know how to write well – in a business voice, for sure. But to gain trust from the masses (i.e. your employee population), you’ve gotta come at them like a human. Learn to write conversationally.