The European Central Bank: helping international teams talk engagingly about their work
The European Central Bank (ECB) was launching a new intranet that needed updated content to match its improved look, feel and usability.
Teams from across the organisation had been invited to write their own sections of the site. To help the contributors, the ECB’s Internal Comms team asked us to create a series of writing workshops.
The goal of the sessions was to give people the skills and confidence to write clearly and engagingly about their work.
An added challenge was that most people in the workshops were writing in English as a second language.
The solution:
tailored workshops for multilingual groups
The participants needed to produce anything from team success stories to boilerplate explaining their expertise in easy-to-grasp terms.
We delivered a series of hands-on workshops on Writing for the Intranet, delivered at the ECB’s headquarters in Frankfurt.
Structured around real-life examples of ECB writing, each session covered three broad topics:
Writing well: basic principles
Nailing the right tone of voice
Writing for online readers
Having taught writing skills to international students at the University of Cambridge, our trainer understood the challenges faced by those writing in English as a second language.
This allowed for lively discussions about the cultural assumptions surrounding what “good” writing looks like. In particular, the idea that writing should be clear and concise is not shared by most cultures.
The outcome:
training that transformed the way people wrote
Feedback on the sessions was overwhelmingly positive, with the organiser of the workshops saying he’d never seen such an enthusiastic response to training.
And for some participants, the discussions about culture seemed almost life-changing. One Italian delegate told us he finally understood why his decades-long career had been characterised by negative feedback on his writing.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t write: he’d simply been writing according to the conventions of Italian. After our workshop, he knew how to adapt his style to meet English-speaking readers’ need for clarity and concision.