By Daniel Maddux | Member
Close to zero percent of those (technical communicators) I talked to had any hard numbers in terms of the money they had saved or made for their employers or clients.
The question of value is omnipresent in the business world today. What is the true value of shale gas? Of our recycling efforts? Of the various social media platforms? The world is trying hard to figure out these questions.
We have similar questions in our field. What is the real value of that maintenance manual you just compiled? Of the help system that your software company just implemented? Of technical communication in general?
Finding the answers to these questions is critical to the success of technical communicators everywhere.
What’s the big deal about value?
In my experience, technical communicators remain confused and divided about the value of technical communication. In a recent, informal survey of tech comm professionals, I found that, while 64% of them think that quantifying their value in some way is important, only 29% make any effort to do so. Close to zero percent of those I talked to had any hard numbers in terms of the money they had saved/made for their employers or clients.
So what’s the big deal? So what if we don’t happen to quantify the dollar value of our work. As long as we work hard, and do a good job, that should be fine, right?
What happens when we don’t focus on value
Well, sure, that’s fine up to a point. But we’ll forever limit ourselves and our profession if we keep that mindset. Myriad problems crop up when we don’t focus on value, including:
1. Low pay
I had a conversation with a trainer friend of mine a while back. She was shocked to find out that her hourly rate ($150/hr) was at least three times what most technical writers make per hour. But was the training she was providing more valuable than the documents you might be producing? Nay! The difference is perceived value.
2. Poor relationships
When we don’t focus on value, a negative relationship may be set up between technical communicators and those who employ them. This can especially be true if the technical communicators aren’t directly employed by the company that needs the work done.
If the technical communicator is paid according to how many hours he or she works, the client will want to reduce the number of hours as much as possible. They may hesitate to pick up the phone to ask the technical communicator a question, since they don’t want to start up an hourly rate. Sometimes this means that needed information isn’t communicated. And then there may be emails demanding to know why such and such number of hours were spent on a particular part of the project.
And the clients’ skepticism has some basis. Because on the technical communicator’s end, we naturally tend to want to work as many hours as possible, for as high an hourly rate as possible. This can result in an antagonistic arrangement wherein the tech writer is pushing for more hours and a higher rate, while the employer/client is trying to squash down the number of hours and hourly rate.
3. Lost business
When I was fresh out of college, working for a small technical communication company, a negative mindset cost the company our biggest client. We were on site, working full time, and getting paid our set hourly rate, but we hit a spot where there weren’t many projects to work on. We were getting paid, without really producing value. Eventually, the client wised up and got rid of us.
Now, in hindsight, we weren’t being dishonest. We just weren’t being smart. If we had been paid according to the value we were providing, instead of a set hourly rate, the client wouldn’t have cared that there weren’t enough projects for us to work on—they wouldn’t have been paying us while we didn’t have work to do, anyway. There would have been no need to get rid of us, and we could have been ready to go whenever the project work picked up again.
For our part, if we had been paid according to the value we were providing, we would have been paid more during the busier times when we were really providing a lot of value. Then, when the slower times hit, we would have been more likely to push ourselves to find new clients to help, instead of unintentionally milking that one client until they ran dry.
Hurdles to quantifying value
There are many hurdles to quantifying our value as technical communication professionals.
For one thing, people are used to paying/receiving a set hourly rate for tech writing. A technical communicator I know was pleased that he was paid $60/hr on a project. “They couldn’t really afford that, and they eventually had to let me go. But it was nice while it lasted.” My colleague was so used to the payment system that he’d lost sight of what the client actually needed.
Another hurdle to focusing on the true dollar value of our work is the presence of so many high-dollar, low-value projects. For example, a big oil and gas company might be ready to splurge on some documentation. As long as the costs aren’t ridiculous, they may pay a “high” hourly rate to get the work done. But they may not actually be getting the bang they could be getting for their buck.
One the biggest hurdles to measuring value is that there are so many ways to measure. It’s not that no one at all tries to determine the actual dollar value that they provide to their employers/clients. Some companies, such as TechProse and Information Mapping, have tried to determine what the ROI has been for their clients. The issue is that there is no standard way of measuring value across companies and projects.
Is it worth it?
So what do we do? Do we just give up and follow the advice of another one of my colleagues, who says, “Forget about value! Just charge whatever the market will bear”?
I think this is all really just a question of whether or not we believe in ourselves. Do we fear that, if we probe beneath the surface, our technical communication work will reveal itself as a mere house of cards? Are we kidding ourselves, thinking that we’re actually making the world a better, more productive place?
I don’t believe that. And as a business owner, my ability to “bring home the bacon” depends on proving those ideas wrong. For an employee at a big company, not being taken seriously may mean that you don’t get paid quite what you’re worth, or that you don’t always have the resources you need to get your job done. For me, not being taken seriously means that I don’t eat.
What can we do about it?
Here’s what we need to do in order to make progress:
- Establish a baseline before we begin projects. We can only measure progress if we know where we started from.
- Follow up after the project to see what difference the documentation made. If you can determine that the documentation saved each maintenance worker about 5 percent of their time daily, and you know that the maintenance workers get paid an average of $30/hr, you could calculate a cost savings of $3,000 per worker per year.
- Share information with other technical communicators. We probably all could calculate a rough dollar amount that we made for or saved a company with a specific project. If we pool our collective knowledge, we can generate some powerful data.
- Business owners should bill clients for what the work is worth. Don’t simply multiply the estimated number of hours by your hourly rate and add a percentage on top.
There is hope
The potential benefits of knowing the value of our work are massive.
Alan Weiss, in his many books on consulting, trumpets the power of value-based billing. High-powered lawyers are fabled to be paid $1,000/hr in some cases. But by using the power of value-based billing, it’s possible to make far more than that per hour. Alan has, many times.
I’ve seen something similar play out with my own business. Awhile back, I worked with a money management company to reorganize and rewrite some of the documentation they provide their clients. When they accepted my bid, they mentioned how pleased they were with my reasonable prices.
I was happy that the client was satisfied with the price, but I was also pleased. I knew that I could give them what they needed quickly. As it turned out, if I would have divided the flat fee I charged by the number of hours I worked on the documents, I would have made an hourly rate that no one would have been willing to pay. But since the fee was based on value, not on hours worked, we both walked away very happy.
And maybe that’s the last hurdle to really understanding the value that we’re providing to businesses. Focusing on value helps really good technical communicators. At least we’ve started a dialogue. Some within STC are beginning to take action, to try to put together a metric for quantifying what dollar value good documentation tends to provide. I laud and support those efforts.
Daniel Maddux owns Elite Documentation Incorporated, a technical writing company based in Houston, TX. Aside from meeting his clients’ documentation needs, Daniel enjoys his volunteer work and workouts. He can be reached at dmaddux@elitedocumentation.com or through his company’s website, www.elitedocumentation.com.
