Jeanne

I certainly think you may be onto something there. It’s similar to the way most companies tend to hire foreign customer service reps to field technical phone calls these days, which can make it very difficult for those callers who have trouble understanding their foreign accents–though it IS different in the sense that the customer service reps do generally tend to be quite knowledgeable and well able to converse in English, though their accents may be difficult to understand.

In the case of the technical manuals, their writers may actually have difficulty translating their knowledge into easy-to-understand English wording. Though I often find that too much important information has simply been omitted from modern product manuals, making them overly simplistic and leaving far too many unnecessarily unanswered questions in the user’s mind. At least, that’s been my personal experience.

Wouldn’t it seem as if the manufacturer would try to anticipate the questions the user might have about the product and attempt to answer them in the product documentation materials? That doesn’t seem too much to ask–at least not to ME.

Jeanne

I’m a little late getting to this one, but I’d say the answer to your question is that it depends on how much “wiggle room” (aka employee empowerment) our particular employment situation/organization allows. It’s equally dependent on how receptive management is to input from rank and file employees. The ideal boss/manager, who’s been trained in and feels comfortable with modern management techniques encourages open communication between management and lower-level employees (as long as it’s productive and not a waste of his/her time) and allows those employees varying degrees of empowerment. It’s always a judgment call, though, to decide how to handle each individual situation.

This next comment is slightly off topic in that it doesn’t pertain to employee instructions, but your third point about the inability to communicate clear instructions has really been brought home to me in the apparent recent trend toward very poorly written documentation (aka manuals) for electronic products, appliances, etc. (which, of course, falls under the category of technical writing).

One would expect the individuals who write such materials to have a special skill for making technical topics easier to understand and to be thorough and complete in their descriptions/explanations; yet so often these days I find this not to be the case. It’s very frustrating for me, as a highly analytical type, to discover that many product descriptions and instructions for use are not at all clear and often don’t cover very basic questions that a user or potential user might have about the product or its use.

This is not only frustrating for purchasers of these products–probably necessitating huge numbers of otherwise unnecessary calls to the companies for technical support–but also highly likely to be the cause of many decisions not to buy a product, since it hardly seems worthwhile to try to decipher the low-quality product information available. I can’t help but wonder how many other people, besides me, have noticed this. Just one of my growing pet peeves.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post!
Jeanne