Your employees can’t spell. What would a grammar geek do?

I found this article interesting and wanted to post it.



August 31, 2007

In the Financial Times, advice columnist Lucy Kellaway gets a request for help from an employer who writes, “My young staff members make sloppy mistakes.”

The reports and proposals that they prepare for clients inevitably contain typos, grammatical and spelling mistakes and often get the numbers wrong too. The result is that I have to check everything myself before it is sent out.

I have tried many things: training, coaching, sending offending documents back repeatedly, minor bollocking. Should I be tougher, humiliate them? … Should I employ a typist? Should I threaten to withhold their bonuses if they don’t get the basics right?

Kellaway gets a heap of suggestions from readers, including this one:

Why not take a leaf out of David Mamet’s play/film, Glengarry Glen Ross? Announce a contest for the month to see who makes fewest mistakes. First prize? A cadillac. Second prize? Set of steak knives. Third prize – you’re fired.

That should get their attention.

That reader sounds like a candidate for the Grammar Geeks Unit.