Five Tips for Better Team Writing

Writing is an individual sport. Unfortunately, much of the writing we do at work is a team effort. Most documents require multiple writers and researchers, have to be vetted by marketing and legal, and then edited to conform to organizational style. So how do you get all these players to play well together? These five strategies can help get your team on the same page.

1. Get Consensus on Quality

It’s tough to work together toward a goal when no one knows what the goal is. Answering the simple question, “What is good writing?” is anything but simple, yet having an answer is essential. Start by gathering the best writing samples your team has completed. Identify the most appealing aspects of each document. Review the lists of positive responses for patterns. With enough documents and enough people participating, you’ll arrive at a consensus standard for quality writing: A set of models and specific language that describes exactly what your organization likes about them.

2. Establish Roles and Rules

If you want your work to flow smoothly, pay attention to work flow. Every document you deliver passes through stages, from planning to publication. Design each stage to add value to the document and maximize the input of individual team members. Define your organization’s writing process as a set of roles and rules. Roles -- such as planning, drafting, revising, editing and formatting -- define the work that needs to be done. Rules help people carrying out their roles focus on their work -- as opposed to everyone else’s. This is especially crucial early on as documents are planned as well as late in the game when they receive the finishing touches. Vetting documents in the planning stage saves time and potential embarrassment. Developing a formal approach to editing and layout is essential to maintaining efficiency and preserving constructive relationships.

3. Use Strategies and Structures

Most organizations produce the same types of documents over and over. Save time and resources by identifying the essential elements of those documents and developing common ways of making sure these elements get handled effectively. Analyzing document structure is a great way to start. For each document element you define, you’ll likely discover particular approaches that have been consistently successful. The key to improving efficiency while maintaining quality is to match these commonly used structures with the most effective strategies your team has used in the past to create them.

4. Massage the Message

Organizational communication presents a challenge few writers face anywhere else: Message consistency. Even companies with thousands of employees working all over the world need to speak with one voice. But that voice is modulated by many different people, sometimes to poor effect. What every organization needs is a message blueprint that provides a thematic umbrella for all communication. Knowing your key messages improves consistency, as well as quality and efficiency. Over time, as writers internalize the language that describes organizational goals, they find newer and better ways to express themselves. As a team, your group can compile a library of successfully articulated ideas. This library, like your set of models that defines quality work, can become the medium in which everyone works.

5. Value the Voice

In an increasingly cynical world, readers value integrity above all else. But it’s impossible to walk our talk when what we say isn’t aligned with who we are. The voice of next-generation business communications is an authentic one. People want to read words that sound like they were written by real people they can understand and with whom they can identify. For the most part, this means presenting a personality through your writing that connects with readers by representing the voice of someone they can trust. On a team writing project, this voice may not -- and probably should not -- be that of any particular individual. Instead, develop a shared voice, one that represents the personality of your company, division or group, and project this feeling with confidence and consistency.

[Steve Peha contributed to this article. Peha cowrote Be a Writer and Be a Better Writer with Carmichael Lester.]