Story-building as a team exercise: a simple process for collaborative writing
In this guide, you’ll learn how to introduce a collaborative writing process to your company’s team. You’ll also receive a step-by-step framework, with an example from one of my company’s clients, to co-create a blog post.
Building the business case: Why collaborative writing?
Collaborative writing has the potential to make work cultures better for a few reasons. For one, everyone on a team can step outside of their daily routines to try something new.
Not to mention, the content that you create has the potential to save time, which frees up creative energy for other projects.
One of the challenges you may run into, when building your business case to try something new, is pushback from people who are already under pressure…and who see content creation as extra work (which is the last thing that anyone needs).
As you build your business case, focus on bringing a value add to the people you ask to participate in your process. Examples include:
Ensuring that we put good stories out into the world
Supporting our colleagues
Saving time for everyone to free up headspace for the entire organization
Building stronger relationships with the people around us
Conveying a sense of gratitude to others
The practice of writing forces us to think about a topic in depth. As research from PwC points out, this self reflection creates a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and engagement at work.
“Employees need to find value in their daily work to be fully engaged,” says PwC. “But few business leaders guide supervisors to have conversations with their teams about why their work matters.”
When people feel inspired, outcomes include:
Raising the organizational credibility of your team
Creating a resource that can smoothen everyday communications
Documenting answers to frequently asked questions on paper, to eliminate repetitive or redundant conversations
Helping everyone level up their subject matter expertise and emotional intelligence
Putting thoughts into writing to build a shared basis of organizational communication
Developing a resource that teammates can share on LinkedIn
As a storytelling, communications, or marketing leader within your organization, you have the power to step into this role — to bring out the best in everyone around you.
Collaborative writing practices can enhance the value and impact of your content engine as a culture-building force that strengthens bonds across your organization.
In the next section, you’ll learn a collaborative writing process that will help your team feel—genuinely and authentically—empowered and engaged.
The process: How to collaborate on story-building, exactly
Because content writing is a creative process, there’s a high likelihood for chaos. You need to put down bowling alley bumpers for a successful collaboration, to ensure that everyone stays organized. The following steps will help.
Step 1: Assemble the team
The first step of the process is to build a braintrust-style team of 3 to 5 people with complementary skills. If you’re responsible for ongoing content production, you may end up assembling multiple 3-5 person teams, with each group focusing on a different content asset or topic.
One way to get started is to create a simple form to gauge interest. Send an email to a few people at your company and ask them to participate in this process. You can communicate a few benefits statements as incentives:
Get to know your colleagues better
Share thought leadership with the world
Gain visibility for your ideas
Develop a resource to help guide your everyday communications
Build an asset that brings results back to your business
Be sure to create a no-pressure atmosphere. If your teammates are busy, they should not feel pressure to join. The point is that the process needs to be fun. You can always expand your contributor base, later.
An example to consider, for the rest of this blog post is the article below from Maven Wave, one of Google’s leading cloud implementation partners.
The writing process included a team of 3 people with varying levels of expertise — a subject matter expert and lead author, an editor, and a writer. All of these individuals were integral to forming the overarching narrative.
Step 2: Kick Off a 30-min ideastorm
The goal of the brainstorm session is two-fold. First, your group needs to find alignment around a topic. From there, you can assign roles and responsibilities.
There should be one researcher, one writer, one subject matter expert, and one editor on the team. With one person tasked to different elements of the content writing process, you can divide roles and responsibilities. Keep in mind that multiple people can share responsibilities and wear different hats.
Of course, this process is malleable, especially if it isn’t realistic for one person to have one role…or if there isn’t time for a separate meeting. The key is to stay fluid by integrating into existing meeting times, talking over Teams, sharing notes over email, or relying on existing research.
During the meeting, the project lead (i.e. you) can ask the following questions to help spark alignment around a topic:
What are some questions that you hear over and over again?
What are challenges that the team is running into?
What projects might audiences enjoy learning or reading about?
You can record and transcribe the interview using GenAI. If you’re not able to use GenAI tools at your organization, you can also simply record the meeting and then transcribe the conversation using a platform like Rev.
It might also be helpful to take notes on a shared document. If it’s easier, compile the list after your meeting based on the recorded transcript. Then, circulate the document for feedback over email.
After your meeting, pick the topic you want to pursue as a group. For instance, with the Maven Wave example above, the original concept idea looked like this, copied and pasted over a Google Doc:
The goal of this step is to assign structure to otherwise amorphous ideas. Your transcript may appear to be a mashup of words that you eventually translate into a linear list of ideas.
For instance, the example with Maven Wave came to fruition through a discussion between the three cited authors, who all realized the importance of communicating this story to MavenWave’s customer base through a variety of channels — paid, organic, social and even 1:1 through account based marketing (ABM).
At this point, you don’t need to decide on your content format — it could be a whitepaper, ebook, blog post, or even an infographic. The idea is to focus on the story that you want to communicate. There’s no need to come up with a title either. Instead of sweating the details, focus on executing.
Step 3: Conduct research
Once you’ve defined a topic that’s important to your business, it’s important to get a handle over dialogue that already exists. There could be one researcher on your team, or there could be several. The key here is to create a repository of all your shared knowledge, as a springboard.
You can use a shared Google or Notion doc to get organized, or you can collaborate over email. You may even evolve your process to create a simple media list or database of shared information.
Once your team feels ready with its landscape assessment, the next step is to start brainstorming content for your narrative.
Step 4: Host a 30-minute narrative planning session
Before the session, the host of the meeting should take 15-20 minutes writing questions based on the assembled research. From there, you’ll have a strong foundation for a guided discussion. Example questions for the Maven Wave blog post included:
Why is this topic important and relevant for retail decision makers?
What trends should leaders be watching, and why?
How should leaders be thinking about COVID-19 disruptions in the context of their overarching strategies?
What are some questions that are coming up among retail leaders?
What are some important trends or patterns do you feel are important to communicate?
You can record the team’s answers to these questions to avoid the need for your team to take notes. From there, one of the writers on your team can create an outline that linearizes all of your ideas into a cohesive narrative.
This outline will be the first written “deliverable” from your planning session, together. It is a good basis to start sharing feedback internally, with your content creation team, and with other team members.
Be sure to include different iterations for titles to continue up-leveling the way you frame your content.
Give the rest of your team space to share ideas about the content. Focus on the quality of information, and don’t worry about perfectionism. The idea is to get your ideas on paper.
Step 5: Write
With this foundation in place, the writing process should take a couple of hours, max. At this point, you’ve already collected input to form the basis of your writing. It will be straightforward to translate the entire team’s ideas into a draft.
At any point, only one person should work on the draft — even if you are bringing on more than one writer. This linear, building-block approach will ensure clarity of voice and tone.
Once you finish a complete draft, the time will be right to open doors to feedback. First, seek input from your internal team. Then, after everyone shares their feedback, open the dialogue to more people in your organization for final touches.
The end result is that you’ll have a ready-for-publish content asset for everyone at your company to use in their promotion. It will be a thoughtful resource and true collaboration, reflecting multiple perspectives.
Step 6: Publish and give credit
As the saying goes, it pays to give credit where credit is due. That’s because people will be proud of their work and share it as their own.
There’s something powerful in the statement, “my team worked together to create this, and I was a part of that team.” Credit makes the work personal.
One way to give credit is through a contributors statement. Assign a lead author for the byline, and give props to the team members who added value.
Here’s a model for how the Maven Wave team shared credit:
Last but not least
Remember that the goal of your story-building routine is to have fun. Anyone who has the privilege of writing for a living is lucky. When we share ideas, we have the potential to make others’ lives easier and happier. The routines that you establish have the potential to transform your company’s culture for the better.
Write something awesome. Enjoy the experience. Learn something about your coworkers that you didn’t know before. Build something incredible for your business by incorporating everyone’s ideas into a central narrative.