Women sat at a table with an iPad and digital pen.

5 tips to boost your team’s confidence and get them writing creatively

Creative writing confidence means free and open writing. It allows expressive language to flow. If your confidence is low, your writing is unlikely to persuade readers to want more. Writers can be nurtured to develop their creativity. And the benefits of boosting this confidence reach far beyond excellent copy. It gives people opportunity to learn and develop. It makes them feel valued and gives them a sense of purpose and belonging. These are things people want from their work and they’re essential to retain talent. Expect teams with freer thinkers, better conversations and connection.

What’s creative writing for business?

Creative writing uses tone, sound or imagery to spark emotion for the reader. This delivers your message in an entertaining and powerful way. It gets the readers’ attention, builds brand awareness and creates a connection with your audience.

Storytelling is at the heart of effective communication. It convinces someone to buy your product or service. It persuades employees to adopt your strategy and investors to invest. Well-researched and carefully presented work often fails because of poor communication. Its brilliance lost in grey corporate communications crammed with meaningless jargon.

Creative business writing provides an inspiring contrast. A vision shared and communicated with language that really speaks to the reader.

Remove distraction and help your team find their focus

Distractions are the enemy of writing. To be good, there needs to be an uninterrupted process of changing thoughts into writing. Thoughts on one topic alone can be messy and tangled. Add distractions to the mix and thoughts get harder to untangle. In the end, you want to put the whole lot in the bin. It’s one of the most common barriers to writing.

A distraction-free environment is a tool of the trade. It can be hard to achieve in a busy office or using a device receiving notifications, but it’s vital for good writing. Your writers can find quiet somewhere else – their home, a café or library. A place that works for them and helps their focus.

Time. Writers need time to write and to think. To draft and rewrite. And to reflect. Writing time should be booked in their diary, so they can focus and produce great content. This time is very productive, even when it’s ‘just’ thinking and planning time. Productive teams communicate their ideas well to everyone who needs to understand them.

Establish the right environment for creative writing to flourish

Giving people time to write promotes it as a key strategy for your communications. If you want high-quality content, you must give your writers time to create it.

Celebrate your team’s writing by sharing it – with the team, with other teams and with your connections. Talk about it. Create a workplace culture where ideas are discussed and challenged in a safe and positive way. An open culture stimulates confidence to write and share ideas and knowledge.

Use internal communications to share the work and experiences of different teams. It improves awareness of activities happening across an organisation. It starts conversations and helps to align project outcomes with wider company aims. No bland internal newsletters! Use the articles your ‘topic experts’ have written for your external communications. They’re more likely to connect your people. And they promote the opportunity to author content.

Plan your content well to reduce pressure and keep creativity high

Once you’ve created a pro-writing environment, you’ll find you have no shortage of ideas and topics to cover. You’ll need someone to coordinate these ideas. To filter and refine them, plan them into a calendar and to speak regularly with your writers. In fact, if you don’t have someone with this responsibility the right time to start is always now.

Choose someone with a keen interest in writing and the skill set to lead and coordinate. It might sound obvious, but I find this often hasn’t been given the attention it needs. A lack of shared vision can scupper your efforts and confuse your audience.

Organisations often forget to treat this as a project – with a project manager. The role requires the ability to understand diverse and complex ideas – and know if they’ve been explained well. This person needs support, so they can give the project the time it deserves (and manage all those writer egos).

If you don’t have the right person, or capacity for this, outsource it. It will save stress and time and ensure you make the most of the valuable talent in your collective team brain. Clear guidance, leadership, timescales and planning removes pressure. It allows your team to write more freely and creatively.

A man and two women sat together with a laptop and iPad. They're smiling and discussing their work.

Encourage your writers to use real language

Creative and effective communication needs clear and concise language. The writer must carefully select simple language to convey their message. Some people find it hard to stop repeating industry phrases they’re so used to hearing. But when they do, they enjoy the freedom and their writing becomes more creative.

Business writing is often littered with industry jargon that makes it boring (at best). It’s not the same thing as technical language. Although, this can also be full of unnecessary words (and long ones supposed to impress). Jargon is waffle. And it suggests a lack of understanding.

Good writing engages the reader, is easy to understand and tells them what they need to know. Creative writing is often the way you’d tell a story to a friend. It takes more effort than grey corporate talk, but it makes people act.

Simplify the writing process to boost creativity

You need professional writing for your business. Unless you’ve hired professional writers and editors, your teams will need some help.

You can streamline the process – removing the need for endless drafts and revisions. Software that suggests changes to spellings and grammar is helpful to catch errors. These are suggestions not corrections. A software package doesn’t understand the sentence. It doesn’t understand a paragraph or a word. It’s making a suggestion based on a series of rules. These ‘rules’ are part of a programme. They don’t relate to the meaning of the words, the spelling conventions used or the context of a word or piece of writing.

The person reading a spelling, grammar or clarity suggestion has to know whether it’s correct. Not knowing whether a suggestion is correct and spending time googling it does nothing to increase confidence.

Professional editing services enable your team to write creatively and engage your audiences. They can write freely – knowing their writing will be checked for them. Seeing their writing edited – ready to publish – boosts their confidence and develops their writing skills. They shine. And their enthusiasm for their work (their real work) attracts conversation and connection.

Even professional writers have their work edited. It’s key to consistent, clear writing. And it brings creativity.

Ready to make it simple for your team to get creative and boost your brand?