Few skills or traits impact a business like writing. Sales, marketing, management direction, persuasion, creativity and more are improved as writing skill and frequency increases. Small business owners can improve their business by developing a system of written communication.

Implement these three steps to improve clarity and collaboration between your employees.

Embrace Collaborative Communication

To clarify, this type of writing doesn’t mean pages of text or overly long emails. It just requires enough detail to enable critical thought.

Harnessing your writing skills leads to better sales outreach, marketing plans and legal document comprehension. Building a writing culture makes management easier by getting more insight and cooperation from employees.

Many business owners think written communication can be replaced with verbal instruction. It’s easier to give verbal commands and writing takes many business owners out of their comfort zone. The difference is that verbal communication can mutate and be misinterpreted, while written information offers the same message when read together as a team.

Tackle writing like you tackle your business. Generate an idea, create a plan and follow it. Here’s a sample template to use:

  • Write down a description of the intended audience – Customers or employees? All employees or just senior managers? Think audience before you begin writing.
  • Write down your intended goal for the reader – Write down what you want readers to take away from your writing? The goal could be a behavior change or just a reinforcement of protocol.
  • Briefly outline your strategy and constraints – Think about everything that needs to be included in your document and decide what should go first. Consider constraints for length, reading time and accessibility.
  • Create a set of writing prompts to reinforce the strategy – Answering questions is natural and easier than starting with a blank canvas. Create a series of writing prompt questions that guide you as you write.
  • Gather relevant source material – Grab the data and supplemental info before you begin so nothing is forgotten.

Facilitate a Writing Culture

Writing is not something only business owners and managers should partake in. It must be an all-hands initiative.

These areas of business will be significantly affected.

Promotions and Career Growth – Handling promotions can be tricky for small business owners. Traditional methods like performance reviews have been criticized. Writing out  comprehensive job descriptions and having employees request promotions in written form provides clarity on both fronts. Writing forces authors to create concrete reasoning and support their ideas with facts. Conversations about what employees need to do to earn a promotion will be constructive when there’s a written document to review together.

Knowledge and Information Retention – Turnover is a perpetual challenge. Knowledge and acumen is lost when employees depart. This effect is referred to as tribal (or institutional) knowledge loss and costs corporations millions of dollars annually. Preserve this knowledge by having employees update process documents and job descriptions. Create an ongoing system, not a final two-week squeeze.

Employee Morale –  Burnout, cloudy career paths and manager relations are all common reasons for low employee morale. These can all be addressed by written documents that include employee goals, expectations and promotion guidelines. It’s an opportunity to encourage and implement employee-led initiatives, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) created a work wellness program because of employee input.

Facilitate a Reading Culture

The last step is the most important. Any written communication system is useless if the information is not read or updated. Many corporate wikis and knowledge bases are outdated or inaccurate because of the failure to actively review information.

Prevent this by creating a process for reading and reviewing documents together.

The most famous example of this management technique is Amazon. Jeff Bezos required all employees to write 1-to-6 page memos whenever they wanted to present or discuss something. Teams would then read the documents together, and each take their turn providing feedback.

Another example comes from iFixit. CEO Kyle Wiens learned this lesson the hard way. The company writes free, open source repair manuals. In the early days, they did not have a dialogue about what they wrote internally or externally. This led to faulty directions and upset customers. Making their writing process collaborative turned around the business.

Here are a few examples of what should be reviewed as a team.

Job Descriptions – There’s no reason a job description should be a static document, they should be adapted as necessary while the core remains intact. Review job descriptions with the person actually doing the job. They probably won’t have much feedback on day one, but by day 90 they will have crucial insight about additional tasks they’ve been doing or could be doing. Small business owners can’t and shouldn’t know every detail about operations, leveraging employee knowledge is a win-win.

Processes and Resources – Don’t set new employees up with an outdated process they have to figure out on their own. Keep process checklists and vendor information up to date with employee assistance. Have employees write out processes they know by heart, and reward them for doing so.

Business Plan – Employees don’t need to see profit and loss statements or any sensitive information from a business plan, but read them in on the general vision and goals of the company.  According to a study by Slack, 80% of workers want to know more about how decisions are made in their organization, and 87% want their future company to be transparent.

Milton Herman has been a writer, editor and content strategist for more than a decade. His experience covers digital marketing, SaaS and consumer goods. He’s written stories and developed campaigns for local small businesses and enterprise clients such as Walmart and Cabela’s. Currently he’s a writer and content strategist at Topple, an early-stage tech startup located in Tempe, Arizona.