The benefits of having a written culture
You probably spend most of your day writing. Text messages, e-mails, documents, commentaries, tasks descriptions, code, you name it. If your company is remote-first, writing is probably your primary mode of operation. Having all this text at your disposal is great for many reasons, but it also demands some caring to be effective. Today I’d like to share a few lessons and insights I’ve collected over the years on this topic. I’ve shared before a bit about how I’ve done it on a personal level, let me talk a bit about how I’ve been doing it collectively.
First, let me advocate why you and your team should spend a bit more effort keeping things mostly in writing. Maybe you all handle many exchanges through meetings and synchronous conversations. As effective as these meetings can be, they probably had their decisions compiled into personal notes, shared drawings, a final product, or even just the team’s collective mind. You may even have your meetings recorded for later use. The reality is that you already have a lot of records about what is happening, and maybe it’s working quite well. But you can go further by consolidating this in text and benefiting from it.
The first benefit of writing is that it forces you to make the collective ideas concrete. When you put effort into finding the right words for what the team agrees on, you can achieve a more polished version of your thoughts. Not only for the concepts about what you are working on but also for finding the misalignments that a conversation could not do. Writing it down forces the team to consolidate the ideas into its main components and trim down all the effort spent talking and negotiating into the essential points.
The second benefit of writing is that it’s searchable and skimmable. Looking for textual information is much easier and faster than other means. You can take all the benefits of highlighted keywords, similar concepts, suggested terms, etc. Practically all tools that handle text have some search tool attached to them. Also, written text is easier to skim through to find what you are looking for. No need to listen to a 10-minute audio file in 2x to find out it’s not about the subject you need.
The third benefit of writing is that it creates a natural history log. When you want to understand why decisions were made, it’s easier to get caught in false memory or present biases. Written history helps piece together what happened with the eyes of the past. This can aid your decision-making by giving you a different perspective on the future.
Given all these benefits, how can we improve our writing as a team?
You can start by writing more. You don’t need to be Tolkien to write good text for your team. Your day-to-day writing is enough. And you’ll get better at writing, getting feedback, and noticing where things are getting confusing (and clarifying them). But you need to get it started first. Having something documented, even if poorly, is better than having nothing. So, no need to wait for everyone to agree on where and how. Just start doing it as often as you feel needed.
Establish a common place for the team texts. It can be your task manager, a document drive, your slack channel; you name it. This will help you favor writing over other methods of recording decisions. Like ending a meeting without actionable steps is bad, force yourself to end all conversations with a standard written text and publish it in the place you all agreed on.
Make your texts easier to be created. Even though you can start without any formal guidelines for your texts, over time, you will feel the need for some form factor. Creating templates and guides (and maintaining them) will help lessen the friction and improve the usage for the team.
Help your texts to be searchable. Start with simple things like having the keywords in the title and main topics properly placed. This helps you to find it and skim it rapidly. Also, make the best use of the tools at hand. For example, Slack and email are places where information is easily lost or hard to find. Proper use of threads or moving conversations to other appropriated tools (like documents) is a better approach in most of these cases.
I hope this can be helpful for you. In the future, I’ll share a bit about how we do things currently on bxblue and how this has contributed. But I’d love to hear how this experience has been for you.
