You need to improve your employees' content creation skills. What's the best way to do it?

The best way to improve employees' content creation skills is through targeted training sessions or workshops focused on relevant topics such as writing techniques, SEO best practices, graphic design principles, and storytelling methods. Providing access to online courses or resources tailored to their specific needs can also enhance their skills at their own pace. Encouraging regular practice, constructive feedback, and opportunities for collaboration can further refine their abilities and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Training and coaching are indeed the pillars of all process improvement. This one time on my own writing journey, when i began i was constantly pumping out content yet the results were not adding up. I went on to change the way i approached the process by taking the advice from a writing mentor by the name of Nicolas Cole, this drastically changed my results. it wasnt overnight change, but the effort was worth it. The things learnt were aspects of content writing like: -Writing attractive heading -SEO -Formating the text -The writing voice to use -Focusing on the audience -Keeping things straight to the point

Internal communications programs have a huge impact on collaboration. I have utilized a combination of chat programs, and internal alignment meetings to make this happen. Having a group chat, whether through G-Suite, Slack, Whatsapp, etc., allows your content team to share what they're reading, discuss insights or challenges, and open communication even in a remote work setting. Internal content planning sessions are also crucial for our agency as we work remotely. Each month, we save time to meet to review a content calendar, brainstorm, ideate, and create. This allows for collaboration and attempts to break down some of the siloes created by remote work.

It's important to understand what motivates your individual team members so that you can find a motivation and reward system catered to them. No matter what the reward itself is, I have found success in tracking successful moments. We utilize a "Brag Board" for this. We have used our project management tool to implement an agenda that solely tracks braggable moments- shoutouts from a client, successful social media content, an email that raised a lot of donations, etc. This can easily be done in any format, including a Google Doc or Word document. Tracking these moments throughout the year makes quarterly reviews easier, and employees can remind themselves of the great work they've completed throughout the year.

An interactive team game is one I titled "Post or Pass". It allows for the team to use real social media examples or create mock posts to be put into a presentation or thrown up on a screen. The team can shout "post" if the content is good, or "pass" if not. The collaboration is in the discussion. It's always interesting to hear different team members' criteria, but most of the discussion lies around branding, power of storytelling (or lack of power), content relevance, audience breakdowns, etc. It's an entertaining way to break up the day and have a flexible discussion.

Once you are done identifying the areas each team member needs to improve in, find your top performers in those areas. Put them together in a team, and let the underperforming employee shadow the high-performing one. Assess the underperforming employee's growth in sometime and see if there was any positive change. If there was none, consider taking other routes such as online courses, external trainers, etc.

One way that our agency freshens up content skills is through lunch-and-learn sessions hosted by various team members. Each team member is assigned a "coach" from management, and the two collaborate on research, information sharing, and presentation. This allows management to share their skills and expertise while also promoting time for research implementation from both management and the team. End the presentation with time for discussion or an interactive game that promotes information sharing from the whole team. Another consideration- bring in an outside expert to host a workshop for the team.