Discuss the importance of collaborative writing in the workplace

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: In business, although you will routinely have to communicate as an individual, many of your projects will be team-based because they are too big to be completed by just one person. As a result, collaboration—working together to achieve a common goal—is crucial in the workplace.
Being collaborative requires that you adapt to the working style of many different people. In addition, it requires that you coordinate, compromise, negotiate, and manage conflict. For example, assume you work for an airline and have been assigned to a cross-disciplinary team that is researching various ways to decrease costs. Your team has 30 days to complete its research and present findings and recommendations to management. Think about all the decisions you need to make to coordinate your work:

? How to identify talents of team members and divide the research
? How and when to share information with each other
? What criteria to use to evaluate the options
? Which options to present to management
? How to organize your presentation
? How to divide the task of writing the presentation
? How to organize and deliver your recommendations to management

In the process of working together and making these decisions, you and your teammates are likely to experience disagreements and conflicts. Perhaps one teammate, based on his research, firmly believes that the best option for decreasing costs is to eliminate the lowest-volume routes that the airline flies, while another teammate argues that her research shows this option has hidden public relations costs. As this scenario suggests, effective communicators need to know more than just how to research, write, and present. They also need to know how to coordinate work, manage conflicts, and negotiate agreements.