It’s hard to keep remote workers on the same page when it comes to the state of their field or industry; a newsletter can help to ensure that distributed teams at least share some common footing and run into fewer knowledge gaps.

Here are some tips to help your newsletter provide real value for your team.

Learn From the Best

I may not be talking about the kind of newsletters that companies send to their customers in this article, but that doesn’t mean the best of those kinds of publications can’t inform the creation of great internal newsletters. To that end, I urge anyone reading this to check out both the Sprouter weekly newsletter and Gdgt‘s recurring missive to members of the site, which doesn’t follow a schedule, but somehow always seems to hit my inbox at just the right time.

Despite having very different formats and focusing on completely different areas, both Sprouter’s and Gdgt’s newsletters share at least one thing in common: providing information that, although related to the core business of each company, isn’t presented as a sales pitch or with a specific marketing slant. Obviously, with a newsletter targeted at keeping a distributed team up to speed on pertinent developments, information is the whole point. But how you choose to convey that information can take very different forms.

Sprouter takes a more scattershot approach. It provides a variety of different material, with a founder profile, a list of hot startups, a list of upcoming events, and a selection of outgoing links to awesome blog posts related to the startup economy from around the web, as chosen by both Sprouter staff and members of its user community. Each item is accompanied by a brief description, and a link to the full piece or site if you’re interested in finding out more. If you wanted to make team involvement a key aspect of your newsletter, this is a great model. You could include story submissions from each team member, so that pieces that are important to your employees are the ones everyone is reading. It also provides team leaders with an informal way of seeing what everyone is interested in.

Gdgt takes a much more focused approach, but one that feels just as useful. Generally speaking, the Gdgt newsletter features a single lengthy article by the site’s co-founders Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, dealing with a hot topic in the gadget-sphere. For example, the Feb. 10 edition contained a long rumination on the situation at Nokia following Stephen Elop’s memo regarding the company’s “burning platform.” Your team leader or a key internal stakeholder could provide a single central piece for each edition, articulating the next major project milestone in detail, for example, or talking about a recent external development that has a significant impact on what the team is working on.

Focus on the News in Your Newsletter

While I realize you may be excited about your company’s latest achievements, that’s not necessarily the best thing to put in a newsletter. Too often, internal newsletters are packed with corporate boosterism, which can put off team members and negatively affect worthwhile engagement.

Instead, focus on what’s changed or new that’s relevant to your team. Don’t think of it like an interim project report, stating progress towards milestones, budget updates, etc. Instead, talk frankly about non-measurable and contextual concerns that won’t get surfaced in more traditional reporting tools. This is your team you’re talking to, not clients or even stakeholders; a newsletter is the perfect place to address things that might otherwise fall through the cracks during normal daily interaction or in other documents. Think specifically about what might be news to your team members since the last time you had a team-wide check-in.

Distributed teams face communication challenges that technology is making easier and easier to overcome, but the form of communication many teams choose to use can leave huge knowledge gaps between members. IM and traditional email exchanges are often too ephemeral, and not inclusive. A newsletter provides a chance for reflection, idea collection and archiving, and a chance for all to step back and look at things from a contemplative distance, all with relatively little time and input.

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All too often, I see people working on the same document and shipping it around via email, and before long, you have multiple conflicting versions made in parallel by several people. Yes, it may seem like creating a document and sending it to a few team members over email is the easiest solution, but it can quickly become a nightmare of merged edits and too many versions, all going in different directions.

Here are a few document collaboration tips and best practices  to reduce the pain and make you more efficient.

Pick a Tool

1. Figure out if you already have an appropriate tool you can use. Your IT department or another team member might already have a document collaboration tool, so start by trying what you have to see if it meets your needs.
2. Wikis are a great solution if you have a large team and want to develop content that anyone can edit, or if you want to share the content with a large audience. They are also a good solution if you will have a large number of pages with related content and many links between documents. You can install a wiki internally behind your company firewall if you need additional security or you can open it up to the world, depending on your needs.
3. Google Docs works really well for sharing a few documents with a small team, and it is one of the best ways to collaborate on spreadsheets, presentations and other documents where the end product is a standalone document in a specific format.

For all of my current projects, I use wikis and Google Docs; it’s likely that one of these solutions will also work for you. If not, there are plenty of other choices depending on your specific needs, ranging from simple text editor applications with local network sharing to high-end collaboration suites for large enterprise businesses and everything in between.

Have the Right Mindset

You need to go into the document collaboration process knowing that other people will change “your” work. As a result, you want to think about the document as a team effort and not something that you own. The vast majority of the time, the additions from team members will make the output better, so be careful to look at changes for improvements and not get defensive about other people changing or rewording your earlier draft. Occasionally, someone (maybe even you) will make a change that takes the document in the wrong direction. Often these undesirable changes are based on some misunderstanding of the purpose or the audience for the final product. Hopefully, you’ve picked a tool — like a wiki or Google Docs — where you can view and restore previous versions. It’s a good idea to get in touch with the person whose changes are reverted or add a comment on a discussion page to explain why, and to investigate whether some of it can be reincorporated.

Release Early and Often

Too many people want to get their document as close to perfect as possible before they share it with anyone else, but that really isn’t the best way to collaborate. Would you try to cook a perfect dinner for someone without finding out when they were arriving or asking if they have any dietary restrictions? Probably not. You would at least have a conversation with them to better understand their needs. The first version of your document can be that initial conversation where you find out if your plans are on the right track. You can start with a disclaimer at the top of the document stating exactly where you are in the process to help people understand that it’s just a list of ideas or an outline for what will eventually be the finished document. This gives people time to tell you whether you are going in the right direction or are way off in left field before you have invested too much time in it. You can even assign sections to different people to work on or get suggestions that you might not have come up with on your own. By putting the content out there early and making frequent changes, you can get team members involved and collaborating early.

Format Later

Don’t get too caught up in formatting and making the document beautiful early in the process. Especially when you are collaborating with other people, worry about getting the content right first, and then figure out how you can best display it with the right headings, formatting and image later. This also gives you the flexibility to transfer the final version of the content into another tool with more robust formatting features to create nicely-designed PDF files or other formatted documents.

What are your favorite collaboration tips for working on documents with other people?

Photo by Flickr user Sean MacEntee used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Thing is, I realized that was what it was like before I became a web worker, when my ideal job was still a cozy 9-to-5 in an office somewhere, with a salary, benefits and a paid lunch hour. Once I gave up that ideal in favor of pursuing freelance opportunities online, the dreaded Job Hunting Process, which I thought was written in stone, largely ceased to exist. Sure, what replaced it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, either, but for all its faults, it definitely beats the cold dread of Workopolis and Monster.com.

Instead, when I want to find work these days, I generally tap friends and contacts in one way or another. Often, people will suggest me for projects that seem to be up my alley when they come up in conversation, and I’ll get an informal request for more information at least, and a contract at best. If I’m actively seeking work, I’ll likewise ask friends in industries I’m targeting about relevant work. This might be as easy as sending a DM via Twitter, or as complicated as arranging a meet-and-greet portfolio presentation. Or if all my personal network leads are cold, I know my field well enough to start some cold-emailing that results in a positive response often enough. More so than a Workopolis job search, at least.

This got me wondering if this is a shared experience among web workers, or if I was alone in finding it easier to search for and land work. What do you think? Is part of the appeal of working online that finding work is easier, or do you actually find it harder, but with a bigger pay-off?

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If you want to try out the coworking experience, but would rather get just get your feet wet than completely take the plunge, two might be the magic number. Find another person to work with and you might eliminate some of the isolation of the web worker lifestyle, but it won’t resemble the office job you might have felt trapped by. But who you work with, and how you work together, make all the difference when it comes to a coworking partnership.

Who

The first step, obviously, is finding someone willing to put with your quirks and actually work with you. Even if you have many willing partners, this is not a decision to be taken lightly. Once upon a time, you couldn’t pick your co-workers, but now that you can, the obvious choices might not be the best.

For instance, your drinking buddy is probably not the right choice. As you might guess, the working can fall by the wayside when there’s an excess of camaraderie involved. It’s a little like choosing a roommate, too, since you might be spending a lot of time with the person. In both situations, picking a good friend can lead to hurt feelings, and possibly broken friendships.

Better to choose someone you respect and admire; someone you know has good work ethic and isn’t easily distracted. You might want to go through old work contacts to see if anyone fits that description and is in a similar work situation. Or, if you prefer to work with people whose work more closely matches your own, try keeping an eye out for contacts in your field who are also in your area. Of course, that’ll be easier to do if you’re based in a major urban center than if you’re somewhere more rural.

Finally, keep in mind that unlike a committed romantic relationship, there’s nothing preventing you from having multiple partners and changing it up from time to time.

Where

Once you’ve established who you want to throw your hat in the ring with, you have to figure out where that ring’s going to be. With a coworking team of two, you’re obviously limited in terms of your options when it comes to renting space. If you’d still like to go that route, though, you can often find an office in a larger shared space (usually with shared facilities like a boardroom, cafeteria, etc.), many of which will include things like Internet service in the price of rental.

If that doesn’t really appeal to you, you can consider using the home of either one or the other partner. One might be more comfortable with the idea, or better equipped to handle two people working in their space, but if possible, try to use both people’s place for at least some of the time. I recommend this route to prevent stagnation, and to prevent one partner from getting the impression that the relationship is becoming unbalanced.

A third option is to try neutral third-party territory that you don’t have to pay for. It could be a coffee shop, or a cultural institution like a museum, something I discussed in an earlier post. You can also throw in outings like these to mix up your regular routine.

No matter who you decide to work with, or where you decide to do it, I recommend trying out a coworking partnership to every web worker, and specifically to those who haven’t been in a community office setting in a long time. Web working from home is a dream job for a lot of people, myself included, but sometimes we have to be careful not to get so lost or absorbed in that dream that we lose a sense of connection to our colleagues.

Have you tried a coworking partnership? Share your experiences in the comments.

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