Let us suppose for a moment that you have made the decision to hire a permanent, in-house writing team as opposed to seeking out writers on a more per-contract basis. The advantages of this decision are numerous, of course — for one, you get to grow a team with a focus on your business so they grow more and more aware of it as time goes on, benefiting from long-term exposure to what you have them writing about.

However, now that you've got them, what's the best way to maximize their creativity? Having a dedicated writing staff is a fine thing, to be sure — but in order to get the most out of the investment, you need them to produce solid, creative and reliable content. It doesn't matter if they produce entire reams of articles if the material produced isn't worth reading.

This is something broadly known as a meta-concern. Meta means "alongside" or even "outside." A meta-concern is a matter that isn't immediately related to your primary purpose, but can have significant implications all the same. Time spent helping your writers be creative is time you aren't spending on direct branding efforts. However, it can pay off in solid support and respect for your brand in the long term. To that end, have a look at a handful of techniques that have been demonstrated to help spur productivity and creativity in your writers.

Let them Own the Project

Group brainstorming is creative asphyxiation. Yes, it will result in a quick sampling of several different ideas, but none of them will be particularly well developed. Creativity is an odd little thing. When it's highly personal, as in a project one or two people own to work on specifically, more effort gets invested into it out of a sense of pride and desire. When control (and therefore responsibility) of the matter is spread around, however, there's a sense of disconnect.

The latter comes as a result of two phenomena. First, there's the lack of privacy it causes. Some of the ideas creative types put forward are very personal, representing the best of their own minds. Exposing their best to others is intensely difficult at times, so a group setting can hinder them out of modesty or shame. Second is the shared laziness of a group. In short, when the work is spread around to many people, no one person pulls quite as hard on their share. The work will get done anyway, after all, so what's the point of putting forth more effort?