When employees feel that their work is both valuable and valued, they are more likely to be motivated and engaged in their jobs.
Managers want their teams to be both happy and productive. Anyone that has experienced the challenge of recruiting and retaining bid writers will know that excellent writers are a resource you want to do everything you can to keep. The good news is that the developments in AI can help you to help your writers by saving time on less complex writing tasks and making the most of their expertise at structuring and editing compelling text.
Tips for supporting your winning writing team
Writers are at their most happy and productive when they feel their work is valued and are given:
- the opportunity to use their creativity
- the opportunity to improve their skills
- adequate time to complete their work
- feedback on their work
- clear and concise instructions
All of the above can prove challenging in tight-turnaround bidding scenarios, but they needn’t be.
While feedback and clear instructions should be provided by managers, (though even this can be supported by AI – have you asked our General Engine, Genny-1, to write you some step-by step instructions yet? Give it a try!) the introduction of AI tools, such as AutogenAI’s Language Engines, provides easy opportunities for companies to support their writing teams to be the best that they can be.
Creativity
How many bid writers will have said to their school careers adviser ‘I want to write proposals for a living’? Writers of all types are first and foremost creatives. Everyone in the industry recognises that there is an art to bid writing, and that regardless of how good, or poor, the content of a proposal is the writing is critical to winning or losing.
It is also widely accepted that bid responses can be very formulaic. There are typical ways of structuring responses and sign-posting to evaluators that you are addressing the evaluation criteria to get those all important ticks in boxes.
Language engines can enable writers to focus on the creative aspects of bid writing by generating the formulaic content needed in an instant. Here’s how a skilled writer would get to a first draft bid response in just a few clicks:
- Writer Identifies the structure for a winning bid response (with or without the help of the Language Engine.)
- Writer uses the Language Engine to expand on the themes identified, generating relevant ideas, adding statistics, case studies and applying the in-house writing style with a few button clicks. (The draft could be reviewed regarding structure and content at this stage – how long would it usually take your team to produce first draft responses?)
- Writer edits the content as needed, finessing with input from subject matter expert colleagues, specific solution details, and ensuring that win themes and commissioner language (there can be buttons for those too) are reflected throughout. (If you follow the Shipley bidding process, the draft is now ready for red review.)
Skills
Learning new skills is rewarding in and of itself. Being provided with and trained in the very latest in language generation technology is an exciting opportunity for a writer.
Further to this, augmenting writing tasks with AI allows users to focus their time on the skilled aspects of decision-making; creative use of the right prompts to get the best responses out of the Language Engine, (for more on prompts for Language Engines see James Huckle’s excellent article ‘What is Fine Tuning and Prompt Engineering?’); and of course editing and adding that all important ‘bid glitter’ to make your responses stand out from the crowd.
Time
Time is a big deal in bidding. There is never enough of it, and bid writers are often among the most overworked team members as immovable deadlines loom. The pressure of bidding can put the wellbeing of individuals at risk, in addition to compromising the quality of their work. While a little pressure can help us to bring our A-game, working under constant stress and to unsociable hours (which is an unfortunate reality for many bid teams) is physically and mentally unsustainable and means mistakes creep in.
At a conservative estimate, AutogenAI’s Language Engines can halve the time needed to create a good first draft response. This level of time saving would be a boon to the wellbeing, as well as the productivity, of any bid team.
And the possibilities of AI tools for bidding go even further than this. Language Engines like ours can also be equipped with:
- Tools to help with the editing and proofreading process.
- Help to generate ideas for new content (have you tried AutogenAI’s Ideator yet?)
- Custom templates for team members to use.
- Analysis of user data to help improve the user experience, help track team progress and identify areas for improvement.
- In-depth training in specific data; this can range from your own company’s information (from brand guidelines to bid collateral to annual reports), to sector and/or customer specific information to create a Language Engine with subject matter expertise for particular types of bids.
Conclusion
Our Language Engines can vastly reduce the time spent by writers on more mundane tasks, making their busy workloads more manageable and freeing them up for high value creative work such as editing and adding the winning flourishes to your proposals.
Would your writers like more time for creativity? How do you think they would respond to the creative challenge of co-writing with AI?
And, why do we care about this again? Here’s Genny-1’s summary:
A writing team that is both happy and productive is beneficial for a number of reasons. First, team members are more likely to be satisfied with their work and feel a sense of ownership over their projects. This leads to increased motivation and a higher level of productivity. Secondly, a positive team environment fosters creativity and collaboration, which can result in better-quality work. Finally, happy team members are more likely to stay with the company, which reduces turnover and saves on training costs.