Take control.
You probably need to prepare a simple inphography of the current workdflow, and some solutions on diferent steps of the process.
I once prepared a Lorem Ipsum simulation with 2 diferent fonts, and 3 diferent font sizes. Once they knew visually the fonts, we choosed one font and a specific size.
The next step was preparing based on that font, a character count example, so I prepared a page with (for example) 500, 1000, 1500 characters including spaces, so people knew more or less how much space there is on each case (and how to find that information on Word).
After this people learned to make more concise texts, because people apreciated that the less texts it has, more space for images or simply air, which elevated the visual quality of the project.
People need to learn not to fill spaces with usless "information".
Another thing to do is defining version names.
Take a look at this question What is your file naming convention you use for version control?
And another thing, use coperative software.
If ou are using Indesign you could take a look at InCopy, that provides some colaboratve tools for text editing, and then this text is integrated in the InDesign file.
Avoid "I sent you the Word file by email".
