Creatives love to create. Forcing them to spend valuable creative time chasing tedious admin tasks is one of the number one causes of turnover for in-house creative teams.

I encountered this quote recently in the comments on a blog post about “How to Retain Great Talent”. Based on my 20+ years of experience in creative roles, I think this sums us up pretty well:

“Creatives in general are not that difficult to make happy. Give us fresh brewed coffee in the morning, a pat on the back once in a while, and freedom to produce great work and we’ll be happy. Sure, the office perks like arcade rooms, pool tables, open bar on Fridays, etc, are nice but at the end of the day we’re here because we love creating things and seeing our ideas come to life.”

Creative people enjoy being creative. They get a charge out of tackling a problem, finding a solution, and turning it into a clever, innovative concept that will generate response. That’s what drives them toward success. That’s how they measure their worth. And that’s what keeps them motivated, and ultimately determines whether or not they will leave a job.

Smaller in-house creative teams are often forced to combine roles due to limits around staff and budget. The Creative Director is asked to also be the Project Manager. Copywriters become client facing and act as Account Managers. While wearing multiple hats is often necessary for creatives on in-house teams, it is a leading cause of turnover and loss of top creative talent because wearing all those hats ultimately takes creatives away from what they really love to do: be creative.

It is the nature of the creative brain to find new, interesting things to get excited about. Often, managers looking in from the outside think that creatives need help working faster or coming up with new ideas. They are usually wrong. The generation of ideas is never the problem. The challenge for in-house creative teams is having enough time and space to bring those ideas to fruition.

There’s no way you can completely shelter your creative team from administrative tasks, that just isn’t possible. But recognizing the top non-creative tasks that drive creatives crazy, derails them from their creative project, and ultimately chases them out of your door, can help you find solutions so you retain creative talent.

1. Time tracking
I hear this all the time from creatives, “How do I enter the time it takes to time track on my time tracking sheet?” Of course, they are being sarcastic, but they make a good point. Time tracking is hugely important to many creative teams because it generates data that provides valuable insights into how the creative team is working. But, if your method of time tracking interrupts creative workflow and requires too much time to complete, it could be defeating its purpose. Reevaluate how your team tracks time and try to find a way that is less disruptive to the workflow.

2. Status meetings
Are you getting your entire team in a room together a couple times a week to go over the status of their work? Take it from me, they hate it. It’s a waste of their time, it distracts from their creativity, and it can most often be demotivational because they not only have to sit through everyone else’s updates, but they have to be reminded of all the work they aren’t able to do because they are sitting in that room.

Status meetings are designed to keep everyone in the loop and foster transparency on the team, but there may be a better way to do that. By using a creative workflow management system, everyone can see the current status of projects, and team meetings can be shortened to quick stand-ups focused on any roadblocks that the team is facing, rather than comprehensive project rundowns.

3. Constantly having to switch between programs
Example: Review and Approval Loop
This is one of the most discouraging parts of a creative’s day, routing completed work for review. Often though, the demotivation isn’t because of the feedback, it’s because of the time it takes to go through the feedback process. In a standard work environment, it goes something like this:
Finalize the art
Save it to the server
Attach it in an email and send it to the Creative Director/Account Manager
Wait
Get an email from Creative Director with changes.
Go back into your job file and make the changes
Go back to your email and attach a copy of the new art and resend to the Account Manager.
Finalize the art
Save it to the server
Wait
Get an email from Account Manager with client changes
Go back into your job file and make the changes
Go back to your email and attach a copy of the new art and resend.
Finalize the art
Save it to the server
Wait

This process is exhausting, time consuming, and a huge distraction to getting other work done.

A solid workflow system can make this process much faster and easier. Creatives should be able to stay in Adobe as they finish work, route it out for review, and receive feedback. This is possible with a workflow solution that takes advantage of the extensibility offered by Adobe, such as inMotion ignite with the inMotion Extension for Adobe Creative Cloud.

If you want to keep your creative talent from bolting, you have to find a way to cut back on the administrative, non-creative tasks that take up their time, derail them, and make them feel devalued. In a lean environment, you can’t always remove the admin tasks, but you certainly can find ways to make them easier and more efficient.

About the author: Debbie Kennedy is former Head of Advertising Operations with CarMax, and is currently Creative Director for Capstone Production Group, and CEO of Write for You, a Digital Content and Creative Workflow Consulting Firm based in Durham, North Carolina. She’s been a power user and advocate of inMotionNow since 2014.