Fixing the Processes Your Creative Team Secretly Hates
The Copywriter Column #242
February is when the truth starts showing.
The New Year energy has worn off. The big goals are still on the board, but the daily grind is back.
And somewhere in that grind, your team is bumping into the same friction they bumped into last year. The same handoff confusion… the same unclear briefs… the same status updates that take longer to write than the work they’re describing.
Nobody’s complaining, though. And that’s the thing.
When a process is painful long enough, people stop mentioning it. They just work around it. They build little workarounds and coping mechanisms and unspoken agreements.
The silence isn’t approval though.
So if you’re leading a creative team and you want to avoid the February slump, here’s my suggestion: skip the motivational Slack message and fix a workflow instead.
Start by Noticing What You’ve Stopped Noticing
You don’t need a full audit. You just need a few honest questions.
Where do things slow down every single time? Not occasionally. Every time. There’s something there.
What do people ask clarifying questions about repeatedly? If the same confusion keeps surfacing, the process is the problem, not the people.
Where do you see the same mistakes happening? Repeated errors usually point to missing information or unclear expectations upstream.
You’re not looking for everything that’s broken. You’re looking for one or two friction points that would make a real difference if they got fixed.
3 Workflows Worth Fixing First
Most creative teams share the same pain points. These are the ones I’d look at first.
1. Handoffs
The moment work moves from one person to another is where context goes to die.
Client hands off to project manager. Project manager hands off to copywriter. Copywriter hands off to strategist, or designer, or both. And somewhere along that chain, key details vanish. The original intent gets diluted. Someone ends up working from assumptions instead of information.
Most handoff problems aren’t about tools. They’re about expectations.
The fix is simple, if not easy: define what “done” looks like before the handoff happens. Not after.
What should be included? What questions should already be answered? If a brief is coming from a client, what does the PM need to clarify before it reaches the writer? If copy is going to design, what context does the designer need to execute without guessing?
Make it explicit. Write it down. Refer back to it.
2. Status updates and check-ins
If your team spends more time reporting on work than doing it, something has drifted.
I’ve heard horror stories of teams buried in daily standups, weekly syncs, and project trackers that require manual updates across multiple platforms. That’s not communication. That’s overhead!
The fix is to reduce frequency and increase clarity. One update with real information beats five pings.
And if you’re manually aggregating status from multiple sources, consider letting AI do that part. Pull project updates from where the work actually lives. Don’t ask your team to summarize what’s already written somewhere else.
3. Documentation and briefs
Bad briefs create bad work. Incomplete briefs create rework. And both waste time your team doesn’t have.
The fix isn’t more fields. It’s the right fields. Standardize the inputs you actually need and kill the ones nobody fills out anyway.
If you want to layer in AI here, use it to draft first-pass documentation or flag incomplete briefs before they ship. Not to replace judgment – just to catch what gets missed when everyone’s moving fast.
The Principle Behind the Fixes
Every workflow fix comes down to the same idea: remove decisions that don’t need to be made.
Most friction hides in ambiguity. When people have to guess what’s expected, they hesitate and make assumptions that turn out to be wrong.
Clarity fixes that.
Clarity is a form of kindness.
You’re not optimizing for speed, by the way. You’re optimizing for focus.
The goal isn’t to make people work faster. It’s to stop wasting their attention on things that shouldn’t require it. That’s how you protect creative energy over the long haul.
If You Don’t Own the Workflow
Maybe you’re not the one who sets the process. Maybe you’re a middle manager, or a senior contributor, or someone who sees the problem clearly but doesn’t have the authority to fix it unilaterally.
Here’s how to make the case.
Don’t lead with complaints. Lead with cost. Frame the friction in terms of what the team loses: time, quality, morale, momentum. Make it concrete.
And don’t propose an overhaul. Propose a pilot. One specific fix. Two weeks. A clear way to measure if it helped.
(If you need a refresher on setting goals that actually work for creative teams, that’s a good place to start.)
Make it easy for the person with authority to say yes.
Small wins build trust, and trust builds room for bigger changes later.
The Quiet Work
Fixing workflows isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t make for a great leadership headline. Nobody’s going to write a case study about how you improved the creative brief template.
But when you remove friction from someone’s daily work, they feel it. Even if they don’t say anything. Even if they don’t fully realize what changed.
That’s the kind of care that compounds.
It doesn’t announce itself. It just makes everything a little easier, day after day, until the team wonders why things feel lighter than they used to.
That’s workflow love. It’s not loud. But it’s real.
Want to dive deeper into the principles that make copy actually work for your team?
I’ve distilled 20+ years of marketing expertise into a free micro-course called The Minimalist Copywriter’s Playbook. It covers the 5 core principles I use every time I sit down to write – ones you can apply immediately.
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