Recommended Steps to Use Automation for Enhancing Creative Team Productivity

To effectively use automation to boost your creative team’s productivity, consider these steps:

1. Implement a Centralized Work Operating System: Use a platform that integrates all creative processes into one system, allowing for streamlined workflows and easier management of tasks across teams.

2. Automate Routine Tasks: Identify repetitive tasks, such as logging requests or updating stakeholders, and automate them to free up time for more strategic work.

3. Enhance Project Visibility: Use automated tools to keep all stakeholders informed about project statuses in real-time, reducing the need for constant updates and meetings.

4. Optimize Workload Management: Leverage automation to track team capacity and task difficulty, ensuring that work is distributed evenly and efficiently.

5. Continuously Improve Processes: Regularly review and refine your workflows to identify new opportunities for automation and process improvement.

Case Study: How Canva Enhanced Creative Team Productivity with monday.com

Canva, a global leader in online visual communications, faced similar challenges as they scaled their creative operations during periods of hypergrowth and economic downturns. Here’s how they used monday.com to automate tasks and boost productivity across their creative team.

1. Centralizing Creative Operations with monday.com

Challenge: Canva needed a system that could centralize their creative operations and handle the growing number of creative requests from various markets and business verticals.

Solution: Canva implemented monday.com as their central Work Operating System. This platform allowed them to streamline their workflows, integrate all creative processes, and manage projects across teams efficiently. With monday.com, Canva was able to consolidate their operations into a single, robust system that could adapt to their changing needs.

2. Automating Routine Creative Tasks

Challenge: Managing the increasing volume of creative requests manually was consuming valuable time that could be better spent on high-impact projects.

Solution: Canva used monday.com to automate routine tasks, such as logging creative requests, updating project statuses, and notifying stakeholders of changes. For example, they transitioned from manually entering creative requests into Google Sheets to using automated forms on monday.com. This shift saved thousands of seconds each season and freed up their Creative Operations Lead, Vic Diesta, to focus on more strategic initiatives.

3. Enhancing Project Visibility with Automated Updates

Challenge: Stakeholders across Canva often felt “out of the loop” due to siloed systems and a lack of transparency in project statuses.

Solution: To address this, Canva mirrored their internal production boards to create external versions that were accessible to all stakeholders. Automation was used to sync status updates and notify stakeholders via Slack whenever a project moved to a new phase. This increased transparency and reduced the need for frequent status inquiries, allowing the creative team to work more efficiently.

4. Optimizing Workload Management

Challenge: As Canva continued to grow, managing team capacity and ensuring equitable task distribution became increasingly challenging.

Solution: Canva optimized their workload management by using automation to track the difficulty of tasks, monitor team capacity, and adjust workloads accordingly. This data-driven approach helped them protect their team’s well-being, push back on low-impact initiatives, and make informed recommendations to leadership on resourcing needs.

5. Continuous Process Improvement

Challenge: Maintaining efficiency during periods of hypergrowth and economic downturn required continuous adaptation and process improvement.

Solution: Canva regularly reviewed and refined their workflows on monday.com, using the platform’s flexibility to adjust processes as needed. This allowed them to scale their creative output—tripling it in less than a year—while reducing production time by 40% and eliminating hundreds of manual actions.

Conclusion

Canva’s success in using monday.com to enhance creative team productivity demonstrates the power of automation in managing creative operations during periods of growth and change. By centralizing their workflows, automating routine tasks, increasing transparency, and optimizing workload management, Canva was able to scale their creative output while maintaining high standards of quality and efficiency. For companies facing similar challenges, adopting a similar approach to automation can lead to significant productivity gains and better alignment across teams.

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Customer story: Canva | monday.com

Learn how Canva masters creative operations in both times of hypergrowth and economic downturn