• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 6, 2023

Creative work, both for email and other marketing teams, is now mostly a hybrid activity. But the approval process slows things down for everyone, according to The State of Creative Collaboration In 2023, a study by Filestage.

Of the professionals surveyed, 65% deem hybrid the most popular work setup, up from 49% in 2022. Fully remote work has declined to 19% from 40% in 2022. And 16% of work is now fully office based, versus 11% last year. 

But email teams clearly suffer as a result of the lengthy and complex feedback process. In general, marketers say their work is hampered by:

• Waiting for feedback — 71%
• Chasing people for approval — 63% 
• Having too much to do — 62% 
• Waiting for more context — 43%
• Too many meetings — 33% 
• Aligning stakeholders who aren’t communicating — 31% 
• Being CC’d into too many emails — 13%

Granted, account management are way more likely to say the same in every case.  

On average, it takes eight days to get a piece of content approved. Brands take the longest time of all company types:

• Brand — 10
• Agency — 7
• Production company — 6 
• Startup — 9 
• Freelancer — 4 

How many versions does it take before a piece of content is approved? This also varies by company type: 

• Brand — 3.2 
• Agency — 3.3 
• Production company — 3.4 
• Startup — 3.7 
• Freelancer — 3.5 

Marketers spend an average of 20 minutes evaluating each piece of content while account managers take 37 minutes. This work includes: 

• Highlighting text 
• Writing emails and comments 
• Copying out timecodes 
• Capturing screenshots
• Annotating designs 
• Sharing references 

Design and creative teams take 33 minutes to review each piece of work, and project management and production heads 25 minutes.  

Teams also spend these average hours per month giving feedback:

• Marketing — 8 
• Design and creative — 13
• Project management and production — 10 
• Account management — 14

The study also found that: 1 in 3 workers are fully remote at companies with up to 20 people, while 1 in 10 are remote in firms with 1,001 employees. 

Looking forward, the study predicts that:

1. Fully remote work will bounce back
2. More people will enjoy a digital nomad lifestyle 
3. Collaboration will get faster as more teams turn to tech
4. Teams will get better at asynchronous collaboration
5. The four-day work week will be in the headlines 

Filestage surveyed 366 advertising and marketing professionals.