Written by David Carneal | Digital Efficiency Consulting Group

Estimated read time: 7 minutes

Everyone Knows the File

Most companies have at least one spreadsheet that quietly holds their operation together.

Nobody admits it publicly, of course. Officially, the business runs on enterprise systems, integrated platforms, and carefully documented procedures. In reality, somewhere inside the company there is almost always a spreadsheet that someone maintains because "the system doesn't quite handle this part yet."

Sometimes it tracks orders that fell between systems. Sometimes it reconciles numbers that should match but don't. Sometimes it exists because an integration broke three years ago and no one ever got around to fixing it.

Everyone knows the file. Everyone depends on the file. And everyone hopes the person who built it never takes a two-week vacation.

The humor in that situation is familiar to anyone who has worked inside a growing company. Yet behind the joke sits a more serious operational question that many companies never stop to ask:

How much of our business is actually running on temporary fixes that were never meant to become permanent?

The Evolution of Temporary Fixes

Nobody sits down one morning and decides to build a permanent workaround. It never starts that way.

Stage One

The patch goes in. Something broke, someone figured out a fix, and the business kept moving. That part is actually good management. You don't stop the line because the software has a gap.

Stage Two

A few months pass and the patch is still there. Nobody removed it because, honestly, it's working. People start building their day around it without really noticing.

Stage Three

A year later and now other things depend on it. The spreadsheet feeds a report. The manual check has become a prerequisite for the next step downstream. Someone new joins the team and is quietly trained on the workaround without ever being told why it exists.

The day it shows up in your onboarding documentation is the day it stopped being temporary. It just never got the memo.

Compounding of Process Friction

Think of it like a slow leak in a pipe. One drip is not a crisis. Nobody calls a plumber for one drip. But leave a dozen drips running for a few years and now you have a mold problem, a water bill that doesn't make sense, and a contractor telling you the whole wall needs to come out.

Workarounds work the same way. One extra step in a process is annoying but manageable. Twenty extra steps distributed across a workflow is a different problem entirely. Every one of those steps adds a handoff, a decision, a place where something can go wrong or simply slow down.

Let's put a number on it. A single workaround that adds ten minutes to a task, repeated twice a day, adds up to roughly eight hours a month. For one employee. Now apply that same math to three employees running the same process. That's twenty-four hours a month, nearly three full workdays, disappearing into a step that was never supposed to be permanent.

At an average salary of $50,000 a year, you are looking at somewhere around $7,200 annually in labor absorbed by a single workaround. Run that out over three years and a fix that nobody got around to removing has now cost the business more than $21,000. And that is one workaround. Most operations have dozens.

A process that used to take three steps now takes eight. Nobody designed it that way. It just grew.

Operational Signals of Hidden Workarounds

Because workarounds develop gradually, most leaders don't notice them until something breaks or a new hire asks a question nobody can actually answer. By then the workaround has been living rent-free in your operation for years.

There are usually a few tells. Employees are running spreadsheets alongside the system that was supposed to replace spreadsheets. Processes have double-check steps even though the software already checked. New hires are trained by watching someone do the job rather than reading any documentation, because the documentation describes a process nobody actually follows anymore.

But the clearest signal, the one that should stop every operations leader cold, is when someone explains a step and the explanation is:

"That's just how we do it here."

The Hidden Financial Impact

Here's the part that tends to get people's attention. Workarounds don't show up as a line item. You won't find them on a P&L statement. They hide inside labor costs, inside overtime, inside the headcount you added last year because things just felt busier even though volume hadn't changed that much.

Every workaround consumes time. Not a lot of time on its own, but time that adds up fast when it's baked into a process that runs fifty times a day. Your people aren't being unproductive. They're working hard. They're just spending a significant portion of that effort navigating the process rather than doing the actual work.

That shows up as headcount growth that doesn't track with revenue growth. Leaders assume the business is just getting more complex. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the complexity is self-inflicted, and it's been quietly compounding for years.

Why Workarounds Persist

If workarounds cost money, why doesn't someone just remove them? It's a fair question. The answer is usually one of three things.

Nobody wants to be the person who broke the thing that was holding everything together. If a workaround saved the day once, it feels dangerous to touch it, even years later when the original problem it was solving no longer exists.

The person who built the workaround left. Nobody inherited the full story of why it was built. So nobody feels qualified to be the one who decides it can go.

And sometimes the original reason simply evaporated. The system got fixed. The vendor changed. The customer requirement went away. But the workaround stayed because everyone assumed someone else already knew it was still necessary.

Identifying Hidden Operational Layers

Companies do not need large transformation initiatives to begin uncovering workflow complexity. Let me repeat that louder for the people in the back: you do not need to hire an army of consultants, launch a multi-year initiative, or blow up your systems to find out where the drag lives.

Most of the time it surfaces with a few targeted questions asked to the right people.

  • Which steps were added after the original process design?
  • Which steps exist only to verify another step?
  • Which steps rely on spreadsheets or manual tracking?

If those questions make someone in the room uncomfortable, you're probably standing right on top of it.

The Bill Always Comes Due

Temporary workarounds are not created because employees are careless. In fact, it is usually the complete opposite. They exist because people are trying to keep the business moving when systems fail or processes break down.

The challenge emerges when those temporary fixes remain in place long after the original problem has disappeared. Over time they accumulate into layers of complexity that few people notice until the operational impact becomes significant.

The most effective companies periodically audit their workflows and ask a simple question:

Which of our processes are still running on yesterday's temporary fixes?

What Can DECG Do to Help?

The workarounds described in this article don't announce themselves. They accumulate quietly, blend into daily routine, and rarely show up as a line item until someone finally goes looking. DECG's Workflow Investigation exists for exactly that reason.

It is a fast, inexpensive diagnostic that gives growing companies a clear answer to the question most leaders already know they should be asking. Either we find the friction and hand you a map to fix it, or we find nothing and return your investment. That is not a marketing promise. It is our written guarantee.

And if we do find the drag, we do not just hand you a list and wish you luck. DECG can work alongside your team to drill deeper into the problem areas, rebuild the workflows and processes that are slowing you down, and get it done in weeks, not months, at a fraction of the cost of a large-scale transformation project.

No bloated timelines. No enterprise price tags. No consultants who disappear after the slide deck. Just practical fixes that actually get implemented.

If any part of this article made you think of a process in your own operation, that is probably worth a conversation.

Contact Digital Efficiency Consulting Group to send a message, schedule a call, or start the conversation.