Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 3 min
Workarounds make organizations nervous. They suggest inconsistency. They sit outside the documented procedure. They often live in personal spreadsheets, handwritten notes, unofficial email chains, and routines known only to the people doing the work. From a control perspective, that is uncomfortable.
From an improvement perspective, it is also extremely useful.
Employees rarely create extra steps because they are bored and looking for a hobby. Customers do not usually bypass a portal because they woke up wanting to make your reporting less tidy. People create workarounds because the official process does not fully support what they are trying to accomplish.
Sales teams maintain shadow spreadsheets because the system does not show something they need quickly. Warehouse associates develop unofficial picking sequences because the documented order creates unnecessary movement. Customer service representatives build personal reference guides because critical information is difficult to retrieve during a live conversation. Customers call instead of using self-service because exceptions are easier to explain to a person.
The Workaround Is a Clue, Not Automatically a Solution
This distinction is important. A workaround can introduce risk, duplication, errors, or tribal knowledge. It may be a terrible long-term solution. But eliminating it without understanding why it exists is equally dangerous. You can remove the symptom while leaving the friction untouched.
That is how organizations end up spending dollars chasing pennies. They invest time enforcing the official process while the underlying design problem continues generating exceptions, questions, and manual effort.
What to Investigate Before You Eliminate It
- Frequency: Is this a one-person habit or a pattern used across the team?
- Purpose: What specific problem does the workaround solve?
- Trigger: What event causes someone to leave the official process?
- Impact: Does the workaround reduce time, confusion, errors, or customer effort?
- Risk: What new problems does the workaround introduce?
The most revealing workarounds are repeated ones. One employee may simply have a preference. Ten employees independently building the same extra step is different. Fifty customers choosing email over a structured form is different. A repeated workaround is the organization receiving the same message from multiple directions.
The temptation is to respond with training. Sometimes that is appropriate. But if people understand the process and still avoid it, more training may simply make them better informed about a workflow they already know does not work well for the situation.
The better approach is to treat the workaround as operational evidence. Follow it backward. Find the moment where the official process stops meeting the need. Then decide whether the process, system, information, or expectation should change.
Workarounds are not always rebellion. Often they are employees and customers quietly doing process improvement without permission.
A useful test is to imagine removing the workaround tomorrow. What happens next? If the work slows down, information becomes harder to find, customers wait longer, or employees immediately invent a replacement, the workaround was supporting a real operational need. That does not make it good design. It does mean the underlying need has to be addressed before the workaround can safely disappear.
This is especially important during technology projects. A new system can technically replace an old process while still failing to replace everything the old process allowed people to do. The missing pieces then reappear in spreadsheets, email, notes, and manual checks. The software implementation may be complete while the workflow is still unfinished.
CTA: Before removing the next workaround you find, ask the person using it one question: What problem does this solve for you that the normal process does not?