The Workaround Is Working. What Is It Hiding?
The official process says to submit a request. The actual process is to message the one person who knows how to get it done.
There’s a spreadsheet that isn’t in the system. A meeting before the meeting. A customer issue that only gets resolved when someone calls in a favor from another department.
And honestly? Thank goodness for the people who figured those things out. They saw something wasn’t working and found a way to keep the work moving. But when a workaround becomes the way work gets done, it deserves a closer look.
The people making it work are showing you where it doesn’t
A workaround is often described as a problem with compliance: people aren’t following the process. Sometimes there are good reasons to worry about that, especially when safety, privacy, or quality is at stake.
But “Why won’t they follow the process?” is rarely the most useful first question.
Try: “What does the workaround make possible that the process doesn’t?”
Maybe it gets a customer an answer before the deadline. Maybe it lets two teams coordinate when nobody owns the handoff. Maybe it gives a manager the information they need because the dashboard arrives three weeks too late.
That doesn’t automatically make the workaround good. It does make it informative.
The person maintaining the secret spreadsheet may be solving a reporting problem. They may also be spending six hours a week compensating for one. Both things can be true.
Success can hide the strain
The tricky thing about workarounds is that they often succeed. Customers get answers. Deadlines are met. The leadership report looks fine.
So the organization sees the result without seeing everything it took to produce it.
A team quietly checks every order twice because the information arrives incomplete. A manager translates conflicting priorities so employees can decide what to do first. One longtime employee remembers the exceptions that nobody ever wrote down.
From a distance, this can look like a remarkably resilient culture. Up close, people may be spending their best energy holding together a system that no longer fits the work.
The distinction matters. You want to keep the ingenuity. You also want to know whether the organization is depending on someone’s extra effort to deliver what it promises.
Follow the workaround upstream
When you find one, resist the urge to ban it or turn it into the official process on the spot. Start by following it.
Ask the people who use it:
What were you trying to accomplish when you started doing this? The answer tells you which need the formal process missed.
Where does the usual route break down? Look for a slow decision, an unclear owner, a missing piece of information, or a handoff that exists on paper but not in practice.
Who pays for this solution? A workaround that makes one team faster may create rework for another. A smooth customer experience may depend on invisible effort from employees.
What would happen if the person holding it together left tomorrow? If the answer is “we’d be in trouble,” you’ve found something worth addressing.
Then bring the people on both sides of the handoff into the same conversation. The aim is to understand the pattern before deciding what to change.
Sometimes the answer is to adopt the employee’s better method. Sometimes it’s to clarify decision rights, change a system, remove an approval, or revisit a promise the organization cannot reliably deliver. Sometimes the workaround should stop because the risk is too high. You can only make that call once you understand why it exists.
What has everyone learned to work around?
Growing organizations are especially good at accumulating invisible fixes. The informal ways that worked when everyone sat near each other can survive long after the organization has become too complex to rely on them.
That doesn’t mean the culture has gone bad. It means the way work happens may need to catch up with the organization you’ve become.
So here’s a useful question for your next leadership conversation: What would stop working if people stopped working around it?
The answer may tell you more about your culture, your customer experience, and your operating reality than another polished process map ever could.
CulturePop helps leaders spot the patterns behind organizational friction and turn that clarity into aligned action. If the same issue keeps resurfacing in a different disguise, The Pop Point is a place to start.
