You’re Paying for the Workaround
Most organizations have workarounds.
The unofficial spreadsheet. The extra checklist. The person everyone asks because the written instructions aren’t very helpful. The standing meeting that exists because nobody trusts the information to get where it needs to go any other way.
Most of the time, these things don’t look like performance problems.
They look like people figuring out how to get the job done.
That’s exactly why they’re easy to miss.
Good Employees Are Really Good at Compensating
When something about the work doesn’t function the way it should, capable employees usually find another way.
They keep their own notes. They create a spreadsheet. They double-check the system. They ask the person who actually knows what’s going on. Sometimes they build a whole little process around the official process just to make the work easier to manage.
And eventually, that workaround becomes normal.
The work still gets done, so from a distance, everything can look fine.
But all that extra effort has a cost.
And the organization is usually the one paying for it.
The Cost Is Easy to Miss
A workaround might only take five extra minutes.
That doesn’t sound like much.
But if several people are doing it several times a day, that starts adding up pretty quickly.
Then add the other pieces that often come with it. Duplicate work. Extra checking. A mistake that has to be fixed. Another meeting because people aren’t working from the same information. A manager spending 20 minutes tracking something down that should have been easy to find.
None of those things looks huge by itself.
Put them together over time, though, and you can burn a surprising amount of money without ever really noticing it.
There probably isn’t a line on your financial statement called “Money We Spent Compensating for a Bad Process.”
But you’re still spending it.
Sometimes We Stop Seeing the Workaround
One of the bigger risks is that a workaround can become so familiar that nobody remembers it’s a workaround anymore.
“This is just how we do it.”
That sentence is worth paying attention to.
Maybe the software doesn’t give people the information they actually need, so someone manually builds a report every Friday.
Maybe the official procedure is outdated, so experienced employees teach new people the “real” way to do the job.
Maybe managers keep their own tracking systems because they don’t really trust the one they’re supposed to use.
After a while, nobody even questions it.
The extra work just gets absorbed into the job.
Workarounds Are Evidence
I don’t think the answer is to start hunting down every workaround and eliminate it.
Some of them are smart. Some are probably better than the original process.
But I would get curious about them.
Why did people need the workaround in the first place?
What wasn’t working well enough without it?
Was information missing? Were priorities unclear? Was the process too complicated? Was the tool getting in the way? Were people trying to meet expectations that didn’t really line up with each other?
That’s where the useful information is.
The workaround may be telling you more about the real working conditions than the official process ever will.
A workaround is often evidence that employees are solving a problem the organization hasn’t solved yet.
Your Best People May Be Hiding the Problem
This is the part I think leaders can really underestimate.
Sometimes the people hiding the biggest system problems are your strongest employees.
They know what to double-check. They remember the step that everyone else misses. They know who to call when something gets stuck, and they catch problems before those problems turn into something bigger.
They’re good at working around the system.
Which is great until we start confusing that with the system actually working well.
Think about one of those people leaving tomorrow.
What suddenly becomes harder?
What stops getting caught?
What information disappears because it lived mostly in that person’s head?
How many things that looked like “the process” turn out to have been one experienced person quietly holding everything together?
That’s useful information too.
Ask a Better Question
The next time you notice an unofficial spreadsheet, a manual check, an extra meeting, or a person everyone depends on to keep something moving, don’t just ask whether the workaround works.
Ask why it had to exist at all.
And then ask:
What are we paying people to compensate for?
You may find that the workaround isn’t really the problem.
It’s the clue.
And if the underlying condition stays in place, you’ll keep paying for it whether you notice it or not.