The Workarounds Your Team Invents Can Show You What to Improve Next
October 1, 2026
Executive Brief
Summary
When someone keeps a spreadsheet beside your official platform or adds an extra step to an established process, they may be solving a problem your system leaves unresolved. Understanding that effort can help you identify useful improvements before committing to another feature or a larger technology project. Your team’s ingenuity can give you a practical starting point for making everyday work better.
Questions Answered in This Article
- What can employee workarounds tell you about your systems?
- They can reveal missing information, difficult tasks, or decisions your existing process does not adequately support. They may also reflect an unfamiliar feature or a personal preference, so investigate before deciding what needs to change.
- Should every useful workaround become an official feature?
- The right response depends on how widely the need is shared and what it would take to support it. You may be able to help through a configuration change, clearer guidance, or a small process adjustment.
- How can you tell whether a workaround reveals a broader need?
- Look at who else encounters the difficulty, how often it occurs, and what happens when it remains unresolved. Compare the underlying need across people whose responsibilities differ.
- How do you improve the process without discouraging initiative?
- Involve the person who developed the workaround and acknowledge what their solution taught you. Give them a role in evaluating whether the proposed improvement supports the work.
Start With the Spreadsheet Beside the Platform
If you find one of your project coordinators maintains a spreadsheet alongside the platform you use to manage work, you have uncovered a potential project. Your platform already contains assignments, deadlines, and status fields. At first glance, the spreadsheet looks like duplication, particularly if you have invested time in making the official system reliable.
Ask the coordinator to show you how they use it, and the picture may change. The spreadsheet might bring together requests from several projects so they can see which ones are waiting for the same person. It may contain a note explaining what would allow each request to move forward. Before a weekly meeting, the coordinator opens it to answer a question the platform makes difficult to resolve.
You have learned something useful before changing anything. The employee has identified a recurring need and assembled a way to address it. Their solution may be imperfect, but the effort they put into maintaining it tells you the need deserves a closer look.
Before asking them to stop using the spreadsheet, find out which part of their work would become harder if it disappeared. That conversation gives you a better chance of improving the system everyone depends on.
People Adapt Systems to the Work in Front of Them
Your official process describes how you expect work to happen. Everyday responsibilities introduce circumstances that the process may handle poorly or overlook. Someone still needs to finish the task, so they find a workable route through the difficulty.
You may already see these adaptations without giving them much thought. An employee keeps instructions for a task they perform infrequently. A manager adds a meeting because the platform’s status information leaves important questions unanswered. Someone starts a separate list to remember which requests need follow-up. Each response can reveal where your process asks people to supply something for themselves.
Those clues deserve investigation, but they do not all point to a product problem. You may already have a feature that the employee has not discovered, or a temporary arrangement may have outlived the situation that created it. Understanding why the adaptation remains useful helps you decide what needs to change.
Ask Someone to Show You the Last Time They Used It
A demonstration will often tell you more than a general explanation. Ask the person to choose a recent piece of work and walk you through what happened. You want to see the moment when the established process stopped providing enough support and the workaround became useful.
With the project coordinator, begin with a request that was delayed last week. Where did it first appear? What information did the coordinator need before they could act? Have them open the relevant screens and show you how they determined what to do next.
Pay attention to the point where they leave the main system. They may export information, consult a message, or add a note elsewhere. Ask what they are trying to learn at that moment and what the additional step provides.
Sometimes the most revealing detail is a column that seems unimportant to everyone else. A short explanation of why a request is waiting may be more valuable to the coordinator than several formal status fields. It helps them distinguish between work that needs a decision and work that simply needs more time.
Let the demonstration finish before proposing a solution. If you immediately suggest a dashboard, you may steer the conversation toward the information that dashboard could display. Following the task through gives you a fuller view of the decision the person is trying to make.
Separate the Need From the Tool They Built
The spreadsheet reflects the options available to the person who created it, along with their habits and knowledge. Copying it directly into your official platform could preserve useful thinking, but it could also carry forward limitations that a different approach would resolve.
Try describing the need without naming the workaround. In the coordinator’s case, you might need a way to identify stalled requests across projects and understand who can move them forward. That description gives you room to consider an existing view, a change to status information, or a clearer decision process.
This becomes particularly useful when one spreadsheet serves several purposes. It might combine reporting, personal reminders, and notes from meetings. You may decide that only part belongs in a shared system. Understanding those functions keeps a useful discovery from becoming a larger project than you need.
Find Out What the Workaround Is Costing and Protecting
An unofficial process can create extra effort while also preventing a more consequential problem. You need to understand both sides before making a change.
The coordinator spends time updating the spreadsheet, but it may prevent requests from being forgotten. Removing it could reduce duplicate entry while making stalled work harder to see. You would leave the employee’s responsibility intact while taking away something they rely on to fulfill it.
Ask what it takes to keep the spreadsheet useful. Does the person copy information daily or check it against another source? Then examine what happens when it is unavailable. A missed update may cause a minor inconvenience, or it may affect a decision with wider consequences.
The answers help you locate the improvement that matters. You might preserve the view of blocked work while eliminating the effort of rebuilding it. Alternatively, you may discover that the difficulty comes from inconsistent updates by other people. Connecting the spreadsheet to a live system would do little to resolve that inconsistency.
Before approving a replacement, return to the responsibility that prompted the workaround. The employee should be at least as capable of completing that work with the proposed approach.
Look for the Same Need in Other Forms
Once you understand one person’s experience, speak with others who perform related work. Ask how they answer the question the workaround helps resolve. You may discover that they have found different ways to handle the same difficulty.
One colleague keeps notes in a document. Another asks for updates in a meeting, while a third relies on memory. Those variations suggest that several people are independently investing effort to compensate for a shared gap.
They can also show you where a common solution needs flexibility. The coordinator may need to see all stalled requests, while a department manager needs only those requiring a decision from their team. You could support both without asking everyone to adopt the coordinator’s entire working method.
Seek out someone who manages the task successfully within your current system, too. Their experience may reveal an existing capability or a difference in how the work is assigned. That comparison can change your understanding of the problem before you invest in solving it.
Choose a Response That Fits What You Learned
Your investigation may lead to a small change. If the necessary information already exists, a saved filter could make it easier to use. If people interpret a status differently, agreeing on its meaning may help more than adding another field.
You may instead need to clarify responsibility. The coordinator could be tracking requests because nobody knows who can resolve a particular kind of issue. Making those requests visible will help, but you still need someone with the authority to decide. Address that question alongside the technology.
Compare the available approaches and include the effort each would take to maintain. A custom feature may be justified, but you will need someone to support it and adapt it when the process changes. A small configuration adjustment might meet the need with less ongoing work.
In How to Lower Campaign Costs Without Reducing Marketing Output, I explored how reusable capabilities reduce work your team repeatedly performs. A workaround can show you where that investment would make a practical difference. You have a specific task to improve and someone who can help you evaluate the result.
Test the Improvement Against an Actual Task
Bring the person who developed the workaround into the evaluation. They can help you recognize whether the proposed change addresses the original difficulty or merely presents the information differently.
For the coordinator, choose a recent example of stalled work and examine it using the proposed approach. Can they identify what is waiting, understand why, and determine who needs to act? Watch where they still consult another source or supply an explanation from memory.
Then try it with someone whose responsibilities differ. A view that makes sense to its original creator may depend on shorthand other people do not understand. You want to preserve the useful insight while making the experience clear to the people who will use it.
Keep the test focused on the task you set out to improve. A demonstration can quickly generate requests for additional capabilities. Record those ideas, but first establish whether your proposed change resolves the known problem.
Preserve the Judgment Behind the Information
Some workarounds contain knowledge that never became part of your official process. A note may explain why a request needs special attention. An extra step may reflect something an experienced employee learned after a previous failure.
When you move the work into a shared system, decide which details should remain available and who will maintain them. A formal status may not carry the same meaning as the short explanation it replaces. If you remove that explanation, the person receiving the request may have to ask for it again.
In AI Should Remove Handoffs Before It Removes Jobs, I examined the effort involved in preparing information for someone else to use. Here, you can use the workaround to see which context matters at that transition. Preserving it can save the next person from reconstructing the same explanation.
Make the Transition Worthwhile for the Person Doing the Work
A replacement needs to prove useful under everyday conditions. The employee has already invested effort in a method they understand, and your new approach may initially take longer. Give them room to practice and bring forward anything the redesign missed.
Agree on what the shared system will now provide. In the coordinator’s case, that might be a dependable view of stalled requests with enough information to prepare for the weekly meeting. Establish who maintains the underlying information so the employee does not inherit a different version of the same cleanup work.
Be explicit about when the old method can be retired. A short comparison period may help you verify the new approach, but keeping both indefinitely can leave the employee responsible for duplicate work. If the spreadsheet remains necessary, investigate which function the replacement still fails to support.
Show the person how their contribution influenced the result. You might point to a question their spreadsheet helped answer or an explanation that became part of the shared process. That acknowledgment gives them a reason to continue bringing useful observations to you.
Give the Discovery a Place in Your Priorities
Finding an improvement does not mean you should immediately displace other commitments. Consider how often the problem occurs, what consequence it creates, and how much effort a solution would require. Those questions help you compare it with other legitimate needs.
Tell the employee what will happen next. You may make a small change now, investigate a broader issue, or leave the current arrangement in place while another priority proceeds. Explaining your decision helps them understand why their suggestion is moving forward or waiting. Silence can make the invitation to share their experience feel unproductive.
As I discussed in Your Digital Roadmap Needs a Stop-Doing List, you need to consider new responsibilities alongside the work your team already carries. If an improvement can replace repeated manual effort or retire an unnecessary step, include that benefit in your decision. You can then assess both what you would add and what you could stop asking people to do.
Keep Curiosity in the Conversation
Your response to one workaround can influence whether you hear about the next one. If someone expects immediate criticism, they have less reason to explain what they have been doing. You lose access to information that could help you improve the process.
You can investigate with curiosity and still address a clear problem. If an arrangement creates an inappropriate use of data or access, correct it while finding a suitable way to meet the underlying need. The person still has work to complete, and understanding that responsibility helps you make a lasting correction.
Invite this kind of discussion during ordinary project reviews. Ask which task requires an extra list or which part of the process someone has had to figure out independently. A focused question about recent work is more likely to produce a useful example than a broad request for improvement ideas.
Over time, these conversations give you a clearer understanding of how your systems perform beyond demonstrations and process documents. You can see where your official approach supports the work and where people supply the missing pieces.
Start With Something Someone Already Uses
Choose one recurring workaround and ask its creator to show you the last time it helped. Follow the task closely enough to understand the need, then look for the same difficulty elsewhere. You can begin with an ordinary conversation about work already in progress.
You may find a modest adjustment, a better use of an existing capability, or a more substantial change worth considering. Whatever the answer, you have a concrete basis for evaluating it and someone who can tell you whether it helps.
Your team’s adaptations contain knowledge you might otherwise miss. Taking the time to understand them gives you a way to turn individual problem-solving into a better shared process. Before deciding what to do with the spreadsheet beside your platform, find out what it has been doing for the person who built it.
