Stop Asking People to Work Around Broken Systems
Every organization has workarounds. It might be the spreadsheet someone created because the official system does not provide the information people need; or the supervisor everyone calls because no one understands the formal process; or the extra meeting created because two departments cannot coordinate through the existing structure. It might also be the employee who manually checks something every Friday because the technology cannot be trusted to do it correctly.
Workarounds can be ingenious. They demonstrate creativity, commitment, and adaptability. They can also hide how badly a system is functioning. And that is the paradox. The better your people become at compensating for a broken system, the harder it may become for leadership to see that the system is broken.
Consider the employee who stays an extra hour every evening because a workflow takes twice as long as it should. The work gets done, the dashboard looks fine, and the deadline is met. From the organization’s perspective, the process appears to be working. Yet it is not working. The employee is working around it.
Organizations frequently confuse successful outcomes with healthy systems. If the report gets submitted, the system worked. If the client gets served, the system worked. If the shift gets covered, the system worked. If the project launches, the system worked. Yet what did it require from the people inside the system? That question, in turn, changes how we define performance.
Perhaps the report was submitted because someone spent Sunday afternoon completing it. Perhaps the client received services because one employee personally called five departments. Perhaps the shift was covered because the same dependable employee once again sacrificed a day off. Perhaps the project launched because the manager quietly absorbed work that should have been distributed across three roles.
In other words, the outcome may be successful, while the system may still be failing. This is why leaders need to become interested not only in whether work gets done, but how work gets done. The “how” contains enormous organizational information. When people repeatedly create workarounds, they are telling us where the formal system and the actual work have separated.
That gap deserves attention. Workarounds usually begin innocently. Something does not work, and someone finds another way. The workaround succeeds, and other people begin using it. Eventually, what was supposed to be temporary becomes part of how the organization operates. Years later, new employees may be taught both processes: “Here is the official procedure.” Then comes the sentence that should make every leader curious: “But here is how we actually do it.” That sentence is organizational gold, for somewhere between those two statements lies information about the system.
At SWEET Institute, we can examine that gap through the Four Layers of Transformation.
At the Conscious Layer, leaders identify the workaround itself. What are people doing differently from the official process? Where are extra steps occurring? What tasks are being duplicated? Where are people manually compensating for technology, policies, staffing, or unclear workflows?
The goal is not immediately to eliminate the workaround. First, understand why it exists.
At the Preconscious Layer, we examine the experience of navigating the system.
Where do people anticipate difficulty before it even occurs?
Which processes cause employees to sigh before beginning them?
Where do people automatically seek help because experience has taught them that the formal pathway will not work?
Employees develop extraordinary practical knowledge about organizational friction. Much of that knowledge never appears in policies or dashboards. It lives in people’s bodies, habits, conversations, and expectations.
At the Unconscious Layer, we examine something deeper:
What has the organization learned to normalize?
Perhaps everyone knows a process is inefficient, but no one questions it anymore. Perhaps chronic understaffing has become so familiar that extraordinary effort is treated as ordinary performance. Perhaps employees have stopped reporting a technology problem because nothing happened the previous five times they reported it. Perhaps the organization celebrates people for “going above and beyond” when they are actually compensating for structural deficiencies.
This is where resilience can become complicated. Resilience is valuable. Organizations need people who can adapt, recover, improvise, and persist. However, resilience should never become the organization’s excuse for refusing to improve the conditions people must continually be resilient against.
Sometimes what leadership calls resilience is actually compensation. When compensation becomes invisible, the system begins depending on sacrifice.
Then we reach the Existential Layer.
Here the question becomes: What do we believe people owe the organization when the organization itself is not working well?
Do we expect commitment to mean endless adaptation?
Do we interpret exhaustion as insufficient resilience?
Do we celebrate people for repeatedly rescuing systems that should have been redesigned?
Or do we understand leadership as having a responsibility to make good work easier to do?
That final question matters. One of leadership’s most important responsibilities is to reduce unnecessary friction between people’s effort and the organization’s purpose. Employees need to certainly work hard. Meaningful work often requires effort, persistence, discipline, and sacrifice. However, there is a profound difference between effort required by the mission and effort required by a poorly designed system. The first may be unavoidable. The second ought to make leaders curious.
Imagine asking employees one question: “What part of your job is harder than it needs to be?” The answers could become one of the most valuable organizational assessments leadership ever receives. You may discover unnecessary approvals, duplicated documentation, and conflicting instructions. You may discover technology that creates more work than it saves, meetings that exist because another process does not work, or information entered repeatedly into different systems. You may also discover policies designed years ago for circumstances that no longer exist; and people whose unofficial responsibilities have grown far beyond their job descriptions simply because they are competent enough to make things work.
None of these problems may look dramatic. That is precisely why they survive. Organizational friction usually does not arrive as a crisis. It arrives as five unnecessary minutes, an extra email, another form, or one more approval. It arrives as a second phone call, a meeting that could have been avoided, or a process someone must explain again.
Individually, these costs look small. Multiplied across hundreds of employees and thousands of workdays, they become culture. They become cost; and eventually, they become exhaustion.
This is where the SWEET four-step rhythm can become a practical tool for organizational redesign.
First, Stabilize. Understand what people are currently doing to keep the work functioning. Do not remove a workaround before understanding what problem it is solving.
Then, Reframe. Instead of asking, “Why aren’t employees following the process?” ask, “What has the process taught employees they need to do instead?”
Next, Decide with Clarity and Transparency. Determine which friction points will be redesigned, who owns the redesign, and what employees should expect.
Finally, Align Work with Purpose. Ask whether every significant process helps people accomplish the organization’s mission, or merely satisfies the inertia of how things have always been done.
This is central to the Beyond Burnout 12-Month Leadership Cohort because sustainable performance cannot depend indefinitely on people compensating for organizational dysfunction.
You cannot wellness-program your way around a broken workflow. You cannot resilience-train your way around chronic role confusion. You cannot motivate your way around unnecessary bureaucracy. You cannot ask people to practice self-care while preserving systems that unnecessarily consume their energy.
Sometimes the most compassionate leadership intervention is not another resource for employees. It is fixing something that should never have been so difficult in the first place.
Here is the question for your leadership team this week: What are our employees exceptionally good at working around?
Find one example. Do not immediately praise their ingenuity. Study it. Ask why the workaround exists. Ask what would happen if the person who created it left tomorrow. Ask what the workaround is costing. Then ask the most important question: What would it take to make the workaround unnecessary? That is where organizational improvement begins.
The Call to Action
If your strongest employees are constantly improvising, if unofficial processes are more reliable than official ones, if people repeatedly say, “That’s just how we have to do it here,” or if extraordinary effort is required to produce ordinary outcomes, your organization may not have a people problem.
It may have a design problem.
The Beyond Burnout 12-Month Leadership Cohort helps leaders examine the systems beneath performance—identifying the unnecessary friction, hidden workarounds, structural contradictions, and accumulated practices that consume human energy without advancing the mission.
We Stabilize. Reframe. Decide with Clarity and Transparency. Align Work with Purpose.
Because your people ought to bring their best energy to the work that matters.
They ought not to have to spend their best energy overcoming the organization itself.
