Automation is supposed to eliminate friction. It promises faster approvals, fewer errors, cleaner handoffs, and lower operating costs. On paper, that is exactly what process automation delivers. In practice, many organizations discover something far less elegant: the official workflow gets automated, and employees immediately build workarounds around it.
This happens in finance, HR, IT, operations, customer service, and procurement. The approved process lives inside the platform. The real process lives in inboxes, spreadsheets, side chats, shared drives, and favors between coworkers.
That gap matters more than leaders often realize. When employees consistently bypass automation to get work done, the problem is rarely that people “resist change.” More often, the automation was designed around policy logic instead of operational reality.
The Official Process vs. The Real Process
Most business processes have two versions.
The first is the documented version: standardized steps, approval rules, system fields, SLA timers, and audit trails. This is the version used in presentations and transformation roadmaps.
The second is the lived version: exceptions, urgency, missing data, judgment calls, relationship-based escalations, and practical shortcuts that keep work moving.
When organizations automate only the documented version, they often remove the flexibility people relied on to handle real-world complexity. Employees then recreate that flexibility outside the system.
Researchers studying business process management have long noted that real work is dynamic and context-dependent, while formal workflows tend to assume predictable sequences and stable inputs. When that mismatch grows, informal practices emerge to bridge the gap.
Why Employees Build Workarounds
Workarounds are not usually acts of rebellion. They are adaptive responses to constraints.
A rigid intake form may require fields users do not have. An approval chain may route simple requests through five people. A ticket may be blocked because one dropdown value was chosen incorrectly. A procurement workflow may take two weeks for an item needed today. A new-hire process may create accounts on schedule but fail to answer basic questions a manager would have handled in minutes.
When deadlines are real and systems are slow, people optimize for outcomes.
Studies in organizational behavior have shown that employees frequently develop informal practices when formal systems prevent task completion, especially in time-sensitive environments. These behaviors often improve short-term productivity while increasing long-term governance risk.
The Hidden Cost of “Helpful” Shortcuts
At first, workarounds can look harmless—even efficient.
Someone keeps a spreadsheet to track requests because the dashboard is unreliable. A manager asks teams to email requests directly instead of using the portal. Staff maintain their own shadow checklist because the automated workflow skips critical context. Teams create shared accounts because the access process takes too long.
The business may still function, but control starts to erode.
Leaders lose visibility into actual cycle times. Audit trails become incomplete. Metrics look better than reality because off-system work is invisible. Data quality declines as records are updated in multiple places. Security risk rises when access or approvals happen outside governed channels.
This is one reason digital transformation initiatives often underperform expectations. Technology may be deployed successfully while operational behavior remains unchanged—or becomes more fragmented.
According to research from Gartner, organizations that focus only on technology implementation without redesigning work practices often fail to capture expected transformation value because process, culture, and operating model changes lag behind the tools (https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/3-ways-to-measure-digital-transformation-roi).
Bad Automation Usually Optimizes the Wrong Thing
Many automation programs are built around internal priorities: standardization, compliance, cost reduction, and system consistency. Those goals matter. But if they become the only design criteria, the user experience deteriorates quickly.
Employees care about different questions:
How fast can I get this done?
What happens when my case is unusual?
Who can help if the system fails?
Why do I need to enter the same data twice?
Can I fix a mistake without restarting everything?
When automation ignores these realities, people stop trusting the workflow. Once trust is gone, adoption becomes performative. Staff use the system because they have to, then do the real work elsewhere.
Human-centered design research consistently finds that systems aligned to user context and cognitive workflow outperform systems designed purely for administrative control.
What Better Automation Looks Like
The solution is not to remove automation. It is to automate the right layer of the process.
Start by observing how work actually gets done. Interview frontline employees, not just process owners. Review exceptions, escalations, manual overrides, and common complaints. The unofficial process often reveals where the real value is created.
Design for flexibility where judgment is required. Not every decision should be binary. Introduce guided choices, exception paths, and fast-track models for low-risk requests.
Reduce unnecessary friction. If users repeatedly bypass a step, determine whether the step creates control or just delay. Many approvals exist because they were added once, not because they still add value.
Create visible feedback loops. If employees submit requests into a black box, they will find side channels. Clear status updates, ownership, and response expectations build trust.
Measure behavior, not just system usage. High submission volume does not mean success if users are simultaneously relying on spreadsheets and side messages to complete the process.
Academic studies on sociotechnical systems have long emphasized that performance improves when technology and human work structures are designed together rather than independently.
The Best Signal Leaders Ignore
One of the strongest indicators of broken automation is not a system outage. It is the sentence: “That’s not how we really do it.”
When you hear that, pay attention.
It means employees have already mapped the gap between policy and practice. They know where the workflow fails, where delays happen, and what it takes to get results. Hidden in every workaround is process intelligence the organization has not yet captured.
Final Thought
Automation should remove friction, not relocate it.
If teams are building side processes around your official process, the issue is not that employees are difficult. It is that the workflow is incomplete. The organizations that win with automation are not the ones with the most forms, bots, or approval rules. They are the ones that design systems around how work actually happens.
Because when the real process lives outside the platform, the platform is not the process.
