The Work Is Getting Done. That Doesn’t Mean the System Is Working.

A decision stalls, but the work doesn’t. Someone makes the call anyway.

A process no longer quite fits, so the team creates a spreadsheet on the side. A handoff is unclear, so one dependable person starts translating between two departments. An approval takes too long, so people learn who to text instead.

Nothing has fallen apart. From a distance, the team may look impressively resourceful.

That is part of what makes workarounds so easy to miss.

We tend to notice workplace problems when something clearly stops working: a deadline is missed, a customer complains, someone quits or a project goes sideways.

People are remarkably good at adapting. When roles blur, priorities shift, information arrives late or a process no longer reflects reality, capable employees rarely sit still and wait for someone to repair the system. They find a way through.

That may be exactly what the moment requires. The concern comes when “figuring something out” becomes the organization’s standard operating procedure.

Sometimes the biggest clue is that people keep finding a way to get the work done.

When adaptation becomes a pattern

There is a useful distinction between a one-time workaround and a workaround pattern.

A one-time workaround may simply be good judgment. Something unexpected happened, and someone found a sensible way forward.

If the same detour keeps appearing—or several people have independently developed their own versions of it—I would get curious.

What are they compensating for?

Maybe ownership is less clear than everyone assumes. Perhaps priorities changed, but no one translated that change into the day-to-day work. A process that made sense two years ago may no longer support the volume or complexity it carries today. People may have learned that getting clarification takes longer than making an educated guess.

None of these explanations automatically means someone has failed. Workplaces are complicated systems, and systems change. Roles evolve. Teams grow. Customers ask for different things. Leaders come and go. A process that once worked beautifully can become inadequate without anyone making a formal decision to change it.

A normalized workaround can make it hard to see when a process has stopped working as well as it once did.

Research has documented this dynamic for years. In a Journal of Operations Management study, Bradley Morrison described workplace workarounds as both a solution to an immediate frontline problem and a mask for an underlying system weakness. When the workaround succeeds in keeping the work moving, the conditions that created it can persist.

The workaround works. That success reduces the pressure to examine why it became necessary.

Start with clarity

One place I look is Roles & Responsibilities.

That is something we look at closely in our work at Furst Group and NuBrick Partners, whether we are helping an organization think through leadership selection, development or transition.

Gallup’s most recent U.S. data shows that only 49% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work. That is an improvement from some recent lows, yet roughly half of employees still do not strongly report that basic level of clarity.

Role clarity extends well beyond a job description. It includes knowing what you own, what someone else owns, where a decision belongs and what success looks like when priorities compete.

When those things become fuzzy, work does not necessarily stop. Someone usually fills the gap.

That person may become the unofficial decision-maker, translator, checker, problem-solver or keeper of institutional memory. Over time, everyone may depend on that person without ever deciding that the responsibility belongs to them.

From the outside, this can look like collaboration. To the person filling those gaps, it may feel more like carrying extra work.

Gallup and Workhuman have also found that employees who strongly agree they know what is expected of them are 47% less likely to report frequent burnout. Unclear expectations do not explain every case of burnout, of course. The finding does suggest that clarity shapes how people experience their workload and their ability to navigate it.

Look at how the work really gets done

In the Three Buckets framework I use, the Workaround Bucket is often the easiest one to see. What fills that bucket may have started somewhere else.

Sometimes the leak is in Roles & Responsibilities:

Who owns this?

Who decides?

What exactly am I responsible for?

Sometimes it begins in Goals & Planning:

Where are we going?

Which priorities lead when they compete?

Does the current plan still match reality?

Then come the Workarounds: the extra steps, side conversations, patches and heroic saves people create to bridge those process or relational gaps.

Trying to eliminate every workaround could also remove some useful ingenuity. I’d pay closer attention to the workarounds that keep showing up.

Choose one process that regularly causes frustration and ask the people closest to it to describe how the work really gets done. You need the Tuesday-at-3:30 version—the one where something is late, somebody is unavailable and the customer still needs an answer.

Where does someone have to chase information? Where do two people believe they own the same decision, or neither believes they do? Where is someone maintaining a separate document because the official one cannot be trusted? Which steps does the team routinely skip, add or reinterpret?

These patterns are data. They show you where the official system and the lived system have parted company.

Before changing the workaround, ask one more question: If this workaround disappeared tomorrow, what problem would come back?

The answer may point toward the clarification, decision or courageous conversation that has been missing all along.

The hidden cost of capable people

The more capable the team, the longer a struggling system may be able to hide.

Resourceful people compensate. They solve problems, cover for one another, remember what the process forgot and make a call when nobody else will. Those are valuable qualities, and leaders are understandably grateful for them.

Still, a team’s ability to keep the organization moving does not prove the organization has given people what they need.

This is a pattern we pay attention to at Furst Group and NuBrick Partners because leadership transitions and development work often make these hidden dependencies easier to see.

Repeated translating, patching, chasing and guessing can create costs that remain hidden for a long time. The dependable person becomes the only one who knows how something works. A side spreadsheet becomes essential infrastructure. An unofficial decision-maker carries authority without the role, information or support that should accompany it.

By then, the workaround may be woven so deeply into the work that removing it creates a new problem.

That is why the workaround may be the best clue you have to create a more sustainable way of getting the work done.

Before asking people to follow an agreed upon process and to stop working around the system, find out what the system has been asking them to work around.

References

Gallup. (n.d.). Employee engagement. Retrieved August 27, 2026, from Gallup employee engagement indicator

This is the source for the current finding that, as of May 2026, 49% of U.S. employees say they know what is expected of them at work.

Kemp, A. (2024, August 14). Employee wellbeing hinges on management, not work mode. Gallup. Gallup article

This is the source for the finding that employees who strongly agree they know what is expected of them are 47% less likely to experience frequent burnout.

Morrison, J. B. (2015). The problem with workarounds is that they work: The persistence of resource shortages. Journal of Operations Management, 39–40, 79–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2015.07.008

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