Employees who work around a prescribed process may be exposing a mismatch between the official workflow and the work that actually needs to get done. That is a reason to investigate—not proof that the process is fixed, that the workaround is safe, or that anyone is acting improperly.
To turn these signals into useful improvements, compare the written process with what employees do, learn why they depart from it, assess the consequences, and test a response. Process logs can help locate patterns, but conversations and observation are essential to understand them.
What a workaround can—and cannot—tell you
A workaround is a departure from a prescribed procedure that helps someone complete a task under particular conditions. It can compensate for software that fits poorly, a system failure, an instruction that misses practical details, or an earlier error that makes the next prescribed step impossible. It can also introduce extra effort, cost, or danger. The behavior is evidence of how work is being done; its value and risk depend on the context. Van der Waal and co-authors describe these causes and trade-offs.
Do not treat deviation as a shortcut to a conclusion about an employee. In a qualitative study spanning six case-study organizations, Soffer and co-authors found that workaround motivations arose from perceived misalignment between organizational, local-unit, or personal goals and the way processes pursued those goals. The useful question is therefore not simply whether someone followed the procedure, but what goal they were trying to achieve and what constraint pushed them off the expected path. The study’s findings are qualitative, not a representative survey of employees.
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How to find the gap between the official process and actual work
Ask people to show the work
Invite employees to walk through a recent task from start to finish. Ask what they were trying to achieve, where the prescribed route stopped working, what they did instead, and who else was involved. Observe the work where appropriate. Asking only whether people follow the written procedure is unlikely to reveal the conditions that make a workaround necessary.
Compare practice with the intended workflow
Set the documented process beside the steps employees describe or demonstrate. Where suitable event logs exist, process mining can surface patterns that merit investigation. SWORD, a method described in a 2025 paper, uses 22 patterns to identify potential workarounds in event logs. Its evaluation in two hospital departments identified 11 unique workaround types. Those are results from the reported evaluation, not general counts of how many workaround types exist or how common they are elsewhere. Read the SWORD study.
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Check what the data actually represent
Logs show recorded events, not necessarily the reason behind them. Check that event names have clear meanings and that the intended process is described well enough to make a meaningful comparison. In a small- and medium-sized company case study, incomplete descriptions of the intended process hindered detection; the authors also emphasized human interpretation for organizational learning. The case study explains these limits.
A 2026 paper similarly cautions that event logs and process-mining techniques provide indications rather than conclusive or exhaustive detection. Interviews and observation can add context, but take time. The paper discusses both evidence sources. Use analytics to decide where to look more closely, not to infer intent, safety, or benefit from a pattern alone.
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Document each workaround before choosing a fix
For each recurring or consequential workaround, capture the conditions around it. That record lets the organization evaluate the behavior rather than label it prematurely.
- Trigger: What system condition, instruction, handoff, exception, or earlier error prompted the departure?
- Goal: What was the employee trying to accomplish, and whose needs were they balancing?
- Actual steps and participants: What happened in practice, and who was involved?
- Frequency: How often does it occur, if frequency has been measured? State the data source and limits rather than assuming a log captures every instance.
- Effects: What does it mean for employee workload, customers, quality, safety, compliance, security, cost, or delay?
Separate what has been observed from what is inferred. A log pattern may identify a sequence to examine; it cannot, by itself, establish why someone took those steps or whether the result was beneficial.
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Choose a response based on the cause and consequences
There is no automatic rule that a workaround should be adopted or stopped. First identify the cause or competing goals, then compare possible responses against the effects on workers, customers, and the organization. The following options are practical choices to evaluate, not a universally validated scoring system.
| Possible response | When it may fit | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Repair or redesign the process or information system | The prescribed route creates avoidable friction, fails in a recurring condition, or does not support the work people need to complete. | Whether the change removes the root cause and improves the workflow without creating a new safety, quality, security, or compliance problem. |
| Clarify or revise policy | Instructions are ambiguous, omit a practical condition, or conflict with how the work is actually carried out. | Whether employees can understand the revised direction and whether it accounts for legitimate operating conditions. |
| Enable a legitimate exception | Not every case can reasonably follow one standard route, but exceptions can be made explicit and controlled. | Who may use the exception, under what conditions, and how its effects and risks will be monitored. |
| Adopt a local practice | Investigation shows a local adaptation produces a demonstrably useful result without unacceptable harm. | Whether it remains effective and safe when used more broadly, rather than only in the circumstances where it arose. |
| Block a harmful path | A workaround creates unacceptable risk or damage. | Whether stopping it will leave workers unable to complete the task, and what safe, workable route replaces it. |
Compare each viable option by the root cause it addresses, the goals it serves, its effects on safety, quality, compliance, and security, whether a process or system change is feasible, and how you will check the result. A response that removes one workaround but leaves its triggering problem in place may simply push employees toward a different one.
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Recheck the process after the change
After implementing a response, return to the people and conditions that exposed the original mismatch. Check whether the friction has eased, whether the task can be completed through the intended route, and whether the change has introduced another problem. Continue observing recurring patterns and listening to employees: process improvement is an ongoing cycle, not a one-time cleanup.
A 2026 paper proposes a workaround-driven improvement cycle centered on recurrent patterns, root-cause analysis, and structured response selection. The authors report three case studies and evaluation interviews with seven process-improvement experts. These support describing it as a proposed approach evaluated in organizational contexts, not as proof of guaranteed productivity or financial gains. See the paper’s approach and evaluation.
Further reading on workarounds and process improvement
A 2019 systematic review examined 70 articles about information-systems users’ workarounds and their potential for improving processes. That figure describes the review’s article corpus, not the prevalence of workarounds in organizations. Utrecht University’s research record provides details of the publication.
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