Most businesses have at least one process nobody actually designed.
It started with a problem that needed to be solved quickly.
Someone created a spreadsheet. Someone else added a step. A shared folder was created. An email became part of the routine. Maybe somebody wrote instructions so the next person would know what to do.
It worked.
So everyone kept doing it.
Three years later, what started as a temporary workaround is now simply “the process.”
And sometimes nobody remembers why.
The interesting thing about these processes is that they rarely look broken. Work gets completed. Customers get served. Reports get produced. Documents eventually get where they need to go.
But behind the scenes, people may be spending hours every week doing work that only exists because nobody has stopped to ask whether there is still a better way.
Workarounds Aren’t Necessarily Bad
There’s a reason workarounds exist. Businesses need to keep moving.
If two systems don’t communicate, someone finds a way to move information between them. If a report isn’t available automatically, someone builds it manually. If documents arrive in different formats, somebody sorts and renames them.
Those solutions can be exactly what’s needed at the time.
The problem comes when nobody goes back and asks whether all those extra steps are still necessary.
Technology changes. Businesses grow. New systems are added. Processes evolve.
But the workaround often stays exactly where it was.
A process that made perfect sense five years ago may be creating unnecessary work today.
What Does a Workaround Look Like?
Usually, it doesn’t look particularly dramatic.
It looks like downloading an attachment from an email, renaming it and saving it to a shared folder.
It looks like copying information from a PDF into a spreadsheet.
It looks like someone checking a folder every morning to see whether anything new arrived.
It looks like emailing a manager for approval, waiting for the response and then manually updating another system.
It looks like creating the same report every Friday by pulling information from several different places.
You can find versions of these processes almost everywhere.
Accounting teams may manually enter invoice information that already exists on a document. HR may copy employee information between forms and systems. Operations teams may maintain spreadsheets because important information lives in several different places. Customer service may have to search through emails, documents and old records before answering a question.
Records and documents are especially good at creating these hidden processes because the information exists, but getting it to the right person at the right time requires work.
Every individual step may take only a few minutes.
That’s exactly why these processes can stick around for so long.
A Few Minutes Adds Up Quickly
Imagine a task takes 10 minutes and someone performs it five times a day.
That’s 50 minutes.
Over a five-day workweek, it’s more than four hours.
Over the course of a year, that one little task can consume more than 200 hours of someone’s time.
And that’s only one task.
Now consider how many similar activities happen across an organization every day.
Download this. Rename that. Enter this number. Check that folder. Send this email. Update that spreadsheet. Follow up tomorrow.
The bigger cost isn’t always one enormous manual process.
Sometimes it’s hundreds of tiny interruptions scattered throughout the day.
Those interruptions also have another cost: they break concentration. Someone who stops what they’re doing to locate a document or transfer information isn’t only spending time on the task itself. They also have to switch away from whatever they were doing and then get back into it afterward.
That makes a five-minute task more disruptive than it appears on paper.
Why Workarounds Become Invisible
One reason these processes survive is simple: people get used to them.
After someone downloads the same report every Monday for two years, downloading the report no longer feels like an extra step. It’s just part of Monday.
New employees are trained to do it the same way.
Eventually, nobody asks why.
That creates an interesting problem when businesses start looking for automation opportunities. Leadership may look for large, obvious processes to transform while employees are performing dozens of smaller manual tasks that nobody thinks to mention.
That’s why one of the most useful questions you can ask employees isn’t:
“What should we automate?”
It’s:
“What do you have to do over and over again that you wish you didn’t?”
The answers tend to be much more useful.
Look for the Handoffs
Another easy way to spot unnecessary work is to look at what happens when information moves from one place or person to another.
Does someone have to download something before another person can use it?
Does information have to be copied from one system into another?
Does somebody need to send an email to tell the next person a task is ready?
Does a document have to be renamed, categorized or filed manually?
Does someone have to remember to follow up?
Does a person have to search several places before they can answer a routine question?
These handoffs are often where unnecessary work hides.
They’re also places where mistakes happen.
A file gets saved in the wrong folder. An email is overlooked. Someone copies the wrong number. A follow-up doesn’t happen. Two people update different versions of the same spreadsheet.
The process technically works, but only because people are constantly keeping it working.
What Could a Better Process Look Like?
Consider a simple example.
A company receives reports by email. An employee downloads each attachment, renames the file, saves it in the correct customer folder, enters information from the report into a spreadsheet and emails another employee to let them know the report is ready.
Nothing about that process sounds particularly difficult.
But it happens hundreds of times.
A better workflow might automatically recognize the incoming document, extract the information the business needs, associate it with the correct customer or project, store it in the appropriate location and make that information available to the next step in the process.
The employee doesn’t disappear from the workflow.
The repetitive work does.
Instead of spending time moving information around, that person can review exceptions, solve problems and handle the parts of the job that actually require judgment.
That distinction matters.
Good automation isn’t necessarily about removing people. It’s about deciding where people add value and where software can handle the predictable steps around them.
You Don’t Have to Rebuild Everything
There’s another misconception that can keep businesses from improving processes: the idea that automation requires a massive transformation project.
It doesn’t.
Sometimes the right answer is automating an entire workflow.
Sometimes it’s connecting two systems.
And sometimes it’s simply removing one irritating step.
If employees spend hours every month manually creating a report, automating that report may be enough.
If someone repeatedly enters information from documents into another system, automating that data capture may be enough.
If employees constantly search through old records to answer routine questions, making those records searchable and accessible may be enough.
Small improvements can create meaningful results when they remove work that happens repeatedly.
Run a Simple Workaround Audit
You don’t need a complicated process analysis to start finding these opportunities.
For one week, ask your team to notice repetitive work.
Look for tasks involving:
- Re-entering information that already exists somewhere else
- Moving files or data between systems
- Renaming, sorting or categorizing documents
- Creating the same reports repeatedly
- Searching multiple locations for information
- Sending routine notifications or follow-ups
- Checking whether something has happened
- Waiting for approvals before manually starting the next step
- Maintaining spreadsheets that duplicate information stored elsewhere
Then ask three questions about each one:
How often does this happen?
How much time does it take?
Does a person actually need to perform this step?
You may discover that some processes aren’t worth changing.
That’s fine.
The goal isn’t to automate everything.
The goal is to identify the places where people are spending meaningful amounts of time performing work that technology could reasonably handle.
Start With the Work Nobody Wants to Do
Businesses don’t usually need more technology simply for the sake of having more technology.
They need fewer unnecessary steps.
Start by asking your team:
“What do you have to do over and over again that feels like it should happen automatically?”
You’ll probably get answers immediately.
Those answers can tell you a lot about where time is being lost, where information gets stuck and where a process has accumulated unnecessary steps over the years.
Because the goal isn’t to automate as much as possible.
It’s to stop spending people’s time maintaining workarounds that no longer need to exist.
Ready to Take a Closer Look at Your Processes?
ExtractIQ helps organizations identify where information, disconnected systems and manual steps are slowing work down, then use automation and AI where they can make a practical difference.
Let’s find the work your team shouldn’t still be doing manually.