Why do users invent risky workarounds instead of following the supported workflow?

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The Direct Answer

Users invent workarounds because, at the exact moment they are working, the supported workflow is slower, less obvious, or less helpful than the shortcut they can improvise themselves. People are not being careless or defiant; they are optimizing for the deadline in front of them, and when the official path forces them to stop, switch to a manual, file a ticket, or ask a colleague, they route around it. That detour then hardens into “how we actually do it here.” The durable fix is to make the supported workflow the path of least resistance by delivering the steps inside the application itself, exactly where the decision is made — which is precisely what VisualSP does by overlaying context-sensitive walkthroughs onto the apps your team already uses.

Deeper Explanation

A risky workaround is almost always a rational response to friction, not an act of carelessness or defiance. When an application owner designs a workflow they see the whole system and the reason each step exists; the user at the keyboard sees only the screen in front of them and the clock. If the supported path forces them to leave that screen — to open a SharePoint document, search a wiki, wait on a help-desk reply, or interrupt a busy manager — the cost of compliance becomes visible and immediate, while the cost of the shortcut stays invisible and deferred, so people choose the fast path and repeat it. This is the same mechanism that drives shadow IT across the enterprise: research compiled on unsanctioned tool usage found that 67% of employees at Fortune 1000 companies use unapproved SaaS applications, and 69% admit to deliberately bypassing cybersecurity measures to get their work done. Those numbers are not a story about bad employees; they are a story about official paths that feel too slow. The same pattern repeats inside sanctioned applications: a user who cannot find the right field, who is unsure whether an approval is required, or who hits a validation error they do not understand will improvise a path that gets the record saved even if it quietly skips a control. The danger is that the improvised route bypasses the validations, approvals, and data-integrity checks the workflow was built to enforce, and because it is invisible to the people who designed the process, it spreads laterally — one person teaches the next, a new hire learns the shortcut before the supported path, and within months the workaround is the de facto standard, surfacing only later as a reconciliation problem, a failed audit, or a corrupted dataset whose connection to the original friction is long lost.

The only reliable way to retire a risky workaround is to make the supported workflow win on the user’s own terms — faster to follow, clearer in the moment, and self-correcting when they stumble. Telling people to follow the process never works on its own, because it argues with the incentive instead of removing it. The two most-cited reasons people reach for an unsanctioned shortcut are the two an owner can actually control: in the same body of research, 38% of employees said they turned to unsanctioned tools because of slow response times from IT, and 61% reported dissatisfaction with the technologies the company provided. Both translate to “I got stuck and could not get unstuck fast enough through the supported channel,” and every time that happens the user is trained that the supported workflow does not respect their time. The cost compounds, because knowledge workers already spend roughly 2.8 hours per week just looking for or requesting information they need to do their job, and a workaround is what they invent to stop paying that tax. The durable fix is to move guidance out of binders and help desks and into the application, at the step where the question arises. VisualSP embeds the correct steps, inline tips, and validation prompts directly inside Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and custom web apps, so the guidance fires at the keyboard rather than living in a document nobody opens, helping application owners ensure applications are used the way they were designed without redesigning the app itself. When the supported path is the easiest path, the workaround loses its reason to exist.

The Research

Strategy and Actionable Steps

Eliminating risky workarounds is not a discipline problem; it is a friction problem. The steps below remove the reasons people route around the supported path.

  • Map where the workaround actually starts, not where it ends. A risky shortcut is the visible end of an invisible moment of friction. Sit with a few users and watch them work, noting the exact screen and step where they hesitate, alt-tab away, or reach for a private spreadsheet. The improvised behavior you see is downstream; the cause is the step just before it. You cannot fix a workaround whose origin you have only guessed at, and the observation almost always surprises the owner who assumed the process was self-explanatory.
  • Make the supported path faster than the shortcut, not just mandatory. People weigh compliance against speed in real time. If following the official workflow costs more clicks, more waiting, or more searching than improvising, the rule loses. Reduce the friction at the originating step until the supported path is genuinely the quickest way to finish the task. A workaround only survives because it is easier; remove that advantage and it dies on its own.
  • Deliver the guidance inside the application, at the point of the decision. A document, SOP, or training video does not help someone who is stuck mid-form and does not know it exists. This is the core of what VisualSP does: it overlays step-by-step walkthroughs, inline tips, and field-level validation directly onto the app at the moment of need, so the right way to proceed appears in the screen the user is already on. When the answer is in context, there is no reason to leave for a riskier path, and the supported workflow becomes the route of least resistance.
  • Close the IT-response gap that pushes people to improvise. Slow help-desk turnaround is one of the top reasons users go off-script. Deflect the routine “how do I do this?” questions to in-app self-service so users get unstuck in seconds instead of waiting hours for a ticket. VisualSP’s approach helps IT and application owners reduce support load and deflect repetitive tickets directly inside Microsoft applications, which removes the waiting that breeds shortcuts.
  • Find the high-risk friction points with behavior data, not anecdotes. You cannot fix every screen, so target the ones that generate the most diverging behavior. Use analytics to see where users hesitate, rage-click, backtrack, or abandon a workflow. VisualSP’s Clarity Connect 365 surfaces exactly where users struggle, abandon tasks, and diverge from intended workflows inside Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, turning a vague sense that “people are doing it wrong” into a ranked list of the few steps responsible for most of the risk.
  • Build validation into the workflow so the wrong path is impossible, not just discouraged. Where a workaround would skip an approval or enter bad data, add an in-app prompt or guardrail that catches the mistake at the moment it happens. Prevention at the point of work is far cheaper than detection downstream, and it removes the temptation to improvise a path that bypasses the controls the workflow depends on.
  • Treat every retired workaround as a permanent fix, not a one-time correction. When you replace a shortcut with in-app guidance, you solve the problem for everyone who will ever reach that step, including new hires who were never in the room for the original explanation. That is what makes in-app guidance compound: each fix lowers the baseline risk instead of resetting it the next time someone gets stuck.

FAQ

Aren’t workarounds just a sign that some employees won’t follow the rules?

Very rarely. The data consistently shows that workarounds cluster around friction, not personality — they spike where official tools are slow or cumbersome and disappear where the supported path is genuinely easy. Treating the behavior as a discipline problem leads to more mandates that people quietly ignore. Treating it as a friction problem leads to fixing the step that caused it. The most reliable signal that a workaround is about friction rather than attitude is that many different people invent the same shortcut at the same screen.

Won’t better documentation or more training solve this?

Usually not on its own. The problem is rarely that the information does not exist; it is that nobody stops mid-task to open a separate document or recall a training session from weeks ago. Knowledge only changes behavior when it appears where the work happens. In-app guidance succeeds where wikis and courses stall because it shows up in context, at the exact step, without forcing the user to leave the screen — which is the very friction that drove them to a workaround in the first place.

How do we know which workarounds are actually risky?

Combine a short observation log with behavior analytics. Watching real users reveals where shortcuts begin, and analytics that surface hesitation, backtracking, and abandonment show you which of those shortcuts are widespread and where they bypass critical validations. Rank the workarounds by how many people use them and how much control they skip, then fix the highest-risk handful first with in-app guidance and guardrails. A shortcut used by two people that skips a cosmetic field is a low priority; a shortcut used by forty people that bypasses an approval or writes unvalidated data into a system of record is where you start. That focus delivers the largest reduction in risk for the least effort, and it lets you show stakeholders a measurable drop in the specific diverging behavior rather than a vague promise that compliance has improved.

What does a risky workaround actually cost the organization?

Far more than the few minutes it saves the individual. Because the improvised path skips the validations, approvals, and data-integrity checks the supported workflow was built to enforce, the organization trades a small time saving for downstream errors, rework, and risk it never sees coming. Those costs surface much later as a reconciliation problem, a failed audit, or a corrupted dataset, and by then the connection back to the original friction is lost, so the owner ends up treating symptoms instead of the cause.

Why does in-app guidance retire workarounds where mandates fail?

Because a mandate argues with the user’s incentive while in-app guidance removes it. A rule tells someone to take the slower path; guidance delivered at the keyboard makes the supported path the fastest one, so there is no longer a reason to improvise. VisualSP does this by overlaying the correct steps, inline tips, and validation onto the app at the moment of need, which also deflects the routine questions that would otherwise wait in a ticket queue and breed new shortcuts in the meantime.

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