Workarounds: Every association has them. They aren’t inherently bad. In fact, they can be a sign of creativity, resilience, and staff’s commitment to making your organization work and succeed. Still, too many can distort your association’s true picture by glossing over organizational friction points to allow staff to get work done. Here are 5 steps to surface and fix association workarounds.
Solution or Band-Aid?
Workarounds are unofficial processes that sprout from staff’s need for flexibility where the default process or tool lacks it. We’re all familiar with situations requiring us to call an audible, deviate from the plan, and craft a solution. These are exceptions to the rule, where a requirement or current process doesn’t meet the moment (e.g. COVID or tool transition). We need flexibility to adjust as needed. However, we must be able to differentiate the occasional workaround from the embedded operational workaround. When the exception swallows the rule.
Our focus is to help you find and fix the association workarounds that staff perform daily, weekly, and monthly. These are symptoms of a deeper problem: tools and processes working against staff, members, and the organization, instead of working with them and for them.
Association Workarounds Conceal Costs
Workarounds are sneaky precisely because they work and keep the work moving. But workarounds also quietly absorb staff time and organizational risk without anyone really noticing. And the more workarounds you have the more organizational energy you need to run them. Consequently, they have real downstream costs:
- Unwritten SOPs. Workarounds are often undocumented; meaning they live in someone’s memory, computer, or Excel file, and not in a workflow. Processes that only live in people’s heads are a liability.
- Tool proliferation. Staff reach for outside tools to fill gaps, and the tech stack grows with no authorization or tracking.
- Data breakdown. If data is everywhere, you don’t have a single source of truth to improve organizational decision-making.
- Low adoption. If the workaround isn’t broken why would staff want to fix it (or use and adopt the new tool)?
- Security risk. Workarounds may involve shadow tools not approved by IT raising compliance and security risks.
- Slow onboarding. Workarounds don’t exist in training materials, forcing new staff to either stumble into them or inherit them without context.
- Ballooning budget. Automated workarounds (e.g., Zapier subscriptions, add-on tools, one-off software purchases) accumulate cost even if no one is tracking.
Find the Root Cause
Workarounds are symptoms and their root causes vary: a way to keep pace during relentless change, missing self-service, complex business rules, process gaps, limited workflows, missing integrations, or organizational choices/individual preferences. Each provides information about your organization. But the central question to answer is: why are staff going around rather than through?
Through our AMS assessments we work with staff to uncover the current system’s limitations, how staff compensate for them, and what requirements need to be built into whatever comes next. Left unaddressed, workarounds multiply and cost organizations hundreds of hours each year. It’s hours spent reconciling donation data, disconnected survey insights from member data, and duplicate event registration work. More importantly, these hours represent time taken away from delivering for members and on the mission.
Fix Your Association Workarounds
- Surface them intentionally. Ask staff directly (with curiosity and no judgment): what manual steps do you rely on regularly to carry out your work? What processes run outside the official tools, including any automations or scripts someone set up?
- Document first. Write down every workaround: what it does, who owns it, when it started, and what would break if it disappeared.
- Determine the root cause. Probe to understand why the workaround exists: are staff unaware of the system’s capability, do they need an SOP, or is the tool truly incapable.
- Prioritize by risk. Focus first on one-person workarounds that affect data integrity, member experience, compliance, or institutional continuity.
- Make time. Use maintenance mode, onboarding, retirements, tool transitions/migrations, and other points of greater bandwidth or transition as natural points to uncover, catalog, and fix workarounds. But make it cyclical.
Fixing Association Workarounds Builds Organizational Strength and Flexibility
Workarounds are a sign of a resourceful and flexible association. But resourcefulness and flexibility have limits. When workarounds become the reason a rule or technology works it’s time to take a closer look and examine if the exception has swallowed the rule. Fixing association workarounds helps strengthen organizational resilience while maintaining flexibility for times when you need it.
Wondering what your workarounds are telling you about your technology? Contact us to learn how Achurch Consulting can help you evaluate what is working, what is not, and what to do about it.