The Hidden Cost of Bad Processes (And How to Fix Them)
In theory, processes are supposed to make work easier. They bring order to chaos, create consistency, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. A good process should remove friction, not create it.
But here’s what actually happens in most companies: processes pile up over time. One team adds a new approval step. Another adds a form. Someone decides everything needs to go through a weekly meeting. And before you know it, the process is the problem.
At The Threadsmith Group, we’ve seen bad processes grind entire teams to a halt. But the worst part? Most people don’t even realize it’s happening. Let’s break it down.
How Bad Processes Slowly Drain Your Business
Nobody wakes up one day and decides, “You know what would be great? Let’s make everything take twice as long for no reason.” Bad processes don’t happen overnight. They creep in slowly—disguised as harmless changes, well-intentioned policies, or “best practices” that made sense… five years ago. Here’s how they show up:
1. Endless Approvals (A.K.A. Decision-Making Purgatory)
Need to publish a blog post? That’ll require approval from three different teams, including running it through the design agency about 6 different times. Want to issue a refund? Gotta run it up the chain. Every extra approval step adds time, friction, and frustration. By the time something finally moves forward, the opportunity is gone.
The root problem here isn’t usually the approvals themselves. It’s the lack of clarity around who actually owns the decision. Instead of trusting teams to make smart calls within clear guidelines, the process becomes a never-ending game of "who needs to sign off on this?" Streamlining decisions doesn’t mean getting reckless. It means trusting your people, defining ownership, and removing the hoops that aren’t adding real value.
2. Meetings That Should Have Been Emails
If you’ve ever sat through a meeting that could have been summarized in a single-paragraph Slack message, you’ve seen a broken process in action. When meetings become the default decision-making tool, they kill momentum and pull people away from real work.
Meetings should be reserved for discussion, decision-making, and alignment. If you’re just announcing something, write it down. If you need input, give people time to respond asynchronously. Give everyone their time back unless it genuinely needs to be synchronous. That one small shift creates more focus, better decisions, and a lot less eye-rolling.
3. Layers of Unnecessary Complexity
Ever try to onboard a new employee only to realize the process involves ten different systems, four duplicate forms, and a manual data entry step that could easily be automated? That’s what happens when processes evolve without anyone stepping back to ask: Do we even need this?
Complexity tends to grow over time. One workaround here, a new tool there, and before you know it, the process is more confusing than the work it was meant to support. Every now and then, step back and audit your processes. Simplify, consolidate, and automate where you can. If no one knows why a step exists, that’s a massive red flag.
4. “Shadow Work” That No One Acknowledges
Bad processes don’t just slow things down. They create extra, invisible work. Someone has to follow up. Someone has to check for mistakes. Someone has to spend two hours formatting a report that no one actually reads. Shadow work is a silent productivity killer.
When you start hearing "I just do it because otherwise it falls through the cracks," you’ve found shadow work. It’s the stuff that lives in the gaps of broken systems. You won’t fix it by asking people to work harder. You fix it by designing better systems that don’t rely on human duct tape to keep things running.
Bad processes don’t just frustrate employees. They cost real money in lost productivity, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. Here’s what happens when broken processes go unchecked:
1. Employee Burnout
No one likes jumping through hoops for no reason. When employees feel like their time is being wasted on redundant approvals, excessive documentation, or unnecessary meetings, frustration builds. Over time, this leads to disengagement, lower morale, and eventually, burnout. People want to feel like their work matters, not like they’re stuck in an endless cycle of bureaucracy.
2. Slow Response Time
The market moves FAST, and with the advent of new technology, it’s not going to get any slower. If it takes your team weeks to approve something your competitor does in three days, you’re already behind. When opportunities arise, slow processes mean you miss out—whether it’s launching a campaign, responding to customer needs, or adapting to new trends. And in many industries, speed is the difference between gaining an edge or losing ground.
3. Higher Turnover (And The Hidden Cost of Replacing Employees)
Talented employees don’t stick around in companies where red tape prevents them from doing their best work. If every decision takes forever and innovation is constantly blocked, people leave. And when they do, replacing them is expensive, not just in hiring costs, but in lost institutional knowledge, training new hires, and rebuilding team momentum.
4. Increased Operating Costs
Every minute spent on unnecessary admin work, duplicate efforts, and excessive approvals is money down the drain. Inefficient processes mean teams are doing more work than necessary just to get simple things done. And the more your company scales, the bigger the financial impact of every inefficiency. Time is money!
5. Customer Experience Takes a Hit
Bad internal processes don’t stay internal. They trickle down to the customer experience. If customers are waiting too long for support, if sales teams can’t move fast enough, if service delivery is slowed down by internal red tape—it damages your reputation. Customers don’t care about your internal approvals or workflows; they care about fast, reliable service—and if you can’t deliver, they’ll find someone who can.
How to Fix a Broken Process
Good news: processes are probably the most fixable part of your businesses. They can be created and destroyed with a couple of decisions. You don’t need a massive overhaul—just a smarter approach. Your new mantra is Streamline, Simplify, Automate. Live by it.
Here’s what I mean:
1. Streamline
Start by asking, “What problem is this process actually solving, and is it still valid?” Every process was created for a reason. The question is: Is that reason still legitimate? If no one can clearly explain why a process exists or what it’s actually aiming to solve, it’s time to rethink it.
Take any frustrating process and write down every single step, every person who has to execute that step, and how long each step actually takes. If you don’t know, go through it and time it with people. You’ll be shocked at how many unnecessary layers have crept in over time and how much time and money is being wasted across the business.
Streamlining is about clarity. It's about removing all the fluff and narrowing a process down to its core. What is the actual job to be done here? Are we adding steps for the sake of ceremony? Is the process optimized for efficiency or just habit? Streamlining is your moment to be ruthless about what really needs to happen.
2. Simplify
Not everything needs executive sign-off. If approvals are slowing things down, figure out which decisions can be delegated to the people closest to the work.
Simplifying is about making a process easier to follow, not dumber. Complexity isn't a badge of honor. In fact, overly complex processes are usually a sign that no one wants to take responsibility for the outcome, so everything gets run through five layers of “just in case.”
Ask yourself: Could this be a checklist instead of a flowchart? Could this be a two-step process instead of seven? Could we remove handoffs or combine roles? If your process requires a 20-minute explanation every time someone new joins the team, it probably isn’t simple enough.
3. Automate
Once a process has been streamlined and simplified, then you can look at automation. Don’t automate a broken process—congratulations, now it’s just a faster way to fail.
Automation should eliminate repetition, reduce human error, and free up time for people to do the work only humans can do. Whether that’s an automated Slack update, a recurring report from your data tools, or a simple workflow in Zapier—automation should exist to serve your team, not confuse them.
The goal isn’t to replace people. The goal is to support them. If your team is constantly bogged down by formatting spreadsheets or manually moving data from one tool to another, that’s not noble work. That’s time that could be reclaimed, every day, with the right automation in place.
Streamline. Simplify. Automate.
Not everything needs to be complex to be effective. Some of the best processes are nearly invisible because they just work. And if you build your systems with this mantra in mind, your team will spend less time fighting the process and more time doing the work that actually matters.
The Threadsmith Group Approach
At The Threadsmith Group, we help businesses fix what’s broken—whether that means cutting unnecessary steps, streamlining decision-making, or building processes that actually support teams (instead of slowing them down).
Because the best processes don’t add friction—they remove it. Let’s build smarter, faster, and better—together.