The Hidden Cost of Bad Processes (And How to Fix Them)
At The Threadsmith Group, we’ve seen bad processes grind entire teams to a halt. The worst part is that most people don’t even realize it’s happening.
In theory, processes are supposed to make work easier. They’re meant to bring order to chaos, create consistency, and make sure nothing slips through the cracks. A good process should grease the wheels, not throw sand in them. I love a good process. Emphasis, strong emphasis, on “good”.
“Good” processes are hard to come by. What winds up happening in most companies is death by a thousand “just one more step.”-s Somebody adds an approval, somebody else adds a form, then someone decides it all needs to be discussed in the weekly meeting that already has fifteen agenda items. Before long, the process is a nightmare.
The funny thing is, no one ever sets out to design The World’s Worst and Most Annoying Process Ever. Probably.
The point is, bad processes don’t show up overnight. They creep in slowly, disguised as harmless tweaks or “best practices” or “We’ve got to do this a certain way because so-and-so needs to be held accountable” that made sense five years ago. You don’t even notice until one day you’re staring at a simple task that takes three weeks and requires five different logins, and so-and-so doesn’t even work there anymore.
Take approvals. Approvals are supposed to prevent mistakes, but in practice they turn into decision-making purgatory. Need to publish a blog? Better run it by design, legal, brand, and the one VP who’s mysteriously always on PTO. By the time it goes live, the moment’s passed and the competition already ate your lunch. The real issue usually isn’t the approvals themselves. It’s that no one knows who actually owns the call, so everyone hedges and piles on another checkpoint.
Meetings are just as bad. Half of them could have been a two-paragraph email or chat, but instead they drag ten people into a Zoom to nod politely while one person reads slides out loud. Meetings are supposed to be where decisions happen. When they turn into the default announcement channel, they suck the air out of real work.
Then there’s the sheer absurdity of complexity for the sake of it. Onboarding a new employee shouldn’t feel like a part-time job piled on top of your regular job, yet somehow it always does. I’ve seen onboarding binders that would give college textbooks a run for their money. This kind of nonsense is what happens when no one ever stops to ask the obvious question: do we even need this?
And let’s not forget that invisible labor where somebody has to reformat the report, chase down missing data, or double-check for mistakes the system should have caught. No one admits it exists, but it eats hours every week. It’s the “I just do it because otherwise it falls through the cracks” problem. That’s not even slightly an effective way to run your business, and it’s going to cost you in the long run.
Bad processes don’t just irritate employees. They bleed money. Every redundant approval, every bloated meeting, every duplicate system costs time, and time is the only resource you don’t get back. Left unchecked, it leads to burnout, turnover, and customers quietly drifting toward companies that move faster.
The good news is processes are fixable. You don’t need a six-month initiative or a consultant army. You need three words: streamline, simplify, automate. Streamline by cutting steps no one can justify. Simplify so the process can be explained in one breath instead of twenty minutes. Automate only after the first two are done, so you’re not just making a broken system fail faster and with more energy.
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.