5 signs your approval process is hurting your team (and how to fix it)

Approval processes exist to keep work moving. In practice, most of them slow it down.

Someone fills out the form. The request lands in an inbox. Three days pass. A Slack nudge follows. An email reply lands in spam. By the time the sign-off comes through, the requester has already filed a workaround.

If that sounds familiar, your approval process isn’t supporting your team. It’s wearing them down. Below are the five signs it’s happening, why each one matters, and what to do about it.

Why a broken approval process costs more than time

An approval process exists to do two things: protect the business from risk, and keep work moving. When it stops doing the second one, people stop trusting the first.

The cost shows up in places you might not measure. Requesters lose half a day waiting for a “yes” they were always going to get. Managers lose focus context-switching between Slack pings and forwarded emails. Compliance loses confidence because nobody can prove who approved what or when. Worst of all, the team learns to route around the process instead of through it.

Catching the warning signs early is cheaper than fixing the damage later. Here’s what to watch for.

Sign 1: Approvals live in someone’s inbox

If your approval process is “send an email and hope,” you don’t have a process. You have a wish. Email exists to send messages, not to track decisions. It has no status, no escalation path, and no shared view.

Watch for these tells:

• Approvers forward requests to colleagues “for awareness” and the chain disappears.
• People reply “approved” without confirming what they’re approving.
• Requests sit unread because they look like every other email.

What to do instead

Move approvals out of email and into a workflow that captures the request, the approver, the decision, and the timestamp. Heather Lloyd, Executive Director at Concordis, put it well: “Each workflow saves us 3–7 emails per engagement, streamlining communication and keeping everything organized in one place.” Fewer emails. Faster decisions. A clean audit trail when you need one.

Sign 2: Nobody knows where a request stands

“Has this been approved yet?” is the most expensive question your team asks. Every time someone chases status, two people lose time: the requester, and the approver who gets pinged.

Common patterns:

• The requester checks in every two days because they have no other signal.
• The approver searches their inbox to figure out which version they reviewed.
• Someone in operations keeps a side spreadsheet to track open requests.

What to do instead

Give every approval a status the whole team can see: submitted, pending, approved, returned. When status updates automatically, status meetings shrink. So does the chasing.

Sign 3: Approvers get pinged for things they shouldn’t

If your VP is approving a $40 expense, your process is broken. Approval thresholds and conditional routing exist for a reason. Ignoring them costs senior people hours every week and slows down low-risk work that should fly through.

Symptoms:

• The same approver gets every request, regardless of size or risk.
• Routine requests sit because the approver is in a strategy offsite.
• You hear “I just rubber-stamp these” from people whose attention you actually need.

What to do instead

Use advanced logic to route requests by amount, department, or risk level. Send a $40 expense straight through. Send a $40,000 vendor contract to legal and finance in parallel. Match the approval depth to the actual stakes.

Sign 4: The same mistakes keep slipping through

If your approvers keep approving forms with missing fields, blank PO numbers, or wrong cost codes, the problem isn’t the approvers. The problem is the form. A request that reaches an approver should already be complete. Anything less wastes the approver’s time and the requester’s.

Look for:

• Approvers manually checking attachments because the form doesn’t enforce them.
• Repeated back-and-forth to clarify the same fields on the same request.
• Errors caught downstream by accounting, legal, or IT, instead of upstream by the form.

What to do instead

Build the validation into the form. Required fields, conditional questions, file uploads, and calculated totals catch errors before they reach an approver. Pair that with a custom PDF that auto-generates from the form submission, and your approvers review one clean document instead of six attachments.

Sign 5: Your team builds workarounds instead of using the process

This is the most dangerous sign. When the official approval process is too slow, too unclear, or too painful, people stop using it. They get verbal approval in a hallway. They split a purchase across two POs to stay under a threshold. They DM a manager instead of filing a request.

Watch for:

• Decisions that “happened” but nobody can find documented anywhere.
• Repeated exception requests that are really just route-arounds.
• New hires asking how things “actually” get done, because the documented process is the second-class one.

What to do instead

Make the official process faster than the workaround. If filing a request takes 30 seconds and approval lands in 24 hours, nobody bothers to dodge it. The fix is rarely more enforcement. It’s almost always less friction.

How to fix an approval process that’s hurting your team

Most approval processes don’t need a complete redesign. They need three things wired up properly:

1. One place to submit the request. A multi-step form with the right fields, required where it matters, optional where it doesn’t.
2. Routing that matches the stakes. Send small requests through one approver. Send high-risk requests to two or three approvers in parallel or sequence. Use advanced logic so the form picks the right path automatically.
3. Status everyone can see. The requester, the approver, and the operations lead should all know where every request stands without asking.

Add document generation, signatures, and a client portal on top of that, and your approval process turns into a workflow that runs itself.

Watch this webinar to learn more about how easily you can set up your complete approval workflow in under 25 minutes!

From “where does this stand?” to “it’s already done”

Operations teams at 35,000+ companies in 100+ countries use Formaloo to replace inbox approvals with one connected workflow. Build the form, route the request, collect signatures, generate the PDF, and track every step from one dashboard. No developer. No follow-up emails. No more “did you get my message?”

Start free, No credit card needed. Build your first approval workflow in an afternoon and watch the chasing disappear.