Picture this: Your operations team has set ambitious goals. Everyone’s aligned around a sound strategy. Yet month after month, your targets remain frustratingly out of reach.
Sound familiar?
When goals go unmet, it’s easy to second-guess your objectives or your team’s capabilities. But according to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
This insight cuts to the heart of why many organizations fail to meet productivity targets and operational goals despite clear vision and genuine effort. No amount of ambition or talent can overcome outdated workflows, manual bottlenecks, and disconnected tools silently undermining your team’s best efforts.
These process problems aren’t just operational inconveniences; they’re strategic limitations that can determine whether your organization thrives or merely survives. For operations leaders, recognizing and addressing these systemic barriers is the difference between consistent execution and constant frustration.
Recognizing the red flags of bad business processes
A good business process is a clearly defined, repeatable method of producing excellent results consistently and efficiently.
A bad process is just the opposite. It consistently fails to achieve its intended outcomes efficiently, often due to unclear steps, poor communication, or lack of accountability.
“Every workflow starts with a trigger — some kind of request or input — and ends with an outcome,” explains Jay Tomlin, Senior Director of Product Management at Nintex. “But if you can’t clearly define how requests come in or what the possible end states are, that’s a sign the process hasn’t been fully thought through or lacks ownership.”
When processes become obstacles rather than enablers, they can significantly hinder your organization’s ability to achieve its goals.
The best way to identify bad processes is by examining aspects of your operations that regularly suffer from inefficiency and underperformance. Here are some telltale signs your company may run on suboptimal processes:
- Excessive manual work: Your team spends hours on repetitive tasks
- Information silos: Critical data isn’t accessible across departments
- Consistent bottlenecks: The same steps repeatedly slow down workflow completion
- Unclear ownership: No one is accountable for process outcomes
- High error rates: Mistakes happen frequently, requiring rework and corrections
- Customer complaints: External stakeholders feel the pain of your internal dysfunction
- Employee frustration: Team members create workarounds to get things done
When these signs appear, it’s not only an operational headache — it’s a functional limitation that prevents your company from adapting quickly and executing on its most important initiatives.
Pro tip: If you have already documented your workflows, look out for black holes: points in your workflow where decisions branch off, but one or more paths have no clear next step. “Atypical tasks and processes often fall into these gaps, which leads to things getting lost,” says Tomlin. “The result is a poor customer experience because their question isn’t answered or their case goes unresolved.”
How bad processes hold companies back
Poorly designed processes perpetuate systemic inefficiencies that become deeply embedded in your company’s operational DNA. The operational cost of these limitations continues to compound over time, reinforcing bad habits and creating a cycle of underperformance that is difficult to break.
Left unchecked, bad processes:
- Diminish efficiency: When workflows are disjointed or overly complex, tasks that should take minutes can stretch into hours or days. Teams spend valuable time navigating procedural labyrinths instead of creating value for customers or innovating.
- Create unnecessary or duplicate work: Poorly designed processes often lead to redundant efforts across teams. Without clear visibility, multiple employees might unknowingly tackle the same problem, while other critical tasks fall through the cracks.
- Create a poor employee experience: Nothing frustrates talented employees more than bureaucratic hurdles preventing them from doing their best work. When processes become obstacles, morale suffers, and burnout increases.
- Lead to risky or ineffective workarounds: If processes are inefficient, unclear, or overly complex, people don’t follow them. “When they encounter a bad process, people create workarounds — like screenshotting a doc, sending it to ChatGPT, and pasting it into Salesforce — introducing security risks in the process,” says Jonathan Butler, Group Product Manager at Nintex.
Together, bad processes are more than just a housekeeping issue — they create a domino effect that undermines strategic objectives and prevents your organization from staying agile.
How to fix what’s broken (and build better processes)
The path to operational excellence begins with reimagining how your organization approaches processes. Rather than sticking with workflows because “that’s how it’s been done in the past,” forward-thinking leaders must work to improve process management from the ground up.
Here are some actionable steps you can take:
1. Identify outdated processes
The first step toward better processes is recognizing which ones no longer serve you. In many companies, processes accumulate over time without regular review, creating layers of complexity that slow everything down.
Butler suggests taking a data-driven approach. “Technology can really help — especially if your processes are centralized in a system that tracks when they were last reviewed or updated,” Butler says. “When systems change and processes don’t, that gap becomes visible.”
This visibility is crucial for addressing bottlenecks systematically rather than through ad-hoc reactionary fixes. By pinpointing exactly where your processes have fallen behind your current business needs, you can prioritize improvements that deliver the greatest impact.
2. Focus on documentation
Clear process records ensure you execute workflows consistently and serve as the foundation for continuous improvement at your organization.
The Department of Transport in Victoria, Australia, for example, built a strong process culture by tackling a tough question about process documentation: What’s in it for me? Their approach connected documentation to tangible benefits that resonated with employees.
“They tied it to the bigger picture: More efficiency means more time in your day to focus on what really matters,” explains Chris Ellis, Director of Solution Engineering at Nintex.
The department demonstrated the material impact of creating well-documented processes by collecting concrete data quantifying the time saved from reduced searching, reworking, and onboarding challenges.
The results from the above test case are clear: Instead of seeing documentation as administrative overhead, organizations can position it as the key to unlocking more meaningful work and reducing frustration.
3. Zoom out before you choose your tech
Many organizations make the critical mistake of implementing technology solutions before fully understanding their process challenges. This approach often results in expensive systems replicating, rather than resolving, existing inefficiencies.
“You can’t just replace a paper form with tech and expect the process to work,” says Ellis. “Start with a full view of the process — take the 40,000-foot view — before selecting the technology.”
Ellis recounts an example of an international airport managing drug and alcohol awareness training for third-party contractors. The airport had started out using a paper-based checklist system. But with up to 15,000 contractors working on-site, papers got lost, and some contractors didn’t receive their completion certificate.
Despite their investment in an e-forms platform offering a digitized checklist, documentation errors persisted because they hadn’t mapped the complete workflow with a product like Nintex Process Manager before choosing a solution.
“They hadn’t considered the rest of the process: how the surveys would be issued, how the certificates would be generated, or how third parties would be connected,” Ellis says.
By taking the time to understand and map your process ecosystem, operations leaders can ensure that technology investments are actually solving root problems — instead of translating existing inefficiencies into a digital format.
4. Focus on achieving a high-impact change
When confronting broken processes, you don’t need to overhaul everything at once. By targeting specific high-friction points, operations leaders can deliver excellent returns while keeping implementation manageable. This high-impact outcome can also serve as a proof-of-concept to rally ongoing internal support for process change.
“A construction company we worked with in Queensland had a poor onboarding experience where staff were leaving after the first or second week,” recounts Ellis. “They approached the issue by interviewing hiring managers and HR, mapping the current state, and identifying where time was lost.”
This methodical analysis revealed a surprisingly straightforward bottleneck. “The biggest issue? Contracts were being mailed out and signed manually,” Ellis explains. “That alone delayed onboarding by hours.”
By automating just this one critical step — implementing digital contract generation and signatures — the company dramatically improved retention and efficiency.
The lesson is clear. Focus on the specific pain points that create the most delay. This approach helps you achieve quick wins that build momentum for broader process improvement while delivering immediate value to employees and customers.
Don’t let process limitations hinder your potential
Outdated processes place a ceiling on what your team can accomplish, regardless of how compelling your vision might be.
The good news is that process transformation doesn’t have to mean months of disruption or massive technology overhauls. You can make faster, smoother progress if you follow the tips above and choose the right tools.
Nintex helps organizations across industries identify, document, and optimize their processes through intuitive automation tools designed for the people who actually do the work. Our platform empowers teams to transform manual, disconnected workflows into streamlined processes that support — rather than hinder — your strategic objectives.
Ready to lift your systems to the level of your ambitions? Request a Nintex demo today to discover how process intelligence and automation can remove the barriers holding your organization back.
