Walk into almost any care office and you will find one. A spreadsheet open beside the care management system. A notebook by the phone where messages get jotted down before anyone logs them. A WhatsApp group where the real handover happens after the official one is done.

It is tempting to treat these as a discipline problem: staff not following process, not using the system properly, going off-piste. Sometimes that is part of it. More often, a workaround is the most honest feedback you will get about how well your systems fit the work.

Why workarounds appear

Nobody keeps a second record for fun. It takes time, and care staff rarely have time to spare. When people build a parallel system, it is usually because the official one is slower, harder to reach at the moment it is needed, or does not match how the work actually happens.

The notebook by the phone exists because logging a call properly means stopping what you are doing, finding a device and clicking through several screens. The spreadsheet exists because the system cannot show the view a coordinator needs to plan the week. The group chat exists because it is the quickest way to tell the next shift something that matters now.

Each one is a small, unpaid piece of design work done by the people closest to the job. They have solved a problem the official process left open.

The risk of ignoring them

Workarounds are not harmless. Information that lives in a notebook or a group chat sits outside your audit trail. It may never reach the care record, it may not be visible to whoever is on shift tomorrow, and sharing personal information on personal phones raises data protection questions. If you are asked how a decision was made, the answer may be sitting in a message thread nobody else can see.

But banning the workaround without fixing the reason for it rarely works. People either find a quieter workaround or slow down to comply, and neither improves care.

Treat each one as free feedback

A more useful approach is to look for workarounds deliberately and ask the same three questions of each one:

  • What problem is this solving? Be specific about the moment it gets used and by whom.
  • What does the official route make harder? Speed, access, visibility or fit with the real sequence of work.
  • What would make it unnecessary? Sometimes it is a system setting or a report. Sometimes the process itself needs to change.

Ask the people who use the workaround, not just those who manage it. They usually know exactly why it exists.

The best sign a system is working

Dashboards will tell you how many people logged in and how many records were completed. Those figures matter, but they only show that the official system is being used. They do not show whether a shadow system is still running alongside it.

The clearest sign that a new system or process has worked is quieter: the day the notebook stops being used, the spreadsheet is no longer updated and the group chat falls silent because nobody needs it. That is when the official way has become the easiest way.

So here is the challenge. This week, find one workaround in your service. Do not shut it down. Sit with the person who uses it, find out what it is telling you, and decide what you would need to change so they no longer need it.