Why approval loops slow down ops teams and what to do about it

Approval loops are one of those problems that nobody designs on purpose. They accumulate. A compliance requirement gets added here, a manager decides they want visibility there, and before long your team is waiting two days for someone to click a button on a request that has never once been rejected.

I keep returning to this pattern because it shows up in almost every ops engagement we run. The team is not slow. The process is slow. The process is slow because someone, at some point, decided that human sign‑off was the right control mechanism for something that does not actually need it.

How approval loops form

Most approval requirements start with a legitimate reason. A vendor payment over a certain threshold needs a second set of eyes. A contract change needs legal review. A new user getting admin access needs IT sign‑off. These are reasonable controls.

The problem is that approval requirements almost never get removed. They only get added. The original reason fades, the person who added the rule moves on, and the approval step stays in the process forever. Over time you end up with a workflow where a $40 office‑supply order and a $40,000 software contract go through the same two‑day approval chain.

There is also a cultural layer to this. Approvals feel safe. They create a paper trail. When something goes wrong, the team can point to the approval chain and show that someone reviewed it. That logic is not irrational. It also means that approvals become a risk‑management tool even when the actual risk is minimal.

What this costs in practice

The direct cost is time. An approval step that takes two days does not just delay one task. It delays every downstream task that depends on it. In a process with three sequential approval steps, you can easily add a week to a workflow that should take an afternoon.

Here is a concrete example. A logistics operation we worked with had a vendor onboarding process that required sign‑off from finance, legal, and operations before a new supplier could be activated in their system. Each approval was handled over email. The average time from submission to full approval was 11 days. The actual review time, meaning the time a human spent reading and deciding, was under 30 minutes total across all three reviewers.

The other 10.5 days were waiting. Waiting for an email to get noticed. Waiting for a reviewer to come back from travel. Waiting because nobody had a clear picture of where the request was sitting.

After rebuilding the process with a structured routing tool and automatic escalation after 24 hours of inactivity, that same workflow dropped to an average of 1.4 days. The reviews did not get shorter. The reviewers did not work harder. The wait time simply stopped being invisible.

The visibility problem

Part of what makes approval loops so damaging is that the delay is hard to see from the outside. A request goes in, it disappears into someone’s inbox, and the submitting team has no idea whether it is being reviewed, forgotten, or waiting on something else entirely.

This creates a second layer of work. People send follow‑up emails. They ping on Slack. They ask their manager to ask the approver’s manager. None of this adds value. It is friction generated entirely by a lack of visibility into a process that should be transparent.

I find this frustrating because the fix is not complicated. A simple status field and a notification trigger would eliminate most of the follow‑up behavior. But because approval workflows often live in email or in a shared spreadsheet, that visibility does not exist.

Not every approval needs to stay

Before automating anything, ask whether each approval step should exist at all. This sounds obvious, but most teams skip it. They want to make the existing process faster, not question whether the process is right.

A useful exercise is to pull the last 90 days of approval decisions for a given workflow and count how many were rejections. If the rejection rate is under five percent, that is a signal worth noting. It means the approval functions more as a formality than as an actual control. In many cases, the right answer is to remove the step entirely and replace it with an audit log that a reviewer can check after the fact.

This is not about removing oversight. It is about applying oversight where it has actual value. A $40 purchase order with a zero percent rejection rate over two years does not need a human reviewer. It needs a policy limit and an exception trigger.

What good approval routing looks like

For the approvals that genuinely need to stay, the goal is to make the process fast by default and slow only when the situation warrants it.

That means a few things in practice. Requests should route automatically based on type, value, or risk level. Reviewers should get a single notification with all the context they need to decide without opening another system. There should be a time limit on inactivity, after which the request escalates to a backup reviewer or a manager. The submitting team should be able to see exactly where their request is at any point.

None of this requires a complex platform. We have built this kind of routing on top of tools like Airtable, Notion, and internal web apps depending on what the team already uses. The technology is not the hard part. The hard part is getting agreement on what actually needs approval and what does not.

The organizational piece

This is where I want to be honest about something. Fixing approval loops is partly a technical problem and partly a political one. Approvers often have a stake in staying in the loop, even for low‑value decisions. Removing an approval step can feel like removing someone’s authority.

The framing that tends to work is to separate visibility from approval. A manager who wants to know what is happening does not need to be an approver. They can get a daily digest, a dashboard, or an exception alert. They stay informed without becoming a bottleneck.

When you can give people visibility without requiring their action, the resistance to streamlining usually drops considerably. Most managers do not actually want to spend their time clicking approve on routine requests. They want to know that nothing is going wrong.

The goal is a process where routine work moves at the speed it should, and human judgment shows up exactly where it adds something.