Improving Our Approval Workflow – Seeking Best Practices & Automation Ideas

[Dimitrios Kouroumichakis]

Hello everyone,

I’m looking for ideas on how to improve our approval process.

Our current setup is quite simple: the company manager (e.g. department head) approves requests made by their team members. So far, so good – and it works well.

However, what bothers me 😄 is when the company manager wants to request something for themselves. In that case, their own manager (one level up) has to approve it.

Wouldn’t it be better if the workflow was designed to automatically approve such requests?

Is it possible to configure this directly in the workflow? Or would we need to build an automation for it?

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My second concern:

How do you handle approval requests that remain pending for days or even weeks because the manager doesn’t take action?

My idea was to build an automation that automatically rejects the request after X days or weeks of inactivity.

I’d love to hear how you’ve designed your approval workflows and how you deal with these kinds of situations 😊

[arielei]

Hey @Dimitrios Kouroumichakis 

I did this many many times.

Your approach is very correct.

When you need an approval from the manager - you send the work-item to approval to the manager.

You can establish a database such as Asset Management to list all users and have a "Is Manager" checkbox that will be ticked for the manager, and then when a request is being opened, check if he/she is a manager and then bypass the approval process. 

Also, regarding SLA, you need to decide on how much time you want to give for manager to respond, let everybody know that this is the new policy, and then if the manager will not act in the SLA time, reject the work-item leaving a message for the request that their manager did not take action and they should contact them.

By the way, if you establish Asset Management, you can also set an attribute called "Manager Name", and then you dont need employees to write their manager name, simply take it from the data.

hope that answers your question.

Ariel.

[Dimitrios Kouroumichakis]

Thanks for your quick reply, @arielei ! 😊

Where would you configure all of this? Directly in the workflow, or would it require setting it up via automation?

[arielei]

Hey @Dimitrios Kouroumichakis 

By using automations.