Approval delay is one of the most common sources of workflow friction, and one of the most fixable. Most of it doesn't come from anyone being genuinely slow to decide. It comes from missing structure: no named approver, no expected response time, no backup when the usual person is unavailable.
Fixing that structure is a smaller change than it sounds, and it doesn't require adding a heavier process on top of the one that's already too slow.
Delay is usually missing structure, not a slow decision
When a request stalls, the instinct is often to assume the approver is busy or the decision is hard. Usually it's simpler: the request landed somewhere without a clear owner, a clear deadline, or a clear next step if nobody responds. Fix the structure and most of the delay disappears on its own.
Name a specific approver, not a queue
A request sent to a shared inbox or a general channel diffuses responsibility. Nobody is quite sure it's theirs to act on, so nobody does. Route each approval type to one named person by default.
In Stelaah, approvals route to a defined approver with the request's full context attached, so nothing waits in a shared queue with no clear owner. See how approvals work.
Set a default response window
Give every approval type an expected response time, communicated to the approver in advance. A 48-hour default is common for routine decisions. The window doesn't need to be aggressive. It needs to exist, so a stalled request is visibly overdue instead of quietly waiting forever.
Build in a backup approver
A single approver with no backup is a guaranteed bottleneck the moment they're traveling, sick, or simply behind. Name a backup with the same authority, and set the escalation to trigger automatically once the response window passes.
Cut approvals that don't need to exist
Not every decision needs a sign-off. Review your current approval steps and ask which risk each one was actually meant to catch. Some will map to a real, current risk. Others will turn out to be leftover caution from an incident years ago that no longer applies. Removing those speeds up everything that's left.
A simple checklist
If you do nothing else, do these five things:
- Name a specific approver for each type of request, not a shared queue.
- Set a default response window and communicate it to approvers.
- Name a backup approver with equal authority.
- Escalate automatically once the response window passes.
- Review existing approval steps and cut the ones that no longer map to a real risk.
Do that, and requests stop sitting in an ambiguous queue and start moving through a process that has an actual owner at every step.
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