Workers are bypassing their approved tools at scale, and the data shows why. Shadow tools in workforce management have become widespread, with Smartsheet’s new operational excellence report finding 70% using tools outside corporate policy, while only 26% of organizations have any governance around those tools. As a result, there’s now an operational layer that IT can’t see, policy doesn’t cover, and teams say they can’t work without.
The research surveyed 1,550 operations management professionals across seven countries and found that 76% rely on workarounds because their approved systems can’t keep up with changing business priorities.
Why Shadow Tools Are Filling Workforce Management Gaps
Almost every team (99.6%) reports shifting priorities due to changing business needs. However, 71% say their tools and processes get in the way of responding to those changes.
This follows the same pattern as shadow IT adoption, where 73% of knowledge workers started using unapproved tools despite governance policies. Organizations tried blocking access, but employees just moved to personal devices. Shadow operations is playing out the same way. However, now it’s not just file sharing—it’s project tracking, resource planning, and workflow coordination.
As Smartsheet Chief Product Officer Pratima Arora notes in the company’s 2026 operational excellence report:
“Operations professionals are creating compliance and security risks by using ungoverned, shadow tools to overcome the limitations of legacy tools.”
The research shows 99% still spend time weekly on repetitive, low-value tasks even though efficiency is their top priority. Furthermore, 63% struggle to balance efficiency with adaptability and just 8% think their organizations have achieved operational excellence.
The Visibility Problem in Workforce Management Analytics
While 97% say visibility across the organization is essential, 61% admit they don’t have it.
Shadow tools in workforce management make this worse. When teams build their own trackers and dashboards because the official ones don’t work for them, operational data ends up scattered across platforms IT doesn’t control. For example, a manager keeps a separate capacity tracker. A team builds their own dashboard because pulling reports from the approved system takes three days. Someone maintains a project status spreadsheet because the official tool doesn’t connect with resource planning.
Each workaround solves an immediate problem but breaks the bigger picture. Consequently, your capacity planning and resource allocation decisions are based on incomplete data.
These shadow tools in workforce management create a data fragmentation problem that extends beyond individual teams. When operational intelligence sits in ungoverned systems, strategic decisions get made on incomplete information.
Three Reasons Shadow Tools Are Growing
The research, conducted with Dimensional Research, points to three main drivers.
First, business moves faster than systems can adapt. When priorities shift weekly but changing workflows needs IT approval, you’ve got a speed problem that training can’t fix.
Second, tool sprawl has hit a breaking point. Research on task management platforms found workers using 11 different applications daily. As a result, they lose over 10 hours a week just switching between them. When approved tools create that much friction, people look elsewhere.
Third, what organizations need from their systems has changed faster than the systems themselves. According to Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research:
“Adaptability is now as important as efficiency, and fixed processes can’t keep pace with business change.”
When 73% of employees report change fatigue but priorities keep shifting anyway, you need workforce management systems that can adjust quickly. Most can’t.
Fixing Shadow Tools in Workforce Management
Only 26% of organizations have documented governance policies for shadow tools. The natural response is to create policies and enforce them. However, when 76% of workers rely on workarounds because approved tools can’t handle changing priorities, enforcement doesn’t solve the real problem.
Shadow IT, shadow AI, and now shadow tools in workforce management all follow the same pattern: banning things doesn’t work when the approved option is slower. The organizations making headway asked a better question. Instead of “how do we stop this,” they asked “why aren’t our approved tools good enough?”
Smartsheet’s answer is Intelligent Work Management. These are platforms that build governance into workflows instead of adding it on top. They connect data sources without manual work and adapt as quickly as priorities change. It makes sense, especially given that only 12% of enterprise technology projects actually reach full deployment.
But new technology alone won’t close this gap. Organizations need to redesign their operational systems around how work actually happens, not how they wish it would happen. That means treating adaptability as essential. It means building visibility through connected systems instead of better reports. And it means creating governance that helps speed instead of blocking it.
The 70% using shadow operations aren’t the problem. They’re showing you where your systems are failing. The real question is whether your approved workforce management tools can become fast and flexible enough that people don’t need to work around them.
