Approvals that don't stall the work

Approvals are the most important step type in Flow. They are how a team stays in charge of what agents do. They are also the most common reason a workflow is slower than the manual process it replaced.

We looked at 1.2 million approval requests from the last six months. The median one was answered in 11 minutes. The slowest 10% took more than two days. The difference had almost nothing to do with the approvers and almost everything to do with how the step was set up.

1. Approve the exception, not the rule

The fastest approval is the one that never gets sent. Use limits so routine cases pass straight through: refunds under $100, discounts under 5%, access to standard apps. Ask a person only when a case is unusual. Teams that set limits sent 80% fewer requests, and their approvers took them more seriously.

2. Put the whole decision in the message

An approver who has to open three tabs to decide will put it off. Every approval message should include:

• what is being requested, in one line

• the key facts: amount, customer, current plan

• why it needs approval, usually the limit it crossed

• what happens on yes and on no

Flow’s agent steps fill this in automatically. For other steps, use the message template and include the fields that matter.

3. Send it where people already are

Approvals answered in Slack or Teams were five times faster than ones answered by email. Approve and reject buttons in the message itself, with no sign-in, make the biggest difference of all.

4. Always have a second approver

Approvers go on holiday. Set a fallback for every approval step, and an escalation time after which the request moves to them. Four hours is a good default for anything customer-facing, a day for internal requests.

5. Decide what silence means

Some requests can safely default to yes after a deadline, like extending a trial by a week. Others should default to no, like a refund above policy. Very few should wait forever. Pick a default for each approval step and write it in the message, so approvers know what happens if they do nothing.

6. Learn from every “no”

A rejected request is information. Either the workflow asked for something it shouldn’t have, or the policy is missing a rule. Owners should review every rejection weekly and decide which it was. After a month, most teams find their rejection rate halves and their approval volume drops with it.

A quick checklist

Before you publish a workflow with approvals, check that each one has a limit, a complete message, a channel people watch, a fallback approver and a default on timeout. Five minutes spent here saves days of waiting later.