Approval workflows people actually complete

Approval workflows fail at the last mile: the approver. They're busy, they don't live in your tool, and every login wall between them and the Approve button cuts completion rates. Designing for approvers means accepting that they will give you ten seconds, in their inbox, on their phone.

The single highest-leverage decision we made in Cadence was letting approvers act from a secure email link — no account, no password. The link carries a single-use token scoped to one decision on one item. It expires, it's hashed at rest, and every use is logged with IP and user agent. Security didn't have to trade against completion; it just took more engineering.

The second lesson: reminders need a cadence, and the cadence needs a ceiling. Remind every three days, cap the count, then escalate. A workflow that reminds forever trains people to ignore it; one that escalates after two misses gets answered on the first reminder surprisingly often.

Third: routing rules beat routing meetings. "First responder wins" suits low-stakes gates where any authorized approver will do. "All must approve" suits the expensive, irreversible ones. Making that a per-stage setting — rather than an org-wide policy debate — means each obligation gets the friction it deserves and no more.

Finally, make the stuck state visible. Cadence surfaces workflows that are overdue or stalled directly to admins, with the pending approver named. Most stuck approvals aren't refusals — they're an email that arrived at the wrong moment. A nudge with a name attached resolves nearly all of them.