This is an issue we've had as well. I think that any template that you use isn't going to make much difference at the end of the day, it's a people issue that discussion and culture improvements are going to make the biggest difference.
Having said that we do have a few things that we have implemented that have made a difference.
- In any flows we have where an approval is required we have an update added to the ticket advising that the approval has been sent to - [insert name here] and there is nothing that can be done until they approve it, so please chase them if you are waiting on something. Then we add an update when approved by that person and add the next approval if there is one.
- I have a reminder email that we can send via a scheduled job (we have it sent to manually be triggered, but obviously it can ben auto sent periodically if needed)
My reminder that I have ultimate summarises all approvals that person has outstanding and includes the ability to approve or reject directly from the reminder email. So if someone is a manager for example that might have 10 outstanding approvals, they are all listed in that email with links to the approvals and links to generate approval or rejection via a reply email.
Here is an example of the reminder email (with lots of redactions sorry)
The buttons are ultimately just a link to a reply email to approve or reject
