Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 3 min
Small friction is sneaky because it rarely looks dangerous. Five extra minutes here. One follow-up email there. A second approval because "that is how we do it." Nobody calls a meeting because one task took five minutes too long. That is how the tax collector gets in.
Workflow friction is the time, effort, and attention consumed by steps that do not meaningfully improve the outcome. It hides inside approvals, duplicate data entry, status chasing, rework, unclear handoffs, and manual reconciliation between systems.
Why small delays become big costs
One extra approval may feel harmless in isolation. Spread it across hundreds of transactions, multiple departments, and a full year, and suddenly the organization has built a tiny toll booth in the middle of its own road.
- Use this simple friction calculator:
- How many times does the step occur each week?
- How many minutes does it add?
- How many people are involved?
- How often does it create follow-up or rework?
- What customer, cash, or capacity delay does it create downstream?
Where the tax usually hides
Friction often hides in places that look responsible on paper. Approvals look like control. Meetings look like alignment. Spreadsheets look like flexibility. Follow-up emails look like ownership. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are tiny paper hats on a raccoon.
- Approvals that do not change the decision.
- Reports created because source data is not trusted.
- Hand-offs without clear acceptance criteria.
- Intake forms that allow incomplete requests into the workflow.
- Meetings used to discover status that the process should already show.
A practical audit
For one workflow, circle every step where work waits. Then mark whether the wait protects quality, reduces risk, improves customer experience, or satisfies a real compliance requirement. If the answer is no, the step may be friction dressed up as discipline.
The goal is not to remove every control. The goal is to remove controls that do not control anything. That distinction keeps improvement practical instead of reckless.
CTA: Choose one recurring delay and calculate its annual cost. The number may be rude, but it will be useful.
Why leaders miss it
Executives usually see totals: margin, payroll, backlog, customer complaints, overdue work, and missed dates. They do not always see the tiny operational charges inside the total. A five-minute delay is too small to become a line item, but repeated delays become capacity loss wearing camouflage.
The dangerous part is normalization. Once the team accepts the delay as part of the job, nobody questions it. The workaround becomes tradition. The meeting becomes sacred. The second spreadsheet becomes the source of truth because the first system got demoted by reality.
- Look for recurring delays that everyone jokes about.
- Measure wait time, not just touch time.
- Ask employees what step they would remove if they were allowed one small act of operational kindness.
- Track the delay across a month before deciding it is harmless.
A quick manager check
Before changing anything, ask the people closest to the work to walk through one recent example from start to finish. Do not ask for the policy version. Ask for the Tuesday-at-3:40 version, where the missing field, extra email, surprise approval, and system workaround all show up wearing tiny disguises. That is the version leaders need before they can make useful improvements.
- What slowed this example down?
- Who had to chase information?
- Which step would be hard to explain to a new employee?
- What small change would prevent the same delay next time?