Good Friction, Bad Friction: A School District Leader’s Guide to Smoother Operations

How district leaders can design smarter systems, strengthen trust, and stop “modernizing the pain”

It’s the last week of the pay period. Somewhere in your district, someone is doing the administrative equivalent of running an Olympic 100-meter dash in ski boots.

A payroll specialist is staring at a timesheet exception that makes no sense. A school secretary is texting a supervisor for a missing approval. An IT director is fielding yet another ticket that starts with, “The system didn’t save my punch,” and ends with, “Can you just fix it this time?”

Everyone is working. No one feels confident.

And that’s the tell.

When a process creates a lot of motion but not a lot of clarity, you do not have a people problem, and you don’t necessarily even have a technology problem. You have a friction problem.

District operations will always have friction. The goal is not to eliminate all friction. The goal is to make friction earn its keep.

Two kinds of friction, one leadership decision

Friction is anything that slows a process down. In district operations, friction shows up as steps, approvals, rules, checks, logins, handoffs, exceptions, and “just in case” safeguards.

Some of that friction is worth its weight in gold. Some of it is the reason your team is exhausted.

Here’s the distinction.

Helpful Friction

Helpful friction is intentional, targeted, and evidence-building. It slows people down at the moments that matter most, and it produces something valuable in exchange: better decisions, cleaner data, tighter compliance, safer outcomes, and greater trust.

Helpful friction is the speed bump before your school’s main entrance.

Unhelpful Friction

Unhelpful friction is accidental, scattered, and effort-wasting. It doesn’t improve outcomes. It simply increases the cost of doing normal work, often through ambiguity, rework, unreliable tools, unclear ownership, or bureaucracy that has outlived its purpose.

Unhelpful friction is the pothole you hit every day because the city won’t prioritize the repair.

The Good vs. Bad Friction Model

Use this model any time you evaluate a policy, a workflow, or a tool. If you remember nothing else, remember this: good friction is designed, and bad friction is inherited.

1) Intentional vs. Accidental

Good friction was put there on purpose, and someone can explain why in a single sentence.

Bad friction accumulated over time because of old constraints, fear of exceptions, or “we had an issue once in 2016.”

A quick test: if your team cannot say who owns the step and why it exists, it is probably accidental.

2) Targeted vs. Scattered

Good friction is placed at the highest risk point, then removed everywhere else. 

Bad friction is sprinkled across the workflow, forcing everyone to pay a “tax” for rare edge cases.

A quick test: if your best employees are slowed down to prevent your worst day, you are paying too much “tax.”

3) Evidence-Building vs. Energy-Draining

Good friction produces an artifact that makes the next step easier: an audit trail, a decision record, a clear approval, a verified identity, a clean exception reason.

Bad friction produces only delay, frustration, and follow-up.

A quick test: if the step does not create confidence, it creates friction debt.

4) Fair vs. Misallocated

Good friction burdens the people closest to the risk, not the people farthest from it.

Bad friction pushes complexity onto school sites, then punishes them for inconsistency.

A quick test: if the front line is doing detective work for a central office policy gap, the burden is misallocated.

5) Recoverable vs. Trap-Like

Good friction helps you diagnose and fix problems quickly, with clear visibility into what happened.

Bad friction creates blame spirals, manual overrides, and “just do it on paper” workarounds.

A quick test: if exceptions are common and hard to resolve, the system is a trap, not a tool.

Why this matters for school district leaders

Business and HR leadership is often tasked with protecting the district from financial risk, compliance risk, and public trust risk. That naturally creates controls, checks, and approvals.

IT leadership is often tasked with protecting the district from security risk, reliability risk, and operational disruption. That naturally creates governance, standards, and guardrails.

Both are rational. Both are necessary. But both can accidentally create drag.

The districts that modernize well do one thing consistently: they treat friction as a design choice, not a side effect.

They keep controls that protect the district, and they remove obstacles that merely punish the workforce.

Examples districts recognize immediately

Helpful friction looks like this

• A clear approval gate for pay changes (stipends, extra duty, overtime rules) before payroll closes, with documented justification.
• Role-based access that prevents unauthorized changes without making normal work harder.
• Audit-friendly guardrails such as requiring a reason for edits, or tracking who changed what, and when.
• Short checkpoints before major system changes that surface assumptions early and prevent expensive reversals later.
  
  

  These slow down the right moments, once, for the sake of getting it right.

Unhelpful friction looks like this

• Duplicate entry into multiple systems because they don’t talk to each other, or because no one owns integration outcomes.
• End of pay period exception “mad dash” because the process fails silently until it becomes urgent.
• Unreliable time capture that forces manual corrections, disputes, and retroactive guesswork.
• Ambiguous policies that create inconsistent site behavior, followed by cleanup at the central office.
  

   

   

  These create a cycle: confusion, workarounds, rework, and blame.

The Friction Audit Checklist

A practical tool you can use this week

Pick one high impact workflow, and run it through this checklist. Employee time and attendance is a great candidate because it touches everyone, every day, and every pay period. Purchasing approvals, stipend processing, and leave workflows would also qualify.

Step 1: Map the workflow in plain language
Write the process as it actually happens, not as it is described in the handbook.

• Where does work start?
• Who touches it, and in what order?
• Where do exceptions appear? 
• Where do people step out of the system (email spreadsheets, paper)? 
  

   

If you can't map it simply, the workflow is already signaling friction debt.

Step 2: Label every step as one of three types
For each step, choose one:

1. Decision step: someone is deciding something meaningful
2. Evidence step: the system is capturing proof, identity, approval, or context
3. Administrative step: moving, copying, rekeying, chasing, formatting, or translating data

Your goal is not “fewer steps.” Your goal is fewer administrative steps.

Step 3: Run the Good vs. Bad test on each friction point
For every step that slows work down, ask:

• Is it intentional? Who owns it, and why does it exist?
• Is it targeted? Does it sit at the highest risk moment, or everywhere?
• Does it build evidence? What confidence does it create?
• Is the burden fair? Who pays the cost, and should they?
• Is it recoverable? If it fails, can we quickly see what happened, and fix it?

If a step fails two or more of these tests, put it on the “remove or redesign” list.

Step 4: Quantify friction with three fast metrics
You do not need a consulting engagement. You need a baseline.

1. Touches per transaction
   How many human touches does one timesheet, request, or record require from start to finish?
2. Exception rate
   What percentage of transactions require manual intervention?
3. Time to resolution
   When an exception happens, how long does it take to resolve, and who gets pulled in?

If exceptions are frequent and resolution is slow, your friction is unhelpful by default.

Step 5: Decide what to keep, and what to kill
Now make the call, as a leadership team.

• Keep friction that prevents expensive mistakes.
• Kill friction that causes rework, ambiguity, and mistrust.
• Redesign friction that is necessary but poorly placed.

A strong rule of thumb: If you are adding friction to compensate for unreliable inputs, you are solving the wrong problem.

Step 6: Fix the friction closest to the source
Districts often try to solve downstream chaos with upstream bureaucracy. That is backwards.

If time capture is inconsistent, no amount of approvals will make payroll cleaner. It will only make it slower.

If a system is unreliable, training harder is not the answer. Reliability is.

If policies are unclear, adding steps will not create clarity. Defining the policy in writing will.

The leadership move that changes everything

When you treat friction as a design decision, you make a powerful shift:

• You protect the district where it matters.
  
  
• You remove drag where it doesn’t.
• You create trust because people can see the logic.

That trust is not soft. It is operational. It shows up as fewer exceptions, fewer disputes, fewer emergency fixes, and fewer late nights at the end of the pay period.

And that is the point.

Modernization is not about replacing paper with pixels. It is about replacing chaos with clarity.

So the next time someone says, “We need to reduce friction,” answer with a better question:
Which friction is protecting us, and which friction is punishing us?

Because one is a feature.

And the other is a fix waiting to happen.

We’ve identified the most common friction point our Touchpoint customers have eliminated in their time collection and payroll process: how employees enter their time. To learn more about a surprisingly simple change in method that completely eliminates this friction point, read this post: The Real Time-Tracking Breakthrough Is Not Just “Going Digital.” It’s Badge-Scanning.

Ready to see if Touchpoint fits with your district?

👉 Schedule a 20-minute conversation with our team