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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
These slow down the right moments, once, for the sake of getting it right.
These create a cycle: confusion, workarounds, rework, and blame.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
When you treat friction as a design decision, you make a powerful shift:
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