---
title: 'Operational barriers'
description: 'Helps identify unnecessary approvals, unclear decisions, and work obstacles that slow people down every day.'
type: template
locale: en
canonical: 'https://app.teal.band/en/templates/process_friction'
---

# Operational barriers

Helps identify unnecessary approvals, unclear decisions, and work obstacles that slow people down every day.

## When to use

The team complains that simple tasks take too much time. People are bogged down in bureaucracy, long approvals, and inconvenient tools. You want to find specific operational barriers that prevent working faster and reduce productivity.

## Key facts

- **Categories:** 2
- **Questions:** 10
- **Respondent:** An employee, team lead, or manager of a small team whose work depends on internal approvals, work processes, handoffs between roles, and digital tools.
- **Topic:** Processes and work formats

## What it diagnoses

- **Approvals and decision rights:** Shows where tasks slow down because the decision owner is unclear, there are unnecessary checks, approval is delayed, or the criteria are not transparent.
- **Tools, processes, and workarounds:** Repeated entry, manual reconciliation, fragmented data, handoffs between roles, and informal ways of getting work done.

## Example questions

- In typical work tasks, it is clear to me who has the authority to make the final decision or approve the next step.
  - **Scale:** Disagree — Agree
  - **Clarification:** In which typical tasks is it most often unclear who can make the final decision or approve the next step?
- In typical work tasks, approvals do not repeat the same check or go through unnecessary levels without a clear reason.
  - **Scale:** Disagree — Agree
  - **Clarification:** Please specify the part of the work where approvals most often repeat the same check or go through unnecessary levels.
- In work tasks, it is usually clear to me how long to expect an approval decision to take and who to contact if the response is delayed.
  - **Scale:** Disagree — Agree
  - **Clarification:** Where does a decision most often get stuck without a clear timeline or escalation rule?

## What the report contains

The report will identify bottlenecks in processes: where decision rights are distributed inefficiently, which approvals delay work, and where employees have to invent workarounds due to broken tools or confusing regulations.

## Similar templates

- [Effectiveness of hybrid and remote work](https://app.teal.band/en/templates/remote_hybrid.md) — Helps understand how clear, convenient, and equitable remote or hybrid work remains for everyone.
- [Value chain](https://app.teal.band/en/templates/value_chain.md) — Helps you understand how clearly the business sees its customer, sells the promised value, and is ready to grow without losing quality.
- [Manager Effectiveness](https://app.teal.band/en/templates/manager_effectiveness.md) — Helps you understand what in a manager’s work supports the team and what should be improved.