Friction & Consumption: what it is and how to measure it

Seventeen of the 18 PEAKTEAMS KPIs describe something a team has or does: clear goals, trust, output. The eighteenth describes something that is taken from it. Friction & Consumption is the only KPI where a higher score is worse, and it enters the Team P&L on the cost side.

The formula on the methodology page is Team Net Value = Value(Input, Process, Output) × (1 − Friction Tax). The point of the multiplication is that friction can only tax value that exists. A team with weak inputs and processes has little to lose; a strong team in a bureaucratic organisation can lose a great deal.

What Friction & Consumption means

PEAKTEAMS defines Friction & Consumption as the energy lost to organisational inefficiencies: bureaucracy, politics, administrative overhead, unproductive meetings and rework. The word consumption is chosen with care. These things do not merely slow a team; they consume the attention, hours and goodwill that would otherwise have gone into the work.

The KPI is built from three taxes, each measured by its own items. They are worth knowing separately because they have different owners.

The bureaucracy tax

Politics, process overhead, administrative work and meetings that do not earn their time. Four items cover it. This is the tax the team mostly does not control; it is levied by the organisation, and the remedy usually involves someone above the team.

The energy tax

One item asks whether people feel drained after the team's own coordination meetings. This is the tax the team levies on itself, and it is the one a team lead can cut by Friday.

The rework tax

One item asks how often work has to be redone because requirements were unclear or changed mid-stream. Rework sits between the other two: sometimes the team's own planning is at fault, sometimes a stakeholder changed their mind after the work had started.

Why it matters

The input-process-output tradition that Ilgen and colleagues (2005) summarised is mostly about what builds value; PEAKTEAMS added a cost side because teams asked for one, and because the research on strain supports it. Maslach and Leiter (2016), reviewing the burnout literature, describe six areas of work life in which mismatches drive exhaustion and cynicism: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. Bureaucracy and politics are mismatches in control and fairness; administrative overload is a workload mismatch. Friction, in other words, is not just inefficiency. It is the mechanism by which a good team becomes a tired one.

Meetings deserve their own evidence. Steven Rogelberg's 2019 book on the science of meetings collects a research programme showing that the quality of meetings, not their number, predicts how people feel about their work, and that most of the common remedies (shorter, fewer, agendas) help only when the meeting's purpose is clear. Perlow, Hadley and Eun's 2017 Harvard Business Review piece documents the organisational side: meetings expanding to crowd out the focused work they were meant to coordinate. That is the energy tax, measured.

What high and low look like in a real team

Remember the direction: high is bad. A team with high friction spends its Monday morning on status updates for people who could have read them. Getting a laptop, a licence or a decision takes three approvals and two chasers. Members leave coordination meetings with less energy than they brought and go back to the real work in the evening. The retrospective's top item is "clarify requirements", for the fourth quarter running.

A team with low friction has few meetings and leaves them with decisions. Approvals it needs regularly have been pre-approved or delegated. Requirements are agreed before work starts and changes go through a visible, slightly annoying step, which is what keeps them rare. Administrative tasks exist, but they are batched and nobody does them during their best hours.

How PEAKTEAMS measures it

Friction & Consumption is the single KPI of the Friction pillar. The Snapshot survey (about 12 minutes per member, all 18 KPIs) asks six statements for it, on the same five-point agreement scale as everything else. Five are worded so that agreeing means more friction; one is worded positively and reverse-scored.

The four bureaucracy items are weighted at half each, so the bureaucracy tax counts twice as much as the energy tax or the rework tax in the KPI mean, rather than four times. The resulting score runs from 1 (no friction) to 5, and it feeds the Team Net Value formula as the friction tax: none at 1.0, everything at 5.0. Unlike the other 17 KPIs, Friction & Consumption has no Deep-Dive module; the Deep-Dive survey goes deeper on value creation and does not produce a Team Net Value.

Results appear only once at least five team members have answered; the owner's own answer does not count. On the Consensus Matrix, which plots each item's average against agreement, friction is often the KPI whose items show the widest spread, because it is felt unevenly: the person who handles the team's procurement, reporting and compliance experiences a different organisation from the person who does not. A high score with low agreement usually points to one or two members carrying most of the administrative load.

How to improve it

Start with the tax the team owns, because results there arrive fastest and buy credibility for the harder conversation about the organisation's tax.

• Give every recurring meeting a purpose line and a cancellation rule. A meeting whose purpose cannot be stated in one line is a status report that could be written.
• Move status to writing, keep meetings for decisions. The energy item drops sharply when people leave meetings having decided something rather than having listened to updates.
• Freeze requirements per iteration and make changes visible. Rework falls when a mid-stream change requires a short written note of what it costs.
• Batch administration into a fixed slot. The same hours of admin cost far less energy at Friday 3pm than scattered across the week's best thinking time.
• Keep a friction log and take it upstairs. Three concrete examples of the bureaucracy tax, with hours attached, are what a sponsor needs to remove an approval step; a general complaint about bureaucracy is not.
• Rotate the administrative roles. If one member carries the team's overhead, the friction score is high for them and invisible to everyone else.

Related KPIs

Friction is what remains after the Input and Process KPIs have done their work, and three of them are its closest neighbours. Delivery Methodology is the Process KPI that decides how much overhead the team's own way of working creates; the Deep-Dive asks directly whether it creates more overhead than it saves. Environment & Resources covers the organisational support whose absence shows up here as chasing and waiting. Team Organization covers workload balance, which is where uneven administrative load is first visible.