Operational Barriers
Helps identify unnecessary approvals, unclear decisions, and work obstacles that slow people down every day.
- Sections
- 2
- Questions
- 10
- Who to ask
- An employee, team lead, or manager of a small team whose work depends on internal approvals, work processes, handoffs between roles, and digital tools.
answers hidden · summary from 5 responses
When to run it
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.
What it shows
The survey is divided into sections. For each one, you'll see separately what's already working and what's getting in people's way.
- 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.
What the questions look like
Below are real questions from this survey, one from each section.
-
In typical work tasks, it is clear to me who has the authority to make the final decision or approve the next step.
- What it checks
- Understand how clear the owner of the final decision or approval of the next step is in recurring work tasks.
- Scale response
- from “Disagree” to “Agree”
- Open clarification
- In which typical tasks is it most often unclear who can make the final decision or approve the next step?
-
In my usual work, I do not have to re-enter, copy, or transfer the same information between tools and documents.
- What it checks
- Understand how well the workflow and set of tools support a continuous flow of data without unnecessary manual transfer between tools, forms, spreadsheets, or documents.
- Scale response
- from “Disagree” to “Agree”
- Open clarification
- Where do you most often have to re-enter or transfer the same information?
-
In typical work tasks, approvals do not repeat the same check or go through unnecessary levels without a clear reason.
- What it checks
- Understand whether the respondent sees a clear purpose in each approval level in their workflow: who checks what, why this step is needed, and whether it repeats a check that has already been completed.
- Scale response
- from “Disagree” to “Agree”
- Open clarification
- Please specify the part of the work where approvals most often repeat the same check or go through unnecessary levels.
The score shows where the tension is, and people’s words show why it arose. How these answers come together into an overall picture is explained in methodology.
What’s in the report
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.
The report isn’t reduced to a single score. It shows growth points — recurring themes and work tensions visible across several people at once. Each one is compiled from anonymized summaries — individual responses don’t make it into the report. What happens to the report next is covered in the full workflow.
Survey sections
From finding to verification
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Launch “Operational Barriers” in your organization
The survey is already assembled: sections, questions, and the report layout are ready. All you need to do is decide who to ask and give people access.