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There’s no avoiding it. Artificial intelligence (AI) has workplaces all aflutter.

Ideas about how AI will revolutionize the future of work vary, of course. Some envision small businesses “staffed” by a peopleless marketing practice built on the tech that drives customer service chatbots. Others crow about how AI’s “decision”-making capabilities will further empower clinical staff, like nurses, to make healthcare more efficient.

To be sure, HR leaders aren’t immune from notions about how AI is poised to forever change their profession. The proof is plain: one Gartner study found that 81 percent of HR executives have used, or considered employing, AI tools at work. 

But chatter around AI notwithstanding, the tech is far from the workplace balm so many want it to be. In fact, AI has a unique potential to increase work friction – and make HR leader’s jobs more difficult. For more about the uncanny rise of work friction in the age of AI, read on.

AI’s “Black Box Problem” Uniquely Generates Work Friction

For HR leaders and workaday employees alike, AI presents a paradox. Many moments of work friction that AI’s proponents claim the tech solves are actually compounded by AI. And when AI is used in the workplace, it can create work friction points that didn’t previously exist.

The reason? AI’s “black box problem” – that is, no one quite knows how AI works. In practice, this means you can’t independently trust generative AI programs to output error-free answers. 

The result? Additional, and unnecessary, moments of work.

Say you want to better manage employee retention. You need to avoid human biases and minimize error. But at the same time, workforce management can quickly lead to decision fatigue. So you turn to an AI program to analyze data about employee engagement and ensure your efforts aren’t wasted on unnecessary obstacles that make work harder than it needs to be.

In any case, the goal is to reduce your cognitive burden. But because of AI’s black box problem, you can’t inherently trust the AI program to output answers you don’t have to verify. So what was meant to decrease your workload actually increases the number of decisions you have to make as you review the AI output for errors.

As an HR leader charged with identifying, detailing, and justifying your people management strategy, any moment spent backfilling the logic behind your AI program’s results is wasted effort – and a significant contributor to work friction. 

Next, we’ll examine another way AI overly complicates moments of work.

AI Makes Moments of Work Friction Harder to Pinpoint

Along with generating new moments of work friction, AI programs can complicate how HR leaders identify existing friction points. Ironically, that creates even more wasted effort. And, in turn, further perpetuates work friction’s viscous cycle.

Consider how each of the following AI workflow results make it harder to discover the root cause of work friction, and require additional effort to address in addition to any initial friction points:

• Data overload: AI generates a tremendous amount of data. HR leaders already have a tremendous amount of data. Sorting through massive datasets to identify noise-free KPIs is time-consuming and unproductive.
• Automated interactions: When HR administrators use AI-driven systems to handle employee interactions or queries, it builds a wall between employees and leadership. Without moments of direct interaction, it’s harder to understand nuances of experience, and difficult to identify the moments that prevent employees from achieving their goals.
• Bias in algorithms: AI algorithms often perpetuate biases present in the data they’re trained on. When this happens, it obscures the actual causes of work friction, especially when algorithms fail to account for individualized perspectives and experiences.

This isn’t, of course, to say that tech has no place in HR. As part of a targeted, refined strategy, in fact, technology solutions, including AI, can help root out moments of work friction. Let’s dive a bit more deeply into that…

Moment-Centric Data Helps HR Leaders Reduce Work Friction

Picture this: your HR team makes numerous attempts to make work easier, only to be told by employees that none address the moments that prevent employees from reaching their goals. 

Listening to employees is key to effectively resolving work friction. It helps avoid making assumptions about employees’ needs and tailors solutions based on their specific experiences. 

A helpful way to address this is to survey a small group of employees in order to pinpoint: 

• The most prevalent moments of work friction. 
• The specific areas causing the most impactful friction points for the most workers. 
• The precise effects of work friction on the employees who experience it. 

With survey data in hand, you can identify the individual moments of work friction, experiment with potential solutions, and monitor the impact those solutions have on the daily experiences of employees. For example, if employees express frustration with their current annual review process, you can test out alternative approaches – say, a holistic, employee-led presentation rather than a rote rating system.

Subsequently, you can follow up with employees regularly (e.g., on a monthly basis) to gauge any observable changes in their satisfaction levels. When executed correctly, this method enables HR leaders to focus on the specific moments of work friction, ultimately aiding all employees in achieving their goals.

AI-savvy Friction Fighters Make Work Less Effortful for Everyone

Unknowable as AI’s ultimate potential for the workplace remains, the technology is here to stay.

The key to intelligently using AI at work? Identifying the moments when AI makes work more complicated in order to convert them into moments that help employees achieve their goals.

For more about how FOUNT can help you build a team of AI-savvy friction fighters, get in touch.

Check out our latest research on work friction.

The FOUNT team will be dusting off their white blazers and sunglasses in preparation for next week’s Business Transformation Exchange in Miami. Unlike vice cops Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, Ian and Christophe won’t be working undercover. Instead, they will be introducing senior business leaders to innovative ways to uncover work friction at their organizations.

Work friction is perceived as energy an employee shouldn’t have to spend to do their work. Even with the best intentions to make work easy for employees, large organizations may inadvertently contribute more work friction to the environment. Outdated processes, faulty tools and misaligned workflows slow people down. These things are invisible to senior leaders but experienced in moments as individuals go about their day-to-day work (e.g. solving a customer issue, setting goals, pursuing a new internal role).

Gartner estimates that employees spend nearly 2 hours a day hacking work to get around work friction. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort. When the work environment makes it difficult to complete everyday work things, employees get frustrated, disengage and eventually burn out. This enormous productivity loss is preventable.

Done well, business transformation leads to more efficient ways of working and a more productive workforce. Even though business transformation projects are typically large scale, real transformation can begin with a small project focused on the most important things your employees care about and want you to fix. Before you consider embarking on a transformational project, book a demo to learn how friction management can get work flowing at your organization.

The Business Transformation Exchange is an invite-only event features speakers from Centene, US Bank and Manulife. The program will cover a range of topics including how to:

• Put effective strategy and structure in place before delving into large transformation projects
• Demonstrate ROI to gain C-suite support and buy-in
• Manage people within the company, and adopt a change culture throughout the whole business
• Balance technology options and maximize their potential in the digital transformation age, including discussions on Generative AI

We’ve written before about the nefariousness of the Sunday Scaries. But it’s one thing for three out of four workers to report experiencing dread before the start of their workweek. It’s another for workers to want to surgically sever their experiences at work from who they are outside of the workplace.

If that action sounds extreme, it’s because it is. But such hyperbole is the engine that drives the plot to the widely-acclaimed streamer, Severance. Briefly: the show follows employees of fictional Lumon Industries who agree to the “severance” program, through which they’re paid to undergo a surgery that separates work memories from non-work memories.

One reason Severance resonates? Employees are unhappier at work than they’ve ever been. At FOUNT we call the reason for that reality work friction.

The fact is, tempting though it may be to try and “fix” employees’ feelings – not to mention removing them from the equation altogether – it’s a misstep that simply causes more problems. So how can leaders know what can be fixed? Read on…

Management Historically Takes a Head-in-the-Sand Response to Work Friction

Let’s start with a key finding from the recent State of Employee Experience Study: people with the most influence over work friction tend to take the least responsibility for it.

Fewer than one-third of managers, it turns out, own actions that create better workplace experiences for their employees. Often, they simply assume someone else will address the issue. It’s a head-in-the-sand approach that makes work worse for everyone.

Employees who experience a lack of managerial empathy – much less practical support – often feel forced to “hack” their workplace experiences just to complete core tasks (more on that below). What’s more: they tend to withdraw (remember the hubbub around “quiet quitting” throughout 2022), miss shifts,,  – and eventually leave altogether. The result: wasted energy and money.

When managers neglect to take responsibility for how employees experience work, it creates environments that fail to support good work. Again, the result is wasted employee effort and a worse bottom line.

The fictional managers in Severance, however, take a more underhanded, troubling approach. They don’t just fail to take responsibility for the workplace they oversee. Rather, they eliminate all potential responsibility for how their employees experience work.

It’s a terrible tactic. And the premise has roots in reality…

Employee Hacks Make Work Worse Than It Has to Be

The titular medical procedure in Severance makes it impossible for employees to remember their workdays. On the surface, this is the ultimate workplace hack. Work is no longer a lived experience. And so, the thinking goes, nothing can create bad experiences of work.

If a tree falls in a forest (or a computer crashes in an office), so to speak…

But ignoring problems fails to resolve them. And hacked solutions only make work worse. Still, according to Gartner, two-thirds of employees spend about two hours per day determining how to work around obstacles that prevent them from completing their basic job functions. That’s a tremendous amount of wasted time. Even if employees didn’t remember the time they wasted on hacks, inefficiencies would continue to weigh them down.

So what can be done? Talk to employees and collect the work-friction data that supports better moments at work.

Work Friction Data Helps Highlight Systemic Challenges

We work in a world where the most critical workplace challenges are increasingly systemic. In fact, according to W. Edwards Deming, only six percent of problems in the workplace are attributable to individuals. Yet it’s individual employees who most often bear the brunt of workplace issues. Even if the “solutions” management expects of them aren’t as outlandish as corporate-sponsored brain surgery.

Employee monitoring, for example, is often seen as a way to boost productivity. Token advancement is believed by some to “promote” diversity. Additional training, in turn, is assigned to streamline leadership and decision-making. 

But monitored employees who feel micromanaged are likely to be less motivated. One employee’s promotion doesn’t broaden skills and perspectives throughout the organization. And critical thinking is a competency that shouldn’t be relegated to one-off training.

Most importantly, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that can sufficiently improve organization-wide employee well-being. And the most effective management strategy in one industry may not perform as well in another.

Rather than dictating solutions to individual employees, ask employees about what prevents them from achieving their goals. Then use these answers to develop solutions that directly address those individual moments of work. 

In other words, lead with curiosity to help address the systems that prevent employees from doing their best work. It turns out: this will help you build a higher-performing corporate culture overall.

Work Friction Wears Away at Employee Well-Being

According to the Deloitte Well-being at Work Survey, employee well-being is troublingly low. And though too few in leadership step up to own this issue, those who do often find they don’t know where to start. 

Solicit data about work friction, however, and you can smooth out the path toward a healthier, more productive workplace.

Want to discuss how you can get the data that will help root out work friction in your workplace? Get in touch.

These leaders are redefining the way people look at the HR industry and HR tech. They’re also helping develop and innovate products and start important conversations in the HR tech market.

It’s humbling to see our cofounder and CEO, Volker Jacobs listed among a list of the world’s best HR leaders. We’re so very proud! This list, compiled by the team at recooty, a recruitment software provider, includes a lot of well-known faces such as Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Officer & EVP, Human Resources at Microsoft; Jess Miller-Merrell, Chief Innovation Officer at Workology and People Analytics leader, David Green.

To learn more about these HR influencers, read the full article on LinkedIn.

Companies selling products and services are leveraging experience to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. People have become accustomed to sophisticated and well-designed consumer experiences and increasingly expect the same of their experience of work. In short, experiences count.

Do you speak the language of experience?

The Experience Economy

People have experiences all the time, including when they work.

Companies selling products and services are leveraging experience to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. People have become accustomed to sophisticated and well-designed consumer experiences and increasingly expect the same of their experience of work.

In short, experiences count.

Adults spend more than a third of their waking lives at work each year, and unsurprisingly people want work to work for them: to meet their unique needs, to provide a daily source of satisfaction rather than frustration.

If the experience of work is good for employees, the benefits for the business are clear: productivity is greatly increased, and much higher levels of employee retention result. However, we know that the opposite is often the case.

Many people’s experience of work is that it is something to be endured, rather than something to look forward to. Worse, many employees feel that they get their work done in spite of the company rather than with its support.

What happens when this is the case? An experience economy is also a free market – many employees will just go elsewhere. Quitting in search of an employer that can provide better experiences of work is easier than ever. The well-documented phenomenon of ‘The Great Resignation’ has shown that employees feel empowered to act when it comes to improving their quality of life, of which experiences at work play a large part.

If the experience of work is good for employees, the benefits for the business are clear

In an already tight labor market, losing staff is a critical business problem and the answer cannot lie with simply replacing them – attracting, hiring, retaining lost talent is expensive and time-consuming (if it is even possible), and may represent a threat to the very existence of the enterprise.

Perhaps even more concerningly, those that don’t leave may drift into presenteeism which can be infectious and harmful to morale. In addition, while gaps in headcount may be easily quantifiable, it can be harder to get visibility into the proportion of your workforce who are still employed but may have ‘checked out’.

Either way, if enough staff leave (physically or otherwise), the net impact is real damage to the performance of the business.

Misunderstanding Work

Fundamentally, the challenge of people having a poor experience of work is not actually their problem, but rather the company’s problem. With unmet demand for labor and the proliferation of sources of information and communication such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn, the barriers to leaving for better experiences elsewhere have never been lower.

The solution for the company is much harder- to improve employee’s experience of work you have to understand what work really is for your employees, and change it to meet their unique needs.

Companies typically design work around their own business needs, thinking about work in terms that they understand, and organizing themselves and their employees accordingly. To create work that supports business objectives and meets the complex needs of human beings, organizations have to shift their whole frame of reference for how they conceive of work to be more human-centric.

Instead of starting from the requirements of the organization and working top-down to the employees, they need to internalize the opposite perspective: beginning with the human experience of work and then adjusting the organization around it. One could sum this up with the following statement: rather than Human Resources that work for the company, they should think in terms of balancing it with Company Resources that work for humans.

To improve work you have to understand what it really is for your employees, and change it to meet their unique needs

Much as businesses have grown to accept that they need to meet customers where they are, ultimately the gap between the organization-centric understanding of work for employees and the lived human experience is what needs to be bridged.

Business as Usual: Lost in Translation

This is not to say that companies haven’t committed plentiful resources – with good intention – towards what they see as improving work conditions.

Many leaders may embrace and agree with the notions of the Experience Economy and the need for human-centricity, but they may also only see in those concepts vindication for the strategies they are already pursuing – especially when the terms ‘human’ or ‘experience’ appear somewhere on the list.

However, these strategies often reflect a top-down view of organizing people and work around the company’s own needs. As a result, they will likely fail to bridge the gap between the company’s and the employees’ concept of the experiences of work, and will not meaningfully change work to meet the human needs of employees.

When organizations conceive of ‘experience’ it often doesn’t align with what employees think and feel about work on a daily basis. Institutionally, companies lack the framework and language to describe and codify work in ways that are not focused around process, silos, systems and functions within themselves.

The existing company-centric view of strategies to improve work conditions includes much of the typical Human Resources project portfolio.

Examples include:

• Implementing or expanding engagement & listening programs
• Human Capital Management (HCM) system upgrades
• Digital transformations
• Employee Value Proposition (EVP) rebrands
• Revising company communications & messaging
• Free breakfasts

The above projects and initiatives may impact the individual, but are not fundamentally tailored to understanding and improving their experience. As such, any improvements in human experience that result from much of the existing HR agenda will be by accident rather than design.

Rather than Human Resources that work for the company, think in terms of balancing it with Company Resources that work for humans.

By describing the work employees do purely in the language of the organization, the company’s good intentions get lost in translation.

Employees’ human experiences remain unmanaged and the deep problem of building a positive employee experience remains unsolved.

Given the strong business and labor market incentives to ‘get experience right’, as well as the finite nature of resources there is the very real possibility that, from an experience perspective at least, it would be better to do nothing than to spend a fortune doing the wrong things.

Ultimately, if a new perspective on the problem of experience is desired, then a new set of tools to solve it are needed.

Cracking the Code

In order to improve work, companies need to understand, measure and meaningfully change the human experience of it.

The many goals that individuals pursue in the act of working are nuanced and varied. The myriad activities they perform, whether little or big things, trigger interactions with a complex human, digital, and physical ecosystem within the company. This interplay is what it means to experience work.

This is where existing listening data fails to provide enough insight – organizations need to be able to collect information across this multitude of factors and interactions and then analyze it. If this weren’t hard enough already, it needs to be done at scale and across the company.

At FOUNT we know that employees don’t speak the language of processes, silos, and other organization-centric concepts; instead they live the daily language of human experience. If an organization is serious about changing the experience of work for its employees, it needs to translate their language into insight it can act on – this is where existing listening strategies fall short, especially at scale.

If a new perspective on the problem of experience is desired, then a new set of tools to solve it are needed.

FOUNT has cracked this critical code, and our Employee Experience (EX) Intelligence solution provides the tools and the structure to gather and analyze authentic experience data.   That intelligence empowers leaders to prioritize the most important work experiences that need improvement for specific talent segments, and pinpoint sources of friction within those experiences.

Implementing an employee-centered listening capability is the critical strategic foundation that provides the data and intelligence to inform the right improvements within your company. However, developing a more mature strategy where this type of change is orchestrated across the many people, teams, projects and initiatives spread throughout an enterprise is a gargantuan task.

The FOUNT solution is the infrastructure to operationalize the delivery and improvement of experiences across the many moving parts of an organization. By tracking progress over time, and determining and appointing responsibility and visibility, a self-sustaining feedback loop can be created to drive meaningful improvement in your employees’ human experiences of work.

That’s why FOUNT exists – we believe that people should feel great at work and we’re excited to partner with our customers to achieve this ambition.

With the right tools organizations can learn and understand this new language of work. By acting on experience, common human frustrations and frictions can be swept away.

Ultimately the dream of work that just works can be made real.

This article about reducing work friction in retail call centers was authored by Christophe Martel, originally appeared in the November issue of Connections Magazine.

Today’s retail call centers face a chronic problem: crushing call volumes for most of the calendar year, followed by a holiday spike that threatens to bring the whole operation crashing down.

Many call center leaders are able to make it through. But the unrelenting strain on agents contributes to sky-high burnout and turnover rates. And even in a high-profit season, there’s a real impact to the bottom line.

Call centers need an evergreen solution that eases agents’ burden—not just over the holidays, but throughout the year. One approach: Find and remove sources of work friction in your organization.

Essentially, these friction points keep agents from pursuing their work goals and ultimately from doing their best work. By identifying moments when work friction crops up, you can implement solutions that make the holidays easier for agents to navigate.

In this piece, I’ll define work friction, explain the impact of holiday stressors, and show how leaders can uncover agents’ biggest friction points to prepare for the next holiday season.

Call Centers Already Have a Work Friction Crisis

Chances are your agents regularly experience work friction in the workplace. Think:

• Headsets with stuttering audio
• Software that’s slow to load
• Workflows with multistep approval processes
• Managers that take ten minutes to walk over when they know there’s an angry customer on the line
• Irregular shift patterns that disrupt work-life balance (and increase burnout)

It’s important to note that these friction points aren’t mutually exclusive. In many cases, multiple ones can crop up in a single moment—just picture an agent who’s waiting for an approval page to load while fifth in the queue for their manager’s support. It’s a frustrating experience at best. At worst, an agent can feel immobilized while they’re trying to help a customer.

Over time, work friction takes a serious toll on agents. But there are also steep business costs, such as:

• Flagging productivity and performance: Work friction makes it harder for agents to efficiently execute support tasks and power through call queues. The effect is “wasted work”—to the tune of two hours per worker every day.
• Low customer satisfaction: When agents don’t have the right environment in which to work effectively, customers may not receive the quality of support they expect.
• Hiring and training expenses: High-friction environments drive agent turnover, forcing call centers to invest in expensive hiring and training programs—even if they’re unlikely to see long-term returns on that investment.

To mitigate these costs, many call centers have tried and tested dozens of short-term solutions: chatbots to defray call loads, performance incentives to boost morale, etc. More often than not, though, these solutions amount to applying Band-Aids. They don’t actually heal the work friction infecting employees’ work lives. And during the holiday season, the worst symptoms of work friction start to show.

Work Friction Snowballs during the Holidays

There’s a good chance you remember the headlines about Southwest Airlines’ colossal failure last year. Several major friction points—legacy staff scheduling software, a point-to-point flight model, and a historic regional blizzard—combined at the peak of the holiday season

Flights were canceled due to severe weather. Flight crews couldn’t view their next assignments. Customers were stranded in airports. And Southwest’s call centers couldn’t handle the influx of calls from all sides. The result: nearly 17,000 cancellations and a total airline meltdown.

This is a real-world example of how regular work friction can quickly snowball over the holidays. And while most retail call centers won’t face the same challenges as Southwest, the holiday crush does mean thousands more inbound calls and messages about:

• Billing issues
• Order delays
• Return processing
• Technical support

A huge chunk of these calls are likely to happen during Cyber Week, which claims roughly 25 percent of ecommerce holiday sales. But the tail often extends into January as customers set up new devices or return clothes that don’t fit.

This extra load can push even a well-oiled call center to its limit. In high-friction workplaces, though, the impact can be devastating.

Picture, for instance, a call center that’s relying on a new AI assistant to help triage customer support requests. The AI works fine under standard conditions, but it’s not equipped to handle the number of requests during Cyber Week.

The AI might take several minutes to process a batch of requests. Or route customers to agents at unpredictable intervals, creating a hard-to-manage queue. It might even buckle completely—leaving customers and agents hanging while the system reboots.

Of course, this is just a single friction point. There’s a good chance agents will experience several at once. During the holiday season, compounding friction points can have a snowball effect—and can quickly bring an operation to its knees.

All of this might sound like doom and gloom so far. But there’s a way for call center leaders to rein in the work friction crisis and make the holidays easier to manage. The next section has the details.

To Find Friction Points, Talk to Agents

To create a frictionless call center environment, leaders have to identify the biggest sources of friction and design a sustainable strategy to eliminate them. The best place to start? Ask agents where they see friction every day.

I can’t emphasize this part enough. As leaders, it’s easy to brainstorm solutions based on our own industry knowledge. But work friction is a problem that frontline workers know best. Without their firsthand perspective, there’s no way to define work friction at your organization—and any problem solving amounts to a guessing game.

In my experience, short, targeted surveys are one of the most effective ways to learn when work friction occurs and exactly how it impacts workers. They’re also a helpful tool for tracking how effective solutions are over time.

Of course, this approach is a long-term investment. Don’t have time for that in the thick of the holiday season? Even asking a handful of agents about their work friction experience can yield helpful insights (e.g., that Slack or Teams messages are overwhelming agents on top of high call loads). You can use these data points to uncover low-hanging fruit (such as implementing a few seasonal norms that limit nonessential communication).

The bottom line: By talking to agents about work friction, you can learn what’s gumming up agents’ workflows and reduce headaches during the holiday season.

Reducing Work Friction Has Benefits Long after the Holidays

For retail call centers, work friction has an outsize impact on holiday operations. But the truth is that a high-friction environment isn’t healthy at any time of year. And as long as work friction persists, call centers will continue to suffer from low productivity, high turnover rates, cratering morale, and more.

It’s time to take the work friction crisis seriously. The sooner leaders can make work smoother for agents, the sooner they’ll reap the benefits year-round.

To learn more about reducing work friction for retail call center agents at your organization, book a demo to see FOUNT in action.

Christophe Martel is cofounder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc., a SaaS company that helps global organizations reduce work friction and improve employee experiences. Christophe has held a range of business leadership roles, including heading the EMEA region of CEB, a global research and advisory company, and serving as CHRO in the leadup to the company’s acquisition by Gartner in 2017.

Executive Networks, the global leader in building trusted, peer-knowledge, exchange networks for HR executives, is partnering with employee experience experts, TaskHuman and FOUNT, to support leaders to reinvent the solutions needed for workforce well-being.

In partnership with Executive Networks and TaskHuman, FOUNT invites HR Directors to engage in a half-day workshop with subject matter experts to co-create actionable and relevant well-being solutions for yourself and your company.

Teddy Zmrhal, a renowned and celebrated design-thinking expert, will facilitate an energized, engaging and productive workshop for HR leaders to optimize exclusive research results, collaborate, and co-create well-being solutions to support you and your employees. 

This opportunity is FREE, and space is LIMITED. Because we are committed to creating a relevant and safe space for you to collaborate with your true peers, the application process needs to include details to help us approve your request quickly. Apply for your spot today! Register for the workshop closest to you.

West Coast

Fort Mason Center, Firehouse 2 Marina Boulevard San Francisco, CA 94123

When: September 27th 1-5 pm PDT

East Coast

Meet Hospitality 41 Madison Ave New York, NY 10010

When: October 4th 1-5 pm EDT

Christophe Martel, CEO and Founder of FOUNT was invited back on Paychex PULSE, an HR Podcast, to talk more about work friction and employee experiences (be sure to catch his first episode, Employee Experiences: One Size Doesn’t Fit All).

Hear as he and host, Rob Parsons talks about friction management – what it is and how it can positively impact employee experiences at your company. Watch it here or listen to the podcast using any of the links below. A full transcript is pasted below.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zNLnpFk5s0A?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://getfount.com

Podcast available at:

• Paychex
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube
• iHeart

Topics include:

• 00:00 – Welcome, Christophe Martel
• 00:52 – What is employee experience (EX)
• 02:51 – Why is EX important?
• 03:59 – The cost of work friction
• 06:20 – How friction lowers productivity
• 07:44 – The impact on turnover rates
• 08:32 – Hyper-focused friction management
• 11:36 – The role of the HR pro
• 12:09 – How data and technology tools can help
• 14:44 – The little things matter
• 17:05 – How HR teams are thinking differently
• 22:50 – Wrap up

Rob Parsons  Welcome to season four of Paychex PULSE, an HR podcast, where HR professionals can find great insights on today’s top issues and be inspired to build and lead effective teams in a healthier workplace.

Rob Parsons  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Paychex Pulse podcast. Rob Parsons here. We’re joined again by Christophe Martel, CEO and Founder of FOUNT, an organization that focuses on helping companies improve employee experience. Huge topic, we all know. Today we’re going to dig into hyper-focused friction management and the positive impact that can have on your organization.

Rob Parsons  Christophe, welcome back to the podcast.

Christophe Martel Good morning. Good morning, Rob and thanks for having me.

Rob Parsons  Oh, it’s a pleasure. We had a great conversation a few months back about employee experience, just in general, a very high-level view. We were talking about your research report, some of the things I saw at HR Tech. To level set, for those that didn’t catch that episode, what does it mean when you talk about EX, when you talk about employee experience?

Christophe Martel So, experience is really just the employee perspective on their life at work, just like the human experience is our own perspective on our life in general. And it turns out that life at work is really complex. Lots of things happening, lots of activities in the space of an eight-hour window and often more, and just very complex environments for people to interact with. So if you think about typical customer experiences that we know of like, I don’t know, buying a pizza from the pizza shop next door, it is not that complicated and it is a pretty linear experience.

Christophe Martel If you contrast that to what happens in a whole day of work for, let’s say, a nurse or a call center agent or just a developer, you end up interacting with hundreds if not thousands of touch points that are either physical, digital, or human across a day. And that complexity is what makes employee experience difficult to understand. It’s a lot easier to understand what happens between you and your pizza than between you and your work. So, that is employee experience. It is important because when people have a good experience at work, two things happen. Number one, they perform better simply because there’s just less friction in their day-to-day work, and also they stay longer, and that means that turnover goes down, which is a good thing for companies.

Christophe Martel  So, that’s the topic for the day, and it is a problem that company have problem. It is a field that companies are discovering and realize that traditional approaches to human resources management end up missing the mark somewhat on how to manage employee experience, in particular understanding and improving these hundreds, thousands of interactions that people have at work. How do you do that with all that complexity of stuff happening? And that’s the game.

Rob Parsons And when we talked last time, it really was eyeopening to me. It’s not an experience, it’s the combination of hundreds of thousands of discrete experiences and they add up, and all it takes is a couple bad ones to wreck the whole show. And I loved how you used the word friction to describe those hurdles, describe those points that are troublesome like gears that aren’t clicking together correctly. Tell me more about friction and what is it really costing companies.

Christophe Martel Good. The term employee experience, and I think we went into this last time, tends to describe the aggregate experience that people have with their company overall for the amount of time that they’ve worked with that company. And that’s a useful thing to understand, but where that experience is created is actually in almost the crucible of day-to-day interactions. And in these interactions, all kinds of things happen. They’re very rich. So if you think about, for example, an individual trying to find a new internal role at the company, the interaction is likely to encompass things that have to do with the manager, with the career framework, with the internal recruitment process and all kinds of things. And the question there is, what gets in my way?

Christophe Martel  So, when I try to go and find that new internal role, all of these things are supposed to work, but often they don’t. And often when you combine them, they really don’t. So friction is really, in particular, what we call work friction. Like for example, process friction that exists in companies when processes are not efficient is one thing. Work friction is actually the friction that employees experience. So when I do X, what gets in my way that shouldn’t be there?

Christophe Martel  So, work friction really has two economic impacts on companies. The first one is that it makes people less productive. And actually, there was a study from Gartner that calculated that work friction costs on average about two hours a day to an average employee at a company today in the United States. Two hours a day, if you calculate that for an average Fortune 500 company is about 500 million a year of wasted… It’s essentially wasted work.

Christophe Martel  If I’m a shareholder, I’m paying employees to work and wasting 500 million because they’re dealing with nonsense. That feels like low-hanging fruit, to be honest, to go after. So, that is the first very immediate impact. If you are able to reduce work friction, it can never go away entirely, but if you can reduce it, you immediately make people more productive, they perform better. And guess what? Most individuals actually aspire to performance, so ….

Rob Parsons  Yeah. I don’t wake up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do a bad job at work today.”

Christophe Martel  Exactly. So, most people show up saying, “I’m going to trying to do my best. If only you stop getting in my way, that would be helpful.” And so, the second financial impact is on turnover rates. And so on average, and it’s hard to attribute it a hundred percent to friction, but it’s anywhere from two to 500 million a year in annual turnover reduction, in financial value of that turnover reduction, for an average F 500. And for some companies that have very high attrition rates or some businesses within companies that have very high attrition rates, that figure can be much higher.

Rob Parsons  So, I want to get practical here, if you don’t mind. Dig in a little bit. You didn’t just call it friction management. You call it hyper-focused friction management. What do you mean by that and how do I put that in place? It’s nice to talk about. How do I make that happen? What are you talking about there?

Christophe Martel  Yeah, so actually one of our customers described work friction as that huge bear or elephant that is just sitting in the living room that no one knows how to deal with, and so everyone just leaves it there. And so that big problem, because everyone knows it’s a big problem, no one knows how to approach it. And I would hate to do that to a bear or to an elephant, but how you approach that kind of thing is by breaking it down. And to break it down, you essentially need data to be able to identify what are the most important causes of friction for our employees? What is it that they see that is really getting in their way? What is causing it? And there’s hundreds of culprits, and in smaller companies, it may be dozens of culprits. And just start with the first two or three and go and have an impact on them.

Christophe Martel  And so, what’s beautiful about this approach is that it is not about solving it, because as I mentioned earlier, friction can never entirely go away. It’s just like entropy. It never really goes away, but you can really reduce it and manage it, and reducing friction for one particular activity that people do. One example we had from one of our customers was in a warehouse where there was just not enough flight for people to be able to do their job right. There’s an example of, well, actually make the light work better so that people can see what they’re doing. Now, it’s not perfect, it doesn’t solve it all, but it makes things better.

Christophe Martel  The second example, if the way shifts are managed in a retail environment is really a problem for employees, it’s not working for them based on what they have to do in their life, again, make that simpler, fair. And these are things that actually are owned, of course, by the business, but also by HR. And HR has a role to particularly HR business partners or people that are aligned with the business to be the voice of employees for these things. But what HR business partners don’t have is data that tells everyone and puts everyone on the same page as to those things that are creating friction for everyone and how important these things are.

Rob Parsons  You got to what my next question was, and you you’d been touching on it. How can an HR pro really, and a business partner, help with this? I’ve got a lot going through my mind right now. One is that it’s so interesting, just like you talked about the experience, is hundreds of tiny things altogether. You don’t just fix experience. You’ve got to think about all of the things. You’ve also made it very clear that friction is the same way. It’s not just I fix friction. You’ve got to determine these things. And I want to touch on that HR role a couple ways.

Rob Parsons  First, let’s start with this idea of data with understanding where I can get the most bang for my buck, as it were. We talk a lot about employee communications, survey instruments, feedback mechanisms, technology tools to help with that. That really is the domain of HR, isn’t it? And you talked about it, being the advocate for the employee and bringing that back to the business. Here’s where you can really make a difference if you can do A, B, and C. You don’t have to do the entire alphabet right now, but if we could just do A, B and C, we can really have an impact.

Christophe Martel That’s right. So, I spent most of my career as a business leader before moving to HR. And as a business leader, all I wanted to know was what do I need to fix to help my people perform better and stay longer? Just tell me HR, please. Often the message is a little bit muddled because most tools out there are very good at telling HR and the business how people feel, and that’s actually quite useful because then you can address those feelings and try to essentially make people feel better about their employment of the company.

Christophe Martel  The data they need to manage friction is not data about people, it’s actually data about the environment in which they work and how that environment constrains their work or works for them or not. So HR as a world is actually very, rightfully so, focused on people but actually needs to build that capability to not only understand people, but understand the environment in which they operate. And that environment is that very complex ecosystem of human, physical, and digital things that they interact with constantly.

Christophe Martel Friction comes from contact between an employee and a thing in the company. When that contact is smooth and frictionless, then great, but often it’s not. And once you get a map of what are the main offenders and the things that really matter, just like the light or the shift or whatever, all these things, then you can actually act on it and maybe not solve it forever, but make it feel a little bit better, even 10% better.

Christophe Martel  So, there’s a notion of iterating your way into a continuous improvement group to make the environment in which people operate better. And you can start with just one thing, and that’s the beauty of it, that you don’t have to try to fix everything all at once forever with a perfectly elegant solution. It’s just lots of small things that actually will improve friction over time.

Rob Parsons  And these can be meaningful, tangible things employees can see that you’re making the effort.

Christophe Martel  Absolutely.

Rob Parsons  You’re not just talking.

Christophe Martel  You see this in our data. What’s interesting is that when you approach the question in that way, this whole notion of survey fatigue is people don’t like to tell a company how they feel about it, but once you’ve been asked, it’s like, “Okay, just back off already.” However, if you tell them that you want them to point to things that are getting in their way at work, they’re usually very happy to respond to surveys because they…

Christophe Martel  As long as the company holds its part of the bargain, which is to go do something about that feedback, which actually turns out that they can do because it’s not about doing something about the employee, it’s about doing something about the things that they control, processes, policies, tools, et cetera, then it’s actually a good bargain for both employees and employers to say, “Yeah, we’re together. We’re going to make this environment better.” And this term that we’re using internally of friction fighters, whether it’s people in HR or business leaders, IT, whoever contributes to that environment, working together with employees who are involved in this effort to reduce work friction, that’s what we call friction fighters. And it’s actually a common cause for both the shareholders and employees, which is rare enough to be mentioned.

Rob Parsons Yes, for certain.

Rob Parsons  The second point I want to touch on with HR, it was something you mentioned earlier, and it isn’t just doing my job, but it’s being at work, looking for that promotion, looking for a training, looking for whatever it may be. HR is a whole another layer that I’m interacting with at the company. And HR can, by accident, create its own friction, which isn’t necessarily how I’m doing my job, but how I am experiencing your company. I’m experiencing my life at your company.

Rob Parsons Tell me a little bit about HR teams and some of the things they’re doing and how they have to maybe think about it a little differently. Not just a bolt on, but think about what they’re doing to be a part of the employee experience. Well, they are. What they’re doing to make it better or worse.

Christophe Martel  Yeah. Maybe the best example I could think about for to highlight, to illustrate this, is an HR very senior executive in a very large, very successful famous company in the United States told me, “I designed the parental leave process and it was perfect, and then I had two kids and it was horrible.” So that’s it. HR is typically expert at designing flawless processes that actually, seen from the top, work perfectly well. However, when individuals consume these processes that usually are not single processes, you always consume processes and policies and all kinds of things all at the same time, that cocktail is really what doesn’t necessarily work for people.

Christophe Martel  How HR can pivot essentially is to try to understand what creates friction for employees. And by the way, when you ask employees what creates for friction for them, the answer that you get is always very different than what HR thinks the answer is, and simply because HR doesn’t experience these things, and to be able to see the friction, you need to experience it. So as we say at FOUNT, “People who do the work are in the best place to know work friction and to identify it.” So that’s the first thing that HR can do, is to spend more time understanding that perspective, rather than perfecting their process design skills.

Christophe Martel  The second thing is actually when resolving these points of friction that you identify is to, again, not use the traditional tools that HR typically use, which is, okay, now we understand there’s a problem there, we are going to redesign the process and we’re going to go on top of the mountain, think about the perfect solution, and then come back down and it will rain back down on our people and it’ll work, and then we’ll get feedback on how it works. Actually, things need to be, unless they’re really very basic fixes, need to be co-created. And what that means is that employees should be part of building the solution with HR as an orchestrator or facilitator.

Christophe Martel  And one example that I want to give from actually a small company was new hire attrition happening because these new hires had a hard time doing the work that had been designed by people that had been in the company for 10 years. So people that knew perfectly how to do the work created the workflow, and you had these new hires coming in and saying, “I can’t do this. It’s too hard for me, and therefore I can’t perform, therefore I’m going to leave.” And this was actually a logistics company.

Christophe Martel  And to fix that, what the company and the HR team asked employees to do was to take new hires that had been there for two months and said, “Okay, so to navigate this warehouse, how would you want it to be? How should it work? How should the warehouse be?” And they all came up with a solution that made it a lot more simple for them to navigate it. And actually, even the guys that had been there for 10 years were like, “You know what? It actually makes sense.” Because over time, they’d built DNA to accommodate complexity, essentially.

Christophe Martel  So, the notion of co-creation is really important, is that if you want to fix problems that people see, you actually have to involve them in the solving of those problems to get to the best possible outcomes. That truth is valid for small or big companies. And when you get employees in that place where they can not only contribute to identifying what gets in their way and pointing to it and giving you data about it, and number two, to be a part of the solution, that’s a very virtuous circle to get things better and to make their work just easier, faster, which is what everyone wants.

Rob Parsons  I love it. That’s a great way to close this out, Christophe. Thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Christophe Martel  Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure. Good to see you.

Rob Parsons  It was great. And I just love hearing that real practical advice about improving the employee experience, just get the right perspective and co-create the solution. It sounds simple, and it probably is once you dig into bite-size pieces that you can actually tackle.

Christophe Martel  Absolutely. Thank you.

Rob Parsons  Fantastic. Thank you again, Christophe.

Rob Parsons  Be sure to subscribe to this and our Paychex Thrive Business podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Looking for more ways to keep your finger on the pulse of industry dynamics? Visit our resource center for the latest research, thought leadership, and news at paychex.com/worx. That’s W-O-R-X. Thanks again for joining us. Until next time, please stay happy and healthy.

According to a 2022 survey by Workvivo, 98% of HR professionals have recently felt burned out. These rates are higher than those of other divisions, such as sales, which record a burnout rate of under 90%, according to Gartner.

One of the significant challenges facing HR employees is senior leadership. Workvivo’s survey found that fewer than one in three employees felt valued by their employers.

Without support, work will inevitably be unrewarding. Sigler’s sentiment was repeated numerous times across Reddit.

“As an HR professional, I can invest a great deal of effort over months or even years to accomplish a change I believe in, and all that time, I see no evidence that I’m making a difference.”

Jennifer E. Sigler, Ph.D., head of research at FOUNT Global, Inc.

Sigler believes the problem persists because companies are still using the 200-year-old lessons from the Industrial Revolution in today’s modern workplace. She said managers need to stop working to these principles and instead break down the assembly line style still in use by too many HR teams.

Some suggest that leaders are not prioritizing the human elements of the business. Alexis Robin, co-founder of pLink Leadership, said, “A large percentage of HR professionals are experiencing burnout due to overworked and overwhelmed internal customers struggling to prioritize time for recruiting, leadership development, and people projects.”

To rectify this, allow HR professionals to exercise the full spectrum of their creative and problem-solving skills, suggested Sigler. When HR teams can utilize their humanity positively, there will be a positive impact on others in the business, and results will be seen early, not years later.

As Sigler noted, the bureaucratic set up of many current businesses result in siloed programmatic divisions that are over-layered and connected with numerous processes. These cumbersome and impractical systems are unrewarding and prompt HR professionals to feel like they’re diverting attention from their primary focus: the people.

HR teams need to be allowed to decide what metrics are essential and report on those. And senior leaders need to take the reports seriously.

Read the full article, Why HR Professionals Are Burned Out, According to Reddit on the Reworked website.