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The research represented in this report focuses on how leaders in global companies measure employee experience.

And, when they do, whether it delivers improved business value. Furthermore, our research aims to understand if organizations are placing more importance on employee experience as a result of the global pandemic with the topics of mental wellness, diversity, equality and inclusion and hybrid workplaces occupying the collective minds of the C-Suite.

A New Value Chain for Employee Experience

How do you demonstrate the business value of Employee Experience? New research at TI People, undertaken in partnership with Insight222 finds that 41% of the total business impact of EX is delivered when experiences for customer facing teams improve. Read the study to learn:

1. How to demonstrate the business value of EX using The Employee Experience Value Chain
2. The elements of EX that people analytics and EX leaders find most difficult to measure and which elements are crucial for proving the business impact of EX
3. How People Analytics and EX teams can work together to better understand employee experience

Download the full study on the TI People website.

Volker is interviewed for the 28th episode of The EXperience Lounge, a weekly podcast dedicated to EX design, the future of work, and digital HR.

List to the full podcast interview here.

In this episode, Laura and Sasha get the inside scoop on FOUNT. You can check out Volker’s previous interview here.

This article, Arbeitsfriktion ist schlecht fürs Geschäft (Work Friction is Bad for Business), by Volker Jacobs, originally appeared in German on The Future of HR website.

It’s a paradox: teams tasked to create better employee experiences still tend to prioritize the organization over the employees they’re meant to support. The reason? A pain point business leaders have until now overlooked: work friction. The reality is that work friction is bad for business because it creates poor employee experiences – and remains a hurdle all leaders must overcome.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, human resources (HR) managers, like all people, have wrestled with what we’ve come to accept as the “new normal.” One part of this reality: employees pay increasing attention to how, where, and when they work. As a result, many businesses have rebranded their HR function to focus on employee experiences (EX). 

While that rebrand hasn’t entirely refocused the traditional HR mandate “to do more with less,” it has redefined the terms. Better experiences, the idea goes, deepen employees’ investment in their workplace and elevate organizational performance. So the trend to prioritize EX – and in turn, create better experiences for less money – certainly sounds like a good idea.

But look a bit closer and it’s easy to see an ever-widening gap between this new strategy and demonstrable results. Teams tasked to create better employee experiences still tend to prioritize the organization first and foremost. The fact is, this top-down focus occurs at the expense of the organization’s employees.

The reason? A pain point that impacts almost all employees (and organizations): work friction.

If the concept is new to you, you’re not alone. But once you know how to identify work friction, you’ll understand why it’s so consequential and be better positioned to address it. In this piece, I’ll introduce work friction – and highlight how anything that makes an employee’s job harder is bad for business.

What is Work Friction?

If you’re familiar with Lean, Six Sigma, or Agile methodologies, you’re likely wondering: what leader doesn’t already focus on how to minimize friction? And there’s no doubt about it: most executives already work to identify and eliminate points of resistance in order to optimize productivity throughout their organization.

But even those most successful at addressing organizational friction regularly miss opportunities to eliminate work friction. In fact, chances are they’re unaware of the misstep.

Work friction – defined as the energy an employee expends to overcome resistance they feel disrupts their pursuit of a goal – is unique in its focus on employees’ efforts and energy rather than on organizational pain points.

Put simply, work friction is any task that makes an employee’s job harder. Consider an employee tasked to write an internal company newsletter. In spite of their goals, they may spend their work day:

• Triaging emails or Slack messages that don’t specifically require their response.
• Contacting payroll about a recurring error in their biweekly paycheck.
• Reaching out to a colleague to interview them about their individual role in the organization without receiving a reply.

Each example above is an instance of work friction. Each requires the employee to expend unnecessary energy on a task (e.g., emailing) that doesn’t apply to their goal (drafting the newsletter) and prevents them from efficiently completing their work. 

Naturally, any impact to employee productivity has a corresponding impact on organizational output. When companies take steps to identify and eliminate work friction for individual employees, they improve the experiences for all stakeholders throughout the organization, from customers to senior leadership. This is what the fundamentals of EX get right. 

But today’s EX teams tend to miss a simple truth: if employee experiences are paramount, it’s simply good business to identify and eliminate elements that hinder individual employee productivity. Next, let’s look at how to identify work friction in your organization.

To Identify Work Friction, Focus on Employees’ Personal Stories

In order to identify work friction, learn about the moments in your employees’ days that prevent them from completing their goals. To be sure: don’t assume your aptitude for identifying organizational friction means you’ll efficiently root out work friction. One efficient way to dive into the differences? Listen to employees’ stories about their experiences at work. Then, use what you’ve learned from these stories to make these work experiences better.

Say that your company finds it difficult to retain recent hires. To determine why, you develop a hypothesis that your onboarding service is the issue. However, looked at from the new joiner’s perspective, it is not only the onboarding service that is important for them in their first months with the company. It is the new job they’ve signed up for as well. So onboarding becomes “begin to work” and encompasses the company’s onboarding services and the job itself. 

Once you’ve developed your hypothesis, the next step is to test it. You might, for example, start with a targeted survey to (some of the) employees who were recently hired. This gathers information relevant to testing your hypothesis (i.e., that there is an element of friction in the “begin to work” that impacts employee retention). And it prevents additional work friction (that is, requiring employees to respond to surveys that are not relevant to them.

To test your hypothesis and determine the exact source of work friction, ask employees about:

• Their goals. 
• What they feel disrupts their pursuit of their goals. 
• What steps they take (i.e., what energy they expend) to overcome disruptions.

The goals, disruptions, and efforts employees take to overcome disruptions are the heart of work friction – and the key for how to address it. Next, let’s look at how to minimize or remove work friction after you have identified it.

Prioritize Individual Points of Disruption

So you’ve tested your hypothesis. You’ve solicited and listened to your employees’ stories. And you’ve identified disruptions. Your next step should be to surgically remove work friction, right?  Truthfully, the answer isn’t so easy. Your employees are people, after all, and so what works for one may not work well for another. 

The way this looks differs across different industries, too. Solutions for the knowledge worker’s work friction outlined earlier in this article, for example, might not be helpful for entry-level employees in a call center. Remember, disruption is any element that makes it harder for an employee to do their work. Individual employees’ work is always key to addressing work friction. 

For the next step to turn work friction insights into action – and develop correspondingly targeted solutions – continue to work with your employees. For example, if you work in a call center, you could invite six call center agents and two of their team leaders to participate in two focus group sessions. In this case, one group would focus on validating the findings from the survey. The other would focus on ideating solutions that actually work for them.

Recently hired agents who work remotely, for instance, might say that a limited capacity of subject matter experts to help with resolving customer issues makes it tough for them to feel supported in their new roles. As a result, you might increase the allocated time of experts to support entry level agents. Then, you can follow up with those agents a few months later to see whether that improved their experiences in the workplace.

Work Friction Fighters Demonstrate Success with Data 

As with any new process, it’s understandable that HR and EX teams aren’t yet set up to fight work friction on their own. Rather, they need expertise and resources from other areas such as IT, work planning, facilities management and, of course, leadership. And that means they need a tech solution that connects improvement processes across teams.

There’s no “secret sauce” that can eliminate all work friction. But a deft approach to gathering, analyzing, and discussing employee data can help organizations identify, avoid, and remove many points of disruption. To develop the best strategy, assemble a x-functional friction fighter team and…

• Identify and prioritize work friction employees experience.
• Equip friction fighter teams with meaningful insights to reduce work friction.
• Measure the impact that friction removal has on business outcomes.

The right technology, of course, can help demonstrate that friction has actually been reduced. What’s more: it can demonstrate the impact that reduction has on metrics including productivity, customer experience, and attrition to sustain successes across the organization.

Even though work friction is bad for business, it doesn’t have to be bad for your business. Request a demo of FOUNT and learn how to get started quickly.

FOUNT was asked to discuss macro-economic pressures, such as inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, the recent run on regional banks, as part of Big50 Hot Startup competition

Startup50 was founded by Jeff Vance in 2013 as a site that would hunt for signal within all of the noise and hype surrounding startups. The original idea was to come up with a process, one featuring rigorous competitions and challenges, that would strip away the spin and force startups to focus on what really matters: real people and the real-world problems they’re struggling to overcome.

Startup50’s biennial Big50 Startup Competition kicked off in January 2023. Every two years, the team investigates hot technology startups to find 50 with the right combination of experience, innovation, and financial backing to upend established market sectors. To earn a slot in the Big50, startups must complete a series of challenges that focus on everything from pitching VCs to moving markets via thought leadership.

FOUNT was one of 30 startups selected to be featured throughout May based on answers to two open-ended questions: 1) How is the current market turmoil impacting our market sector? 2) Why is our startup well positioned to navigate the current market troubles and continue scaling up in 2023? Responses from our CEO, Christophe Martel, are featured below and on the Startup50 website.

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “Wasted worker effort damages productivity and retention. In this macroeconomic climate where uncertainty and a tight talent market exist simultaneously, enterprises need to find ways to remove friction for employees in order to attain higher productivity and lower attrition among frontline workers and other value creators.”

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “FOUNT is solving a critical economic problem for companies at a time when there are few alternatives that enable companies to pinpoint and resolve these issues. We are well-funded, have an ambitious product roadmap, and our customers are getting results and deriving value from our solutions.”

If you’d like to learn more about how to reduce work friction at your organization, you may request a demo.

Christophe Martel met with George LaRocque at WorkTech to discusses FOUNT’s recent funding and how its friction management solution can help companies make their work environments easier for employees to work in.

George LaRocque is founder and principal analyst of WorkTech, an advisory firm focused on HR, HR technology, and the trends shaping them. In this interview, FOUNT Cofounder and CEO, Christophe Martel, discusses the pervasiveness of work friction and how FOUNT’s recent funding will be directed toward efforts to help organizations reduce the invisible headwinds their employees face in their day-to-day jobs. Listen or read the full transcript below.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mnNRM6snv0c?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://getfount.com

Christophe Martel, Co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc. and George LaRocque, founder of WorkTech

TRANSCRIPT:

GL: Welcome back to work Tech it’s George LaRocque and we’ve got some industry funding news to discuss today. FOUNT announced a round of growth funding of eight million dollars. FOUNT is an employee experience solution and Christoph Martel the CEO and founder of FOUNT is here to talk about the deal and tell us more about FOUNT. Welcome Christophe.

CM: Thank you, thanks for having me. Good morning.

GL: It’s great to meet you. I spend a lot of time in the employee experience space so I’m as excited as the audience to learn more about FOUNT and about your deal. But let’s start out with a quick introduction – if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and the quick “what is FOUNT” story.

CM: Let’s see, my background is mostly a business leadership background. I worked for about 15 years at a company called CEB – Corporate Executive Board – acquired by Gartner in 2017. I spent most of those years as a business leader heading the EMEA region … London and then transferred to HR to become CHRO in the last few years before the acquisition.

I’m not really qualified as a proper HR person… spent in enough years in it to be a little bit dangerous but that’s it. One thing that it did highlight for me was that employee experience – which everyone knows is incredibly important for the health of a business – is as much an HR problem as it is a business problem given that these two functions essentially share the load of experiences that are provided to employees. And in my time as a business leader I expected HR to sort it out… in my time as an HR leader I expected the business to sort it out. And the truth is really in the middle. That’s kind of what what prompted the creation of this business which is to help large companies understand the friction that their workers… employees experience on a day-to-day basis whether it’s with their work – so whatever their work might be – their day-to-day activity or what I would call “life at work things” like career planning and using benefits and so on and so forth.

So the question is how do you break down the big massive experiences that people have every day to understand which ones are working and which ones are not working so that we can go fix it? I found myself just unable to do that in my time at CEB and that’s why this company was created.

GL: Great. So, I noticed in looking at your site and your messaging the word friction is used a lot. It talks about identifying those points and improving them and where you ended is sort of where I’d like – it’s a great segue. How do you identify those points of friction and how far do you go in solving them – or how do you help solve them?

CM: One thing that I observed just transitioning from the business to HR is how little success metrics you have in HR. It’s very difficult to know if you’re solving the right problems and whether or not you’re solving them because you know the only metrics that are typically used are employee engagement metrics that are more about how people feel which is not hard enough to see if you’re really making a difference.

At FOUNT, we’ve focused most of our fire on creating data that is going to pinpoint where the friction occurs in a way that aligns everyone within an organization. So, between the business and HR and IT and everyone involved in all these experiences to say here’s what is causing friction, here’s how it breaks down and here’s how we can solve it cross-functionally. Data is at the center of our business because it allows not only to understand what’s happening but also to measure the progress that’s being made. We do this with a data model that’s pretty unique – that is centered on the goals that people have and the activities that they undertake when pursuing these goals.

For example, pursuing a new role… that’s an example of something that individuals try to do. Well, what happens when they try to pursue a new role? What gets in their way of solving a customer problem if they’re a customer facing a team member? The heart of our product is actually about collecting data that represents the friction that these people experience across these multiple activities and the multiple things they interact with and things and people and processes and so on so forth. And that helps the organization actually improve its own environment to make it easier for people to work there. That’s something that is easy to do in a smaller company but much harder to do the bigger you get. The less visibility you have into what parts of the company’s ecosystem are working for people and not working…

GL: Yeah, is that done passively? Is the system – you know – observing the tasks or listening or is it a survey?

CM: On our forward roadmap there is a bunch of passive data intake to provide context however there’s kind of a central assumption in our work is that employees don’t like surveys when surveys are not acted upon, right? So, just like the same thing as the customers – if I don’t think you’re going to do anything with my feedback I would rather just not give you any. And the same thing is a little bit at play right now in organizations. But we actually believe that employees want agency. So, in other words, if you ask them for feedback in order to improve their work environment and to make it easier for them to do their job and to perform, you’re going to find that all of them will lean in actually and not only in providing data but also in helping create solutions for the problems that they encounter every day.

So instead of trying to “sneak on” employees and then rain down solutions on them, we believe that it’s better to actually involve them in both the sourcing of the problems that they encounter and the resolution of them. We use a survey approach and actually we can run on a variety of server platforms but it’s what I would call a very economic survey solution in that you essentially don’t need to survey a lot of people to get great insights about what’s happening for employees at work. So it’s a very high-efficiency survey solution. We’re actually not shameful about asking employees for input but we do it in the most economical way possible and our customers are usually focused on following up on this feedback by taking action and then closing the loop afterwards to make sure that improvements are real and can even be reported internally.

GL: As far as differentiation it sounds like your data model is one of the unique things about FOUNT? How does that data model present itself as differentiation for the employees or the customer?

CM: Typical feedback platforms actually try to understand how people feel about the company and I’ve used these platforms. At CEB, we even had our own brew of it and it’s very effective to understand who in a team is getting disengaged or having feelings that are categorized in certain drivers of their overall engagement and that’s actually really useful for business managers – people that have teams in the front lines and want to know how their teams are doing that’s great however when you’re in the business of trying trying to make the environment work for employees so if you’re in the HR team or the IT team or if you’re a very senior business leader where essentially workflows are created for the workers in the front line. There’s a dearth of data that tells you what gets in the way of people what causes friction for them when they try to do stuff and you know our data model actually portrays this friction in the context of the activities that these people are trying to perform and that makes it uniquely effective at designating the things or processes or policies or whatever in the environment that are really getting in the way. And it’s usually relatively easy to fix – not everything needs to be a transformational design approach. So that companies kind can essentially start having impact on this environment even if it’s through quick wins but then over time just go after more ambitious things.

GL: Okay, interesting. That all tracks to my experiences as well so I really appreciate that approach especially earlier I’m not a big fan of the listening approach. I’ve got an eight-year-old and she’s been learning the difference between listening and eavesdropping and I think a lot of the tech solutions could could use some of her experiences lately but that being said I’d like to move on to the deal and and keep the conversation going.

So, eight million dollars of growth capital – congratulations – this is not an environment where it’s as easy as it once was. I don’t think it was ever easy but it’s definitely not as easy as it was to raise capital so that’s a that’s a feat in and of itself. Great validation. I’m curious what was happening in the market or at FOUNT or both that led you to this time for that Capital raise.

CM: So what’s happening in the market is that there’s a little bit of a – you know – post-COVID hangover happening in the world of HR right where COVID was really a license for HR teams to ask for anything from the leadership team to say, “hey all workers are remote, we need to show some love right now.” And that did happen across the two years of COVID. Towards the end of last year what we did see is that companies started tightening the belt a little bit on employee investments and it’s still continuing today. That drove the the trend that you described also for HR technology companies as a result.

What made us special actually is that friction is not just an employee problem. Friction is actually a productivity problem when you really think about an employee doing their work the the time that they spend doing – what I would call useless stuff for lack of a better word – is essentially wasted work. So if you’re the CFO of a company and someone tells you that there’s up to 15 or 20 percent of the activities that workers do that is actually wasted… that feels like a good thing to go after.

This notion of friction is unique in that it is both an enemy of the CFO and CEOs of these companies but also an enemy of the workers so when you do work and you feel the company is putting obstacles in your way when you’re just trying to do your work. There’s nothing more frustrating than that and more disengaging than that. If you think about things like burnout and under-performance and quiet quitting and all these phenomena – many of them are actually caused by just an overload of controls and things and rules that people that probably makes sense from the center’s perspective right from the head of corporate finance and whoever manages operations. But when you’re a worker and looking at this gigantic machinery that you have to carry, it becomes a lot more frustrating. So the business case for our solution is usually a dual business case 1) increasing people’s performance and productivity and 2) make sure that their work is less frustrating than it currently is. And that’s what I think – that was a story that resonates with both companies today and also investors.

GL: Ok, so now you’ve got this eight million – or however it is being delivered, how do you plan to use it? What’s the plan for the funds?

CM: Well, Plan A was to make sure it was not in one of those banks that got in trouble so that was a little bit scary. So Plan A was to not lose it…

GL: … that’s a good starting point…

CM: Plan B was to actually build a product. So, our our product is very powerful right now and you know one of the things that created the investment opportunity for investors was we have a lot of big companies that are struggling to resolve this friction problem and this is just a unique way of doing it. Our growth last year was such that we’re on the beginning of a pretty exciting run. What’s going to take us to the next level is to actually build up our product – both the types of data we can ingest and convert to our data model, but also the support that the solution can provide beyond providing insights but also helping these organizations solve these problems by co-creating with employees which is a really important aspect of our methodology. So there’s a lot of product to create, there’s a lot of software to build and that’s expensive as you know. So that is where most of our focus is at the moment.

GL: Okay, so what kind of impact will this all have? I always think of the three constituencies – the customers, the employees and then the market at large, what can customers expect now that you’re off and running on this?

CM: I think we’re only at the beginning of our story, right? We’ve uncovered this big giant headwind that this kind of resisting both employees and companies trying to do things better and our product is miles ahead of anything else out there to again to problem solve that thing. There is so much we can build and some of the areas that we’re building our product into are actually specific Talent segments. So think about call center agents, right? These are rules with really high attrition particularly in the United States and when you actually look at how much friction call center agents have to deal with on a day-to-day basis not surprising that there is a lot of attrition.

Same thing for nurses, right? So these are especially after COVID very highly pressured talent segments where there’s enormous attrition. Many many open jobs right now in the United States are nurse jobs and again friction is one of the biggest causes of turnover there. Think about engineers. Software engineers or retail workers so these specific talent segments where we actually have mapped their day-to-day work activities to understand what gets in the way of them doing you know ambition being their best basically right so that’s a big area of investment from a product perspective and then the second one is essentially a more comprehensive solution to enable people to not only understand where the problems are, co-create solutions for them, but also close the loop all that in an environment that recognizes people that do the work, that shows best practices and so on so forth. So there’s a lot of great things that we have in mind in the future

GL: That’s great and I’m curious on the employee front, are you growing or is there a lot of movement internally right now?

CM: No, we’re just building up our product and engineering team mostly. You know we’re we’re pretty disciplined about where we invest these funds. We will invest more heavily in sales and all these things once we feel we’re uh you know we’ve got a team where we need to be in terms of product and engineering and we’re almost there to be honest but there’s still some work to do so we’re recruiting pretty heavily right now.

GL: Okay, well this is a good place to get that word out so that’s good if you want.

CM: If you want to build friction-fighting code, please reach out.

GL: All right, I think we’ve talked a lot about the market and how you’re different and what the market can expect. And you’ve touched on the roadmap. Where should folks go in order to learn more about the product and the company?

CM: Yeah, our website is fount-ex.com. That’s the best of the best place to go. Just as a note, we’re rebuilding our entire marketing engine so our website is pending revision, but what’s there is already helpful and… or, contact me directly if need be.

GL: Well I have to say this sounds really interesting. I have talked a lot about and explored employee experience a lot over the years. This is the first friction conversation around productivity that I’ve had so I find it very interesting. Congrats again on the deal and thank you so much for telling your story here at Work Tech.

CM: Thank you, George. I appreciate the opportunity and as you said, employee experience is so large a topic that is often easy to get lost in it, and I think that we’ve provided a unique shortcut to essentially having an impact on it which is you know dearly needed in this environment. Thanks for the opportunity to speak.

GL: My pleasure and thanks to everyone who’s watching or listening. Until next time…

This article first appeared in CSM, the magazine for Customer Service Managers and Professionals. It was authored by FOUNT Co-founder and CEO, Christophe Martel.

Last year, call centers averaged a 38 percent agent turnover rate – 12 percentage points higher than in 2020. That turnover has a steep cost. Christophe Martel, cofounder and CEO of FOUNT, investigates work friction in call centers.

Analysts have blamed everything from competitor poaching to general dissatisfaction. But the reality is that many call centers see high turnover because their environment creates a lot of work friction: the kind of everyday obstacles that make it harder than necessary for agents to do their jobs.

To reduce agent turnover, leaders first need to reduce work friction. That starts with understanding the nature of the problem at hand. In this piece, I’ll explain what work friction is, how it impacts call centers, why current problem solving isn’t cutting it, and how leaders can reverse course with a data-first approach.

Work Friction Hurts Agents, Customers, Managers, and Leaders

Work friction is anything (from technology to processes to people) that makes an employee’s job harder. At call centers, it might look like…

• Headsets that frequently malfunction
• Separate platforms agents have to juggle for each part of the support workflow
• Multi-step approval processes for each support task
• Unpredictable or inflexible shift schedules
• Minimal time for breaks

Agents often experience a combination of these friction points (and many more), sometimes at the same time. The cumulative impact is serious: heightened stress, slower work, low morale, and burnout.

Over time, work friction starts to impact life outside the call center as well. Workers may find themselves without the time and energy to finish their coursework or pick the kids up from school. And while most agents don’t dream of quitting in their first six months, a high-friction environment can all but force that choice.

Work friction can directly impact customers as well. Maybe an agent sounds exhausted over the phone. Or punts their device issue to an in-person technician without even pausing to help troubleshoot. No matter the scenario, work friction prevents workers from creating a satisfying support experience – and customers take note.

At scale, work friction can devastate a call center’s bottom line. Apart from the cost of agent turnover itself, there’s the cost of…

• Low productivity
• Low efficiency
• Spotty performance

As long as work friction remains pervasive, everyone – from agents to customers to managers and leaders – will continue to feel the impact. And it’s clear that folks have already reached their breaking point.

Some “Solutions” Create More Work Friction

Most call center leaders can tell when workers are disengaged. But they don’t necessarily understand how work friction causes disengagement. So they try to treat the symptoms of disengagement (low motivation, productivity, etc.) without addressing the friction at the root of the problem.

This approach is often ineffective at best – and it can even make work friction worse.

Consider, for instance, a large call center that’s adopted Slack to enable faster communication on the floor. Agents might be able to ask questions and receive guidance asynchronously. But they’ll also have a new stream of constant, urgent-feeling pings – and there may not be an established norm for triaging Slack messages.

What’s more, the platform might not integrate with the call center’s custom task management software. So agents now have to manually add manager requests to their daily task lists – which creates additional work friction.

Environmental changes like this are often well intentioned. But in the process of solving one problem (e.g., difficulty reaching a manager on a busy call center floor), they can easily create new work friction that exacerbates agent turnover. And for call centers, any efficiency gains will prove marginal compared to the cost of high turnover.

So how can you identify the points of work friction impacting your agents? Ask workers. In the next section, I’ll explain how a ground-up, data-driven approach can help leaders solve the work friction problem.

Frontline Data Can Uncover Friction Points and Monitor Solutions

Frontline workers live with work friction every day and know it best. They’re the only authoritative – yet untapped – resource for learning…

• When work friction occurs in their daily work
• When work friction does the most damage to their productivity and engagement
• Potential ways to resolve causes of friction

One of the more common methods to learn from your workers is through short, targeted surveys. You don’t have to survey every employee, of course. The goal is to gain insights from a representative sample and incrementally apply what you learn across the board.

For example, you might issue a survey to new hires to understand what it’s like to do their job. Questions might cover specific activities (like handling an abusive caller) or broad topics (like career planning and taking leave).

From here, you can identify specific friction points and measure the impact of each change.

For instance, a few agents might say that limited breaks make it tough for them to focus during long shifts. As a result, you might change the number of breaks allowed per shift. Then, you can follow up with those agents a few months later to see whether that improved their workplace satisfaction.

Data that surfaces what gets in agents’ way is essential to solving the work friction problem. It’s like having a radar in heavy fog: you get a clear line of sight to the issues workers experience day to day. Once you have the right data, you realize you can fix practically any work friction problem – and, in turn, solve the agent turnover crisis.

Waste Less Work, Keep More Workers

At its core, work friction wastes workers’ time, energy, and effort. And as long as call centers create unnecessary hurdles for agents, there will continue to be a revolving door.

It’s time to focus on eliminating sources of workplace friction. This way, you can make it easy for agents to do their jobs well – and help them feel engaged enough to stick around.

To learn how FOUNT can help you reduce agent turnover, read more on our Platform page or book a demo.

Employee experience (EX) is challenging to precisely define. Often, it’s deployed as shorthand for an intricate web of concepts that thread through all facets of an organization’s management, culture, human resources (HR) initiatives, and day-to-day work.

When HR executives and business leaders ask the right questions, however, they’re likely to find that the reality of EX isn’t so nebulous. 

To dovetail off of how TI People defines EX: What interactions define how employees work? What helps them succeed? What limits their successes? And how does all this influence how employees feel about their work – and the company they work for? 

There’s no doubt: a focus on employees’ interactions and feelings (ineffable though they can seem) is the key to developing and supporting positive experiences.

In this blog – FOUNT’s guide to Employee Experience – we go over the two “buckets” central to exploring how employees feel about their work. Then, we dive into why companies struggle to consistently realize positive EX throughout their organization.

For more about how to deliver better experiences, read on…

Background: An Internal System with Customer Experience Roots

Eight hours (or more) per day. Five days (or more) per week. Employees’ work lives are nothing if not intensive. Multiply weekly hours worked over any number of years and it’s obvious that an employee’s work within a company is far more intricate than any single customer experience.

Customer experiences, after all, are designed to be relatively brief. Want to make a purchase on Amazon? One click of the “Buy Now” button is all it takes. And enterprise-scale transactions, too, are made as smooth as possible for the customer. From sale, to implementation, to automated updates, companies work hard to make the purchase process frictionless.

But work isn’t so straightforward, even if it should be. Throughout every employee journey, work-related experiences arise beyond the core tasks, extending into a complicated web. These complications may be as simple as unplanned 15-minute meetings, or as complex as navigating benefits of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). In any case, companies tend to accept such EX obstacles as the cost of doing business. 

This cost is paid in energy and effort. And it’s almost always employees who pick up the tab.

The result? Unnecessary (sometimes terrible) experiences. (Reminder: we call such disruptions work friction.) But it doesn’t have to be that way. When companies dive down into understanding their employees’ work lives, they can make better experiences for everyone.

Here’s how…

Bucket #1: How Employees Experience Doing Their Work 

From talking with customers on the call center floor to vaccinating patients for the flu, day-to-day job responsibilities are the primary way most employees – and their managers – think about work. But when it comes to work friction, day-to-day tasks are only one side of the coin (more on the other side below). 

A business’s operational managers typically own this EX bucket. Traditionally, management of the experiences employees have working in their assigned roles focuses on…

• Optimizing workflow
• Promoting task efficiency
• Evaluating overall job performance

The key is, these focal points are determined with the company’s goals in mind. In practice, this creates points of work friction for employees such as unnecessary hurdles, inefficient processes, and unclear expectations.

Some managerial actions – say, micromanaging an employee’s core tasks – may even create work friction in all three areas above. And the more difficult an employee finds it to complete their work, the worse their experiences are, which in turn tends to diminish their productivity.

But navigating obstacles while working on core tasks isn’t the only way employees experience work friction. Next, let’s look at the second bucket.

Bucket #2: How Employees Experience Company Benefits and Services

Consider an employee who needs to take medical leave. No matter the reason, that’s a stressful situation, at best. And even the most generous leave policy won’t fully alleviate the impact on how the employee thinks about their role in the workplace. 

HR-related services and policies like these, which impact personal and professional development, are the second bucket of EX.

Researching FMLA policies, for example, isn’t a core task. Neither is completing the forms required to take leave. And each process is likely to add stress to an already burdened employee who is worried about their health.

When that employee returns to work, they may also worry about whether their absence has impacted their colleagues or changed their trajectory toward promotion. The HR managers who own this bucket may do the best they can to smooth out the process. But chances are, even if they make the bureaucratic work as frictionless as possible, they don’t have a window into how the EX they manage intersects with the EX overseen by the employee’s direct supervisor.

Yet without a 360-degree view of how both buckets impact each other, a clear understanding of an employee’s experiences isn’t possible. And each unseen or overlooked obstacle is a friction point with the potential to detrimentally impact an employee’s experience at work.

So, what’s the best way to gain a full understanding of EX? It’s simple: ask employees about their experiences.

Work Friction: The Universal Destroyer of Good Employee Experiences

Many leaders are familiar with W. Edwards Deming’s observation that a bad system will beat a good person every time. Yet when it comes to work friction, this maxim is too often overlooked. And such systemic failure is what makes work friction the universal destroyer of good EX.

It’s true for business leaders. It’s true for HR executives. And it’s true for the employees whose experiences they manage. Work friction is like running with water-logged shoes or sailing into constant headwinds – it makes progress more difficult (and uncomfortable) than it needs to be. 

In other words, positive EX results from making the system work effectively for employees, and addressing the root causes of friction in the workplace. So how can businesses make that a reality? Identify and reduce work friction in both work processes and HR services. 

To achieve this, FOUNT suggests businesses use moment-specific surveys to gather data and learn from employees how, where, and when work friction occurs – then determine the courses of action that reduce friction from those experiences.

Work Friction Is as Dynamic as the Work It Prevents

At the end of the day, experiences employees may accept in the workplace likely won’t be accepted when they impact their lives at home. That may sound easy to understand. But, like work friction, without the right approach it’s also easy to overlook.

Want to learn more about how to discover the right approach for your organization? Get in touch.

Citybiz highlighted FOUNT’s recent $8M funding round, underscoring its impact on reducing work friction and boosting enterprise productivity.

‍citybiz is a publisher of news and information about business, power, money, and people in 20 major U.S. city markets, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte Raleigh, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, South Florida, Washington DC.

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FOUNT’s U.S. headquarters are located in Washington DC. Our recent funding news caught the attention of citybiz editors. They summarized our press release in the following article.

In this episode, Marie-Line Germain, Ph.D. speaks with Christophe about the impact of work friction on Employee Experience: He also discusses how COVID has changed Employee Experience, and what HR and organizations can do to improve it.

On the heels of last year’s State of EX, Christophe sat down with Dr. Marie-Line Germain, a professor of Human Resources and Leadership at Western Carolina University (a campus of the University of North Carolina), to discuss research findings and insights about creating better employee experiences.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1451614330&show_artwork=true&maxheight=1000&maxwidth=1080

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Soundcloud. A transcript from the episode appears below.

CM: There are an infinite number of opportunities that are all valid opportunities to go and change something in the experience that people have at work, and it can start with the coffee machine or it can be the tools they use at work. It could be their benefits coverage. There are just huge amounts of opportunity that you could go and have an impact on. The question that everyone needs to ask themselves is, what is it that matters most to employees and what is it that is currently presenting the most friction for that?

MLG: That’s Christophe Martel, co-founder and CEO of FOUNT, a company that focuses on improving employee experiences by removing friction from work. You’re listening to Dear Human Resources. I’m your host, Marie-Line Germain.

In this episode, Christophe will talk about some aspects of employee experience, what it is how COVID has changed employee experience and what HR and organizations can do to improve it. Christophe Martel also talks about a recent report that reveals that about 90% of employers run employee surveys at least once a year, but 70% lack adequate employee experience data that digs deeper into what causes friction for employees.

According to a Gallup poll disengaged employees cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, which is the equivalent of 11% of the global GDP. With this increased disengagement the talks about quiet quitting and the rising attrition rates. The spotlight has been cast on improving the employee experience. So welcome to our show, Christophe.

CM: Thank you. Good to be here.

MLG: The topic of employee experience sometimes referred to as EX has been an increasingly important topic in the HR realm. Can you explain what employee experience is and why it’s become so important for organizations?

CM: Absolutely. So, I may start with the second part of the question, why is it so important? And you alluded to it just now, if you look at the quit rate in North America for the past 10 years, you’ll see that the voluntary separations, that quit rate has literally doubled from 18% to something like 35%. As of 2022. That’s a very consistent increase in the past 10 years. And everyone pins that on the great resignation, COVID, etc. But actually, that’s a very consistent phenomenon that’s been happening for much longer.

What companies are starting to realize is number one – whilst it’s feasible to deal with attrition level, or quit levels in the 10 to 20%, it gets much harder when you start to break through 30% and over. Then it becomes a real business problem and that means that CEOs, business unit leaders just come to HR to say, “Look, I’m having these terrible attrition problems, what can you do to help?” And that’s when employee experience comes in. Because the next question is, well, why are these people leaving? What is prompting it?

We all know that engagement is a predictor of attrition, so low engagement means that people are getting ready to leave and essentially what that transcribes is how people feel about their work at the company. Now, what does the connection between employee experience and this notion of employee engagement? Well, actually at a certain level, they’re kind of identical. If you ask for a definition of employee experience, that’s actually pretty similar to a potential definition for engagement which is, how do I feel about the some of my experiences with the company so far? Since the moment when I first got in touch with the company as a candidate, joined, started working and been there for five years? How do I feel right at this moment, about my relationship with the company? You could call that my employee experience.

Now, where it gets a little complicated is that if you wanted to get under this high-level definition, because telling you that somebody is engaged or not very engaged is not very helpful when it comes to getting to the root cause of it. So getting under the covers of employee experience, you have to zoom down into not employee experience as an aggregate but employee experiences, meaning, the various experiences that people have during their life at work, and there’s millions of them. That includes their experience of doing their work, let’s say, if they’re in a customer facing role, it means solving customer problems, escalating to their manager when they’re out of answers. There’s everything that’s about what they’re doing, asking for help from SMEs, all kinds of things about doing a job and that’s where people spend most of their time.

The question is, how are these experiences? In fact, what we find through the work we do with customers, is that the friction they encounter in the doing of the work is one of the big reasons why their engagement could be declining. So in other words, I spend my time trying to do a good job but the company is putting unnecessary obstacles in my way. That’s a very frustrating thing to observe. And that typically drives employees to look for alternative employment.

The experiences on the job is a very important part in this kind of the lion’s share of where people spend their time. But there’s another side to their experience, which is their experience with consuming the services that the company provides to them as an employer and that includes, getting paid, creating a career path, learning and doing all kinds of things that HR is typically very involved in. And for that, again, they rate their experience based on how good a service do they get from the company. How easy is it to go on parental leave? How easy is it to come back? How easy is it to navigate the benefits portal and so on. There again, friction is in processes or policies or misalignment between different silos ends up creating poor experiences that over time will result in their disengagement and eventual attrition.

MLG: So we think that the tech industry tends to be a little further ahead in terms of employee experience, is it true?

CM: They’re typically further ahead in terms of the baseline of transactional experiences that need to be provided to an employee, mostly because they’ve invested almost natively in it. Most tech companies are relatively new to world and they have pretty modern platforms when it comes to doing HR things. So that helps. However, you see many tech companies having surprisingly high attrition level in key talent segments and losing great talent, but they actually don’t know how to keep them at some level. When you look at Glassdoor ratings, it’s typically reflecting what you said. However, when you dig into these worlds, you see that important segments like salespeople, or developers, etc., there’s still much higher levels of voluntary attrition than they wish they had.

MLG: So before this podcast recording, Christophe, you made reference to a report about employee experience. That report is titled The Big Bad State of EX, findings from the State of EX 2022. Do you know how that was conducted? And how many respondents were in that study? And what the findings were?

CM: Yep, so first of all, it was conducted at the end of last year, and I don’t have the accurate count in mind, but by the end of the project was a few 100 respondents across HR executives, and business leaders essentially. There were essentially two tracks to the questions that we asked. Because employee experience as I described it, just like attrition, which is the consequence of better poor employee experience is a shared problem between HR and the business, which is why business leaders were included in the research effort.

The report was published in late November, early December. What we found and hence, the name The Big Bad State of EX, is that most organizations that invest in employee experience tend to do so in thinking about having an impact on all employees of the company. And whilst that’s a smart idea, what turns out in practice is that impacts that actually scale to all employees in the company tend to be technology investments because that’s the quickest way to have that kind of impact. In fact, many of the technology investments that were made as a result of that approach ended up not having a tremendous amount of impact on the experience of people in the frontline. Think about Workday which is a great system for managing HR data. When you really think about how much it transforms the experience of work for individuals in the company – it sure transforms the experience of work for the HR team, and makes it a lot easier to do the HR work. But for employees, it doesn’t really change that much. And one of the reasons is that they spend most of their time working rather than most of their time doing HR things.

What we found in the report is that all these efforts where we thought that big investments across the board would be the ones that would drive experience gains… well, that didn’t realize. What did happen, however, was that companies that started small – and what that means is focused on specific talent segments… that in particular talent segments with crucial importance to the business. So if you’re in a healthcare company, and nurses and doctors are critical talent segment, like everything in the company is there to support the work they do.

It’s a little bit similar to companies that are in the financial services industry where anything that is customer facing (e.g. service centers, etc.) is hugely important because CX ends up driving business outcomes. So, companies that actually started in specific talent segments and focused on smaller improvement initiatives (e.g. Improving part of the work somewhere, improving specific workflows, and so on so forth), those are the initiatives that really moved the dial. And what that did was to give these EX leaders the confidence that the approach of trying to create better experiences for people actually could work and had visible results and therefore was worthy of investing more into. So the Big Bad State of EX was to say, “watch out if you want to make progress in that field. Don’t start too big because you may just get lost in the noise,” essentially, which is one of the things that happened to many of them.

Now, a few things that we measured as part of the report, were essentially trying to assess the level of effectiveness of these organizations on a few dimensions that included a humancentricity scale. So in other words, the ability that these companies and these executives had to think in the employees’ shoes right so in other words, to put themselves in the employees shoes to see the world from their perspective, which is kind of necessary if you’re gonna go and improve the right thing. So understand what are the points of friction that they encountered? And honestly, most self-reported data showed that there was a lot of progress to make there. It’s actually not that easy to go do that. Second was the degree of dispersal which means the amount to which employee experience initiatives were driven with the business in the front lines, or were much more corporate initiatives driven by the center for the center almost.

Again, we saw that hence the Big Bad State of EX, a lot of efforts tended to be done at the corporate level which explains why there was not that much impact on the frontline. A third component that we measured actually was agility, which was the ability for companies when they detected once a friction for employees to be able to go and act on it quickly. And you’ll be familiar with the great skills that most HR professionals have when designing fantastic processes. But in the world of experience, it’s a kind of a fail fast / fail early type of approach to improvement initiatives rather than big, broad and perfect process design. On these three dimensions, it looks like there’s a lot of progress for companies to make, to have the ability to go after these experience problems and become agile enough to make progress there.

MLG: And how do you think COVID the pandemic has affected employee experience overall?

CM: I would say, first of all, COVID got a bad name. Honestly, for The Great Resignation as a trigger… as I mentioned earlier, that whole trend of increased quit rate has been going on for much longer than that. So I think it’s easy to blame the pandemic for that, but it’s a little bit unfair. The second thing that COVID did is that it provided more clarity for leaders – business leaders, in particular – to the fact that their employees have a choice of where to work. The whole debate between working remotely or hybrid, etc. was not really a debate before and it became front and center for two years.

Through these discussions, there’s been the realization by some leaders that employees have a choice of where they work. And just like we have a choice of what product we buy on Amazon or what hotel we stay at when we look at TripAdvisor. The transparency of the job market is such that they can’t really hold their employees as tightly as they were able to do before. And we’ve seen a major shift in the interest from business leaders to figure out, “How do I reduce friction in the day-to-day work of my employees?” Because they care about it a great deal, right? They don’t want to spend time working that they feel is time poorly spent. The phenomenon of burnout and quiet quitting, etc. – these are all manifestations of the work we’re asking them to do is just not working for them. So they want to make an impact on that.

And by the way, these business leaders are themselves concerned with the productivity of their company. And so in other words, you see you have a strange dynamic where a CEO like the CEO of Google would say at the same time, “we want employees to go work harder.” And when employees are pretty much tapped out, trying to do everything that they’re supposed to do but dealing with unnecessary friction in their workflow, and saying, “Well, yeah, I’d be happy to do whatever you want, but stop putting things in my way as I’m trying to do my job.” And actually, you see some businesses just embracing that, to just try to reduce the level of bureaucracy and complexity that exists in the organization. And that’s a common cause actually, for both business leaders and employees. So for once, they kind of share a common objective and a common opinion on how to go about it. I think the pandemic was a great trigger for business leaders and HR leaders to think about things differently, and kind of opened up a bigger passage for companies to embark on an employee experience initiative based on everything that they realized through the pandemic.

MLG: Good point. So what advice do you have for business leaders, as you mentioned, but also for HR professionals who would like to put more emphasis on employee experience, but they don’t really know where to start?

CM: So the big challenge that organizations face – and I was a business leader before and I was a CHRO before and I faced that every day – is the question of where to start. There is an infinite number of opportunities that are all valid opportunities to go and change something in the experience that people have at work and it can start with the coffee machine or it can be the tools they use at work, it could be their benefits coverage. It’s just a huge amount of opportunity that you could go and have an impact on.

The question that everyone needs to ask themselves is, “What is it that matters most to employees? And what is it that is currently presenting the most friction for them? So, in other words, what’s most broken and what’s most important to employees? And for that, that was one of the findings from The State of EX. You need a specific kind of data that points to the things that create friction in the organization for specific talent segments.

The best advice I would give is to try to zero into a really important talent segment for the business – people that create a lot of value for the company, where attrition has a very high cost to the business. And in there understand what are the one, two, or three experiences – not the overall experience, that’s way too high level – but the one two or three discrete experiences like pursuing an internal role or solving a customer problem or things of that nature. What are these things that are every day creating bad experiences for people, which result in disengagement and attrition over time. And then focus on these things using agile methods. So, small sprints and quick iterative results. And that’s the best way to start because you can have visible impact that business leaders will be excited by that becomes a much more kind of an organic way of starting a different way of working, that starts with people’s experiences, and then works back up from there, rather than starting from big processes and working down from there.

MLG: Christophe, you’re the co-founder and CEO of the company FOUNT. I’m curious, what does FOUNT stand for?

CM: Our motto at FOUNT is experiences count because it’s the root word for fountain and essentially, we believe that everything that’s good about a company springs from great employee experiences. When I say everything that’s good, it’s actually employee happiness at the company and their desire to work harder and for a longer period of time with the company because they enjoy what they’re doing. That stems from an intentional approach to make these experiences work for them. And by the way, when that happens, the business results follow. Everything that’s good in the company is not only just good for the people, but also good for the business. So that’s where it stemmed from.

There’s a second, connected message that the opposite of friction is flow, right? If you think about a fountain and what flows out of it, by removing friction in the organization, you’ll have more employees that are in a state of flow, and essentially not dealing with unproductive friction and needless obstacles that we all know are there because they’ve always been there. We also know that they don’t need to be there and that they’re costing us time and frustration every day at work.

MLG: Thanks, Christophe, for your insights on employee experience and what HR professionals can do to enhance it.

CM: My pleasure.

Support for this show comes from Western Carolina University, a campus of the University of North Carolina’s system with the technical assistance of Kelly Minnis.