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This article is part of a series called EXposed: EX practices uncovered. It was co-authored by Stephanie Denino and Timo Tischer from TI People. It originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Why does this matter?

For teams focused on improving employee’s experiences, there are three key questions they must be able to answer to ensure they drive measurable impact:

• Which experiences should we improve?
• What about those experiences can we improve?
• Did our efforts improve the experience?

Every step of the way, those driving this work need data to help inform their answers. So, they are going out looking for data. On one hand, they hear: “surely we have enough data!”, as organizations are overflowing with data. On the other hand, these practitioners often feel that they don’t quite have what they need.

In fact, this later perspective was confirmed in the State of EX 2022: although over 90% of respondents run employee surveys at least once a year, 70% say the employee data they collect is inadequate for their needs. More on this below:

“It’s not the amount of EX data that’s the problem for organizations. It’s the kind of data. EX and HR professionals must look at the big picture of the organization, so naturally they collect employee sentiment from the entire organization. But then they suffer what we call ‘big paralysis’ trying to turn that overwhelming mass of surface-level data into actions they can take to improve specific experiences.”

EX leaders and practitioners are determined and resourceful; they will do their very best to make the most of what they have, and when they still do not have what they need, they will go out and get it.

But what should they go get? First, let’s lay out the core types of data that are relevant to answering the three key questions:

• Moment and touchpoint data captures people’s feedback about specific experiences at work (e.g. your experience in specific moments like learning to perform your role, resolving a customer issue, taking leave or pursuing a new role, as people interact with human, physical, digital touchpoints)
• Aggregate sentiment data captures people’s feelings about their cumulative experience at work (e.g. as a result of your experience across many moments, you feel engaged, included, a sense of purpose, etc.)
• Behavioral data captures people’s actions at work (e.g. attrition/retention, individual productivity, absences, leave requests)

With this context, we can turn our attention to which type of data is most relevant to answer each of the three key questions.

What are we seeing?

Let’s look through the lens of a recent experience improvement project with a US-headquartered financial services institution of roughly 60,000 people.

Which experiences should we improve?

The team driving this work first considered behavioral data, noticing patterns in attrition data, but realized they couldn’t quite pinpoint why this was.

They then naturally looked to aggregate sentiment data, in this case data from their yearly survey and quarterly pulses and found that a key pillar of their EVP focused on ‘growth’ was showing a noticeable dip in scores. Even with tens of thousands of open-ended comments at the end of their survey asking, “what can we do better?”, the data did not help clarify which of the many growth-related challenges that people raised were most important to go address.

This led them to trigger the collection of moment and touchpoint data using the FOUNT product to understand, across 4 key talent segments (e.g. digital roles, call center agent roles), which moments were both most highly important (based on their correlation with overall engagement and likelihood to recommend working at the company) and not meeting their people’s satisfaction threshold.

One moment stood out as highly important across talent segments, based on thousands of responses: the act of pursuing a new role internally. The moment’s 60% CSAT suggested that 40% of those having experienced this moment were not satisfied. Without creating the possibility of internal mobility and access to new opportunities, it was difficult for people in this organization to feel as though they truly could grow the way they would hope to. (Note: we know a role change/promotion is not the only way for employees to grow, but it certainly revealed itself as highly important to employees in this organization)

What about this experience can we improve?

Within this moment of pursuing a new role, it was necessary to uncover the critical pain points.

In the past, the team explored experience challenges with research methods such as interviews and observation. However, conducting interviews was time-consuming, which often required limiting their number. And though they would uncover many issues through their exploration, it was hard to understand what the biggest pain points were, given the limited volume of data and its unstructured nature. This often led the team and their leaders to wonder: are we solving the right problem?

This time, thanks to the collection of moment and touchpoint data it was possible to identify which touchpoints were highly problematic. For example, job postings received a 34% CSAT and confirmed that this part of the experience needed attention, more so than other higher scoring touchpoints.

Because free text data tied to that specific moment was also collected, they learned through its analysis that job postings were too generic and unclear, making the work of finding a new role very confusing and overwhelming.

The project team then engaged employees in deep dive sessions to better understand what felt generic and unclear, and worked with employees as well as internal recruiters, to find ways to improve the job postings.

This is just one example of many specific changes made to improve the experience of pursuing a new role. 

Did our efforts improve the experience?

Once changes and interventions are implemented, all the same data is relevant, but in reverse. First, re-measurement of moment and touchpoint data allows the organization to see if the touchpoint performance has improved and whether the overall moment score has also improved.

Over time, the team will look to aggregate sentiment data via items in their quarterly pulse and yearly survey to monitor higher-level improvement (e.g. increases in ‘growth’ related items such as “Do you feel you have good career opportunities?”). They will also monitor behavioral data – more specifically internal role application data and attrition data – to observe trends (e.g. are we seeing declining attrition from people who have signaled they are open to new roles and/or who have applied to internal roles?).

What do we recommend?

Given the sea of data that exists, it is difficult to know what type of data is most relevant to experience improvement efforts. Teams get the best insights from moment and touchpoint data because it provides what we call middle signals: data that is not too high-level or too low-level, which not only confirms that there is a problem requiring focus, but also indicates what to do about it.

However, we commonly see people spend too much time trying to make sense of macro signals or micro signals. Macro signals, like aggregate sentiment data, behavioral data and social listening data, offer high-level findings that can indicate a moment needs fixing, but are often not specific enough to show what needs fixing it.

Micro signals, like system usage data or process metrics, suggest the possibility of a problem, but often lack the broader context needed to interpret whether to act and how. Indeed, we have not spoken about micro signals to date in this article because it is not a core type of data that is immediately insightful without context.

See below a summary of macro, middle, and micro signal data:

As organizations mature in their collection, integration, and use of different types of data to improve people’s experiences, macro, middle and micro signals might all play a role. But to begin, middle signals provided by the collection of moment and touchpoint data are most valuable.

When collected in quantitative ways to begin, this type of data allows organizations to:

• Focus improvement efforts on the most highly important and highly broken moments. In this case, improving the moment ‘pursue new role’ was a higher priority according to people’s feedback than ‘learn in my role’, which might also be related to the organization’s growth pillar)
• Understand which touchpoints within the moments require most attention. While there were other areas to improve, the team needed to start somewhere, and this helped with prioritization. It then becomes relevant to involve employees in making deeper sense of the specific findings and co-create solutions to address the pain points
• Re-measure to quantify the impact of the work. In this case, pre-intervention CSAT was 60%; post-intervention(s) CSAT jumped to 78%. With this kind of data in hand, teams can undeniably describe the impact of their work.

Beefing up an EX strategy requires first understanding what the experience is—and where the problems are. For that, you need to capture very specific employee feedback in the context of their day-to-day work experience and environment.

In a summary of findings from the State of EX 2022, FOUNT cofounder and CEO, Christophe Martel describes how organizations can address the operational cost of attrition by collecting the right kind of data. The Human Resource Executive article, What HR gets wrong when it comes to using EX data, includes advice about delivering a frictionless work environment for employees by focusing on small projects.

HR leaders, Martel says, are used to creating “big, broad business cases” for transformation initiatives that will touch all employees—but, when it comes to EX, they need to close the aperture a bit to be able to demonstrate true business impact.

He advises HR teams to focus tailored EX work on one particular talent segment, business unit or geographical area and, from there, scale to other areas.

Read the full article on the Human Resource Executive website.

The data on wellness programs tell a pretty confusing story. On one hand, the percentage of companies that have them has hovered around 40%–60% for nearly a decade [1]. The CDC appears to be a fan of them, and there’s certainly no shortage of websites that will tell you your organization needs one. (We don’t necessarily disagree; see below.) There’s some evidence that the best programs have good ROI (typically measured in terms of a firm’s healthcare costs), which wellness program providers are naturally turning into major profits: Between now and 2030, the US corporate wellness market’s CAGR is forecast at 4.47%; by 2028, the global market is expected to do even better with 8.2%.

On the other hand, if you look closely at the last decade of data, organizations don’t seem completely convinced of the value of these programs. The percentage of SHRM members reporting they offer one has fallen (not in a straight line) from a high of 59% in 2019 to 44% in 2023. The best study of these programs, contracted by three US government agencies and conducted by RAND in 2012 (old, we know, but it really is the best), may help explain why. That study concluded:

• Employee participation is usually low (20%-40% of those eligible)
• Most employees who do participate are the ones who’re already healthy.
• Incentives boost participation “only modestly”
• Whereas the ROI of disease management programs (in which only 13% of eligible employees participated) was probably worth it ($3.80 saved on healthcare costs for every $1.00 spent on the program), lifestyle management programs (in which 87% of eligible employees participated) actually lost companies money ($0.50 for every $1.00 spent)

In 2019, the KFF drew a similar conclusion in another unusually large and thorough study: “Despite the prevalence of workplace wellness programs, numerous studies find limited evidence of their effectiveness in promoting health or preventing disease.”

Preventive vs Urgent Care

That might seem weird, because SHRM defines wellness programs as benefits that “are provided to employees as a preventive measure to help avoid illness while improving and maintaining the general health of employees”[2]. For sure, that’s the intent. But whether it’s free health screenings, chronic disease management, smoking cessation assistance, weight loss coaching, discounted gym memberships, healthy snacks, onsite yoga, mental health support, or any of the other dozens of things wellness programs can include, FOUNT sees these programs more like an emergency room than true preventive care.

We suspect organizations secretly feel the same, so in 2022, when our friends at Executive Networks asked us to design a small survey for an upcoming event of theirs on employee wellness, we wanted to know:

1. How much responsibility do organizations really feel for employee wellness?
2. What do they think they can do to make a meaningful difference?
3. What do they hope to get out of wellness programs?

We knew the answer to the third question already: reduced healthcare costs and absenteeism, improved labor productivity and candidate attraction, and to be perfectly honest, just a good old-fashioned feeling that they’re doing the right thing. So, we didn’t ask that question. But we did circle around the other two. Here’s what 75 HR leaders said.

Employers Believe Employees Are Primarily Responsible for Their Own Wellness

When we asked respondents to rank the influence of four parties on individual wellness, 66% put “Self” at the top. “Employer” most often came in third, after “Family and friends” but before “Community”.

When we broke out kinds of wellness (mental, physical, etc.), the only kind on which respondents said employers have more influence than the individual themselves was “Financial and material stability”.

And when we drilled down to find out roughly how much influence respondents believe employers have on these kinds of wellness, 69% again said “A great deal” for “Financial and material stability”; 32% said “A great deal” for “Mental health”; and 23% said “A great deal” for “Sense of meaning and purpose in life”. Fewer than 20% of respondents said “A great deal” for all the other types of wellness.

In short, these respondents’ answer to the question, “How much responsibility do organizations really feel for employee wellness?” is pretty clear: Not much—at least not relative to what they think is employees’ own responsibility, with the sole exception of financial stability.

What Employers Mostly Do and What Actually Makes the Most Difference Are Two Different Things

Despite believing that their organizations don’t have much influence on individual wellness, only 1% of respondents said they’re not doing anything to try to improve it. The most popular tool among the other 99% was, of course, corporate wellness programs [3].

But when it comes to what’s actually improving employee wellness, the stand-out tool isn’t corporate wellness programs. Sure, nearly 70% of respondents said these programs have “improved well-being a bit”, but less than 15% said they’ve “improved well-being a lot”. The biggest difference-maker, it seems, is “redesign of employees’ day-to-day work”—which less than half of respondents are doing.

In other words, we know what we need to do to actually improve employee wellness: Design work that doesn’t make them unwell in the first place. But… most of us are still just offering a band-aid once the damage has been done.

The relationship between work friction and wellness

I wish I could tell you we’ve got hard numbers linking work friction and wellness, but we don’t (yet). What we do have is hundreds of employees telling us about work friction they experience in terms that pretty clearly suggest their wellness is being impacted by it. Here are just a dozen examples from our August 2023 survey of 506 employees.

Financial and material stability

“Give my best and all daily but no raise of any kind for 10 years or so. Isn’t 10 or so years long enough?”

“I was told I would be refunded for my diesel for traveling to work and then wasn’t approved when I requested reimbursement.”

“The policy has gone from working two days in-office a week to now three days, and parking is $20 a day and not covered by the company. I have to spend more time commuting to work and more money on gas and parking.”

“The policy has gone from working two days in-office a week to now three days, and parking is $20 a day and not covered by the company. I have to spend more time commuting to work and more money on gas and parking.”

Mental Health

“Ladies in the office were constantly trying to put the blame on the new person. I would go home and cry. I was suicidal.”

“The constant no-matter-how-much-I-do-it’s-not-enough. It leaves me feeling like I am giving it my all and don’t know what else to do. Gives me the ‘why try?’ thoughts.”

“When my personal morals are compromised and customer service suffers, I feel extremely unhappy and stressed in my work, thus impacting my job performance and my health.”

Physical Health

“Employees are getting hurt on the job.”

“Have to work more hours when my coworkers are sick even if I am sick.”

“I work in an outside environment and there’s barely enough fans to keep our growing staff cooled down in the heat.”

Formation and maintenance of close social relationships

“Not possible to take vacations at the right moment with my family.”

“Employees are being discriminated against for being a parent.”

“Holidays from work are only approved closer to the time which causes frustration at being unable to plan long-term.”

Clearly, these employees’ wellness is suffering because of work friction. Bad policies, bad processes, bad equipment, and bad relationships take their toll on employees’ mental, physical, and financial health. And according to the UK’s Health Foundation, the more “low-quality work factors”—all of which are sources of work friction in our survey data—people experience, and the longer they experience them, “the more likely they are to have worse health”. In 2020, the Foundation found over a third of UK employees were in low-quality work, and those individuals were more than twice as likely as people in high-quality work to report poor health.

Minimize Work Friction or Maximize the Wellness Program

If you’ve been paying attention, you know this question presents a false dichotomy:

Work friction reduction is itself a critical component of any effective wellness program.

In medicine, both preventive and urgent care have their place, and we believe the same is true in places of employment. Above, we’ve seen how employers actually influence employee health—and how they don’t. On the basis of that evidence, we suggest you flip the scales of your investment in these two types of care by taking the following steps:

1. Re-assess the value of your urgent care programs.
   • Break the full program down into individual components (chronic disease management, lifestyle management, health coaching, etc.).
   • Measure each component’s value. It’s relatively easy to measure eligible employee participation, impact on absenteeism, and savings on healthcare costs; it’s harder to measure impact on labor productivity and candidate attraction, but at least try.
   • Cut program components that aren’t worth what you’re paying for them.
2. Introduce and prioritize truly preventive care.
   • Reinvest the funds from cut urgent care programs into truly preventive wellness measures, like reducing work friction for employees.
   • Use surveys, interviews, and other listening tools to identify where work friction happens in your organization, how bad it is, and what causes it.
   • As you begin to target sites of work friction for intervention, you’ll have a sense for which ones are probably impacting wellness the most—but don’t just trust your gut. Develop measures of wellness directly tied to each type of work friction so you’ll be able to both invest your money wisely and prove your investments paid off.

REFERENCES:

• [1] – 2012, 2016–2020, 2019–2023
• [2] – Italics added.
• [3] – We weren’t surprised to see training so high on this list, but we were saddened by it. To understand why, see this research post.

Data and insights gleaned from 2.5 million employee experience ratings as measured by FOUNT’s SaaS solution with the consulting expertise of TI People.

Employee Experience Intelligence Quarterly, EX Trends

We are happy to share the Employee Experience (EX) Intelligence Quarterly Q2/22. Based on 2.5 million experience ratings for 39 moments and touchpoints across the employee lifecycle, TI People and FOUNT bring experience insights to the EX community.

In this latest edition for Q2 2022, we show the overall satisfaction of employees with their experience of work. We also show a key opportunity to invest into Employee Experience: ‘Have a life event’ is the moment with the highest impact on overall work experience and hence engagement. Its impact has strongly risen in the past 12 months.

To improve the experience when having life events, physical touchpoints are a key lever: (HR) Support Processes, Company Communication, Employee Benefits and Company Policies all provide below-average experience.

In our spotlight of the quarter, we take a deeper look at frontline manager experience. Using a customer case study, we show that hiring and onboarding new team members matters the most to frontline managers, but 29% of them are not satisfied with their experience of organizational support to hire & onboard new employees.

When asking their team members, frontline managers provide low experience especially when discussing/negotiating compensation, pursuing a new job/role or promotion, and setting/resetting goals.

You can request the full PDF version of the research on the TI People website.

Charter researchers Emily Goligoski and Melissa Zwolinski examine dozens of industry and academic studies about how we work now and synthesize what is most actionable for your workforce.

Charter’s Research Briefing “How to Get Learning and Development Right” offers practical insights and strategies to help HR professionals optimize their organization’s learning and development efforts and includes insights from FOUNT’s benchmark representing more than 5M work friction data points. Learning and development play a crucial role in driving organizational success and empowering employees. However, ensuring the effectiveness of these initiatives while aligning them with organizational goals can be a challenge.

The Briefing highlights three key areas for HR professionals to focus on when it comes to learning and development:

1. Aligning Learning and Development with Organizational Goals: To make learning initiatives impactful, it’s essential to align them with your organization’s goals. Start by identifying the skills and competencies needed to achieve strategic objectives. By filling skill gaps through targeted development programs, HR teams can enhance employee capabilities while contributing directly to the organization’s overall success.
2. Creating a Culture of Continuous Learning: Fostering a culture of continuous learning is vital for employee growth and engagement. Encourage individuals to take ownership of their development by promoting a growth mindset. This means embracing challenges, seeking feedback, and actively pursuing learning opportunities. Offering flexible learning options, such as online platforms and short modules, enables employees to learn at their own pace, boosting engagement and knowledge retention.
3. Leveraging Technology and Data: Technology can greatly enhance learning and development efforts. Use learning management systems (LMS) to streamline training administration, track progress, and deliver personalized learning experiences. Additionally, harness the power of data analytics to gain insights into the effectiveness of your programs. By leveraging data, HR professionals can make informed decisions and continuously improve their learning initiatives.

Data that technology provider FOUNT Global shared with Charter shows that companies that overly rely on digital tools like learning portals for teaching new information may be missing the mark. According to FOUNT’s employee experience benchmark data, workers at enterprises with 10,000+ global employees said human touchpoints–including interactions with colleagues, coaches, and managers–were much more likely to positively influence employee learning, either through formal training or on-the-job learning.

By aligning learning with organizational goals, fostering a culture of continuous learning, and leveraging technology and data, HR teams can create an environment that empowers employees, improves performance, and drives overall success. By implementing these strategies, HR professionals can unlock the full potential of their workforce and ensure that learning and development initiatives hit the mark.

This interview with Christophe Martel originally appeared in Authority magazine.

There have been major disruptions in recent years that promise to change the very nature of work. From the ongoing shifts caused by the COVID19 pandemic, the impacts caused by automation, and other possible disruptions to the status quo, many wonder what the future holds in terms of employment. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that automation will eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030.

To address this open question, we reached out to successful leaders in business, government, and labor, as well as thought leaders about the future of work to glean their insights and predictions on the future of work and the workplace.

As a part of this interview series called “Preparing For The Future Of Work”, we had the pleasure to interview Christophe Martel. Christophe is co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc., a SaaS company that helps global organizations reduce work friction and improve employee experiences. FOUNT helps companies identify what’s at the root cause of employee dissatisfaction and prioritize what to fix in their environment. Previously, Christophe was CHRO of CEB, a global research and advisory company acquired by Gartner in 2017.

What do you expect to be the major disruptions for employers in the next 10–15 years? How should employers pivot to adapt to these disruptions?

Employers can expect the labor market to become even more fluid over the next 10–15 years, as any individual’s choices of where to work continue to increase in variety and volume, across industries. Employees will gain even more visibility into what work is really like inside different companies, which will lead to more informed decisions, mirroring how they become ever better informed about the real-life performance of the products or services they buy as consumers. Individuals gaining this new level of transparency and agency will challenge employers to adopt new ways of attracting, motivating and retaining employees as they compete for talent with other organizations. This is how an experienced economy arises in the new world of work.

Companies will need to look beyond building an attractive employee value proposition (EVP) as that is no longer enough. Organizations must follow through and deliver on the promises they make through their EVP. Data shows they are not doing this today, which accounts for a doubling of voluntary attrition rates over the past decade.

The other disruption that shows no sign of slowing is the fact that work itself will continue to rise in complexity as processes, policies, regulations, organizational structures and tools become more complex. Advances in AI and machine learning will undoubtedly streamline many ‘expert’ processes. They present an amazing opportunity to reduce friction and complexity in frontline workflows to free-up workers’ energy and capacity for ever more valuable customer or patient interactions where experience is paramount. As such, customer-facing workers will be more valued than ever for the quality of human interactions they are able to create, in stark contrast with automated alternatives.

Conversely, organizations that are unable to tame complexity and work friction for their people, leaving them unable to perform at their best, will be subjected to a double penalty:

1. On productivity: Gartner estimates that employees waste as much as 2 hours per day “hacking work” to avoid friction they face while completing routine tasks. To put this into perspective, that equates to 3.1 million wasted hours per year at a typical 10k+ organization.
2. On talent retention and attraction: Individual tolerance for work friction and ‘wasting my time’ is declining with every generation and companies will be unable to stop employees from seeking and finding opportunities elsewhere when their expectations are unmet. The ‘great resignation’ has shown us the economic impact of such a challenge.

There is however an untapped opportunity for companies to address the challenge of rising complexity and ever-increasing work friction: New analytic tools and friction reduction methodologies can show what it looks like when employers reduce complexity for employees, follow through on their promises and create frictionless work environments. This new work friction data lives at the intersection of employees’ perspectives about what gets in their way, uncovers where the most critical hot spots are occurring, and offers a clear path to resolution. In the coming decade, the most successful companies will be those that make friction management a strategic part of their business.

The choice as to whether or not a young person should pursue a college degree was once a “no-brainer”. But with the existence of many high-profile millionaires (and billionaires) who did not earn degrees, as well as the fact that many graduates are saddled with crushing student loan debt and unable to find jobs it has become a much more complex question. What advice would you give to young adults considering whether or not to go to college?

Maya Angelou had many powerful quotes, and one of my favorites is “Making a living is not the same thing as making a life.” Careers are moving from a traditional linear, upward path toward a “lattice” or “spiral” progression model based on a constantly enriched set of skills and the discovery of one’s unique abilities, preferences and personal goals through experimentation, which ultimately lead to more personal fulfillment than a conventional path.

College remains a powerful path toward a fulfilling career in many places such as academics and expert fields, but it is no longer a sine qua non. Skills are the currency of the future for individuals and the question is: ‘Is College the best way to build the skills I want and need for my next step?’. The business case for this path weakens every year with rising investments in alternative options. For young adults looking to level up their career, there now exists an abundance of skill-building resources at a fraction of the cost of traditional university programs.

Consider many technology, coding and evolving ‘prompt engineer’ roles where skills matter more than credentials and pedigrees. Or, the rise of service jobs where customer-facing acumen is at a premium while also providing opportunities for those who relate well to people and have high emotional intelligence.

Perhaps the best advice for young adults thinking about their future is to first understand their natural strengths as well as areas of curiosity and identify ways to build on those through whatever traditional and non-traditional paths make sense for them. Then, look for career opportunities that enable those strengths to shine, will be self-motivating and offer a path to evolve faster than automation does.

Despite the doom and gloom predictions, there are, and likely still will be, jobs available. How do you see job seekers having to change their approaches to finding not only employment, but employment that fits their talents and interests?

There will be jobs available for the foreseeable future and those job seekers who take the time to understand their talents and interests will benefit the most. This might mean doing some “me-search” to learn what drives them, working with a mentor who can provide outside perspective and guidance, or simply following an area of interest in many directions to seek out ways to learn and contribute.

If one is certain about the path they want to pursue, sheer determination can go a long way. Having the courage and resolve to keep trying is itself a worthy skill. Many people owe their success to this kind of grit, particularly when it is accompanied by natural talent.

For job seekers who are still figuring out where they want to focus, they might consider pursuing low-risk experiments, like a short internship or volunteer opportunity, in fields that will continue to thrive in the future (e.g. customer-facing roles, hospitality, coding, finance, etc.). One constant imperative in these experiments is to develop the ability to tell compelling stories about the things they do (how they solve problems, the food they cook, why great code matters, how finances shape great businesses, etc.)

The statistics of artificial intelligence and automation eliminating millions of jobs, appears frightening to some. For example, Walmart aims to eliminate cashiers altogether and Dominos is instituting pizza delivery via driverless vehicles. How should people plan their careers such that they can hedge their bets against being replaced by automation or robots?

Roles that are based on hyper-consistent, repeatable task patterns are potentially at risk, a pattern we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution. AI and automation will augment many existing roles, but there will still be a need and desire for human interactions, creativity and storytelling.

Retail stores like Walmart may replace cashiers but are still looking for many customer-facing roles because human-to-human interactions that make or break the customer experience are essential to the brand and impossible to digitize ‘with feeling’. Consider a parallel in terms of creativity, advances in technology reshaped the way we consume media, content and music, but artists continue to find ways to surprise, delight and entertain us.

Educating oneself about where the new ‘automation line’ is and staying informed about evolving opportunities can provide a sizable runway as well as a future frame for career planning. One thing is certain: Denial about the coming AI and automation era and a fixed mindset stuck in the way things were will be a risky approach.

Technological advances and pandemic restrictions hastened the move to working from home. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?

Because the labor market will be more transparent and more fluid, companies will not always get their way. Those that insist on their way will pay a price for maintaining policies that fall short of the talent market’s expectations. Most organizations will continue offering more flexibility and land somewhere in the middle between the office and home. There will be three implications resulting from this shift as we think about management and leadership:

1. The global pandemic proved that people could get work done remotely. But when work happens in a decentralized way, managers lose the ability to absorb frustration and mitigate risk in the moment as they did in the office environment. The reality of interpersonal conflict and frustrations emerging from work friction now explodes in the privacy of people’s homes, or worse, becomes a buried grievance. In person, managers can intuitively take on the role of shield and ‘friction absorber’, which is greatly diminished in a remote context.
2. Managers will learn to lead with only occasional live interactions. They are not there yet because there was little preparation when the pandemic-driven shift in work was happening. But post-pandemic work life offers opportunities to level up remote management in new and effective ways rather than relying on the false sense of control that in-person management provides
3. Companies that rely on managers to absorb employee frustration will have to find another way to design work ergonomically so that it fits employees. Rather than spending their time making up for work friction, managers can spend more energy growing skills and helping with career development rather than compensating for work friction.

What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support the fundamental changes to work?

The future of work is in the hands of employees as much as it is in the hands of employers. This used to be a one-sided game, but now needs to be a partnership. “Work activism” can be designed to make life at work better while also improving shareholder value. It no longer has to be a zero-sum game with tradeoffs in favor of the organization at the expense of the people doing the work, or the other way around.

Individuals have more agency than in the past — they can move to a company that better suits their values and needs. This will force employers into partnership to make their work environments not only more attractive, but also easier to work within.

Employers are going to have to acknowledge employees as individuals and not simply as numbers on a spreadsheet. There is an expectation of freedom to be who you want to be and not be judged. That means accommodations will need to be made to bring employees with different views together under one tent.

Companies do this today for their customers and now they need to do this for employees. When people are treated well in the consumer world, they come to expect it in the work world. And expectations matter. If they aren’t met, employees will walk away or stop working.

What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employers to accept? What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employees to accept?

Employers know that maximizing shareholder value is tied to better work environments for their employees. Being profit-driven means meeting employees’ needs. This shift may be difficult to make for middle management teams as they typically operate a system designed to control what, and how much, employees do rather than leveraging their agency. So, it will be incremental and take a while. There is a trust component that will be new for this middle management cohort.

Bureaucracy 2.0 will allow for more human agency and employ design methods to make work better for workers. Organization-first principles will shift to a more balanced approach which means learning to let go of some old ways of thinking. The way forward will be human-centered, iterative and data-driven.

As employers go through this shift, they will need to accommodate the needs of various constituencies, generations and circumstances. For example, commuting is increasingly intolerable for younger generations. Companies may set universal mandates that ultimately impair their ability to create a sustainable work environment where multiple generations want to contribute and grow over the long term. Conversely, employees insistent on never going into an office will miss out on social connections, mentor opportunities and personal growth. Again, balance is key.

Despite all that we have said earlier, what is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

Both shareholders and employees share a common cause: To create economic value for the business and make work more fulfilling for employees. Some companies realize it is not an ‘us vs. them’ logic and begin to walk on a new path. There is an opportunity to live your brand, and to define your values based on those you demonstrate rather than the ones you write on the wall. Some companies will achieve this because they will align both customers and employees around these values and focus their every effort on delivering on these promises. Competing organizations will follow suit to keep the pace performance-wise.

Delivering on promises has a lot to do with removing nonsense from work (aka ‘Work Friction’) to let people perform rather than attempting to force them to perform. That is an immense, untapped opportunity — let’s do the math: As mentioned earlier, 2 hours of wasted work is 25% of my 8-hour workday. If we clawed back these 2 hours, we could give 5% more output to shareholders AND make my work week 4 days instead of 5. How is that for a win-win?

The definition of a company is a group of people coming together to build a thing (vs. an artisan). There is a bidirectional, mutually beneficial thing that happens when individuals break out of the “Me vs. the Man” and “The Man vs. Me” mentality and a cease fire puts an end to the zero-sum game. When I see this happen, it gives me hope that we can truly make work better for everyone.

Historically, major disruptions to the status quo in employment, particularly disruptions that result in fewer jobs, are temporary with new jobs replacing the jobs lost. Unfortunately, there has often been a gap between the job losses and the growth of new jobs. What do you think we can do to reduce the length of this gap?

The rising fluidity and transparency of the job market is driving these disruptions. Dropping the degree requirement opened things up in a way that recognizes diversity matters as a driver of business success. Companies have more access to more talent faster which makes them more competitive because they are more diverse.

Barriers to employment which were class-driven are falling (e.g. college degree). Career paths don’t necessarily go up the ladder. It’s now more common to move cross-functionally and switch careers vs. staying in the same job for a lifetime. Skills are no longer non-transferable now that there are fewer barriers.

The dearth of workers and wealth of opportunities available to them drive this and people feel more comfortable taking risks. The system is maturing to accommodate these changes. To reduce the length of the gap, companies must also accommodate these macro changes and not stick their heads in the sand.

Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Watch In the Future of Work?”

1. Globalization and “fluid-ification” of work — Today, where you find workers, where they sit, and what job they can do has evolved quickly. Companies can source talent from anywhere in the world and there are many tools to help make the legal and payroll requirements easier such as DEEL and Oyster. We built FOUNT as a global-first organization and are proud to have employees physically located in far-flung locations from Iceland to Ireland to Indianapolis. The competition for talent gets more interesting when the world opens up in this way.
2. Turnover trends for frontline workers have been rising for the last decade and will continue — Until companies recognize their old tools can’t solve the new problems, they will waste money and likely repeat the same mistakes. One FOUNT customer was struggling to address a huge drop in attrition within the first year of tenure for their call center agents. They tried everything in their tried-and-true HR toolbox — more training, more incentives, remote work, more performance management. None of these tools could tame that dragon. But once they shifted their perspective from trying to fix the call center employee to instead focusing on what within the environment is making it hard for these new employees to do their jobs, they had a breakthrough. This new tool showed them exactly what to fix.
3. Work friction — The invisible headwinds that get in the way of employees as they go about their day-to-day work — or said simply, “Energy I shouldn’t have to expend at work” — is costly. The rise of work friction as a disproportionately important factor in retention, burnout, wellness, etc. will be particularly acute for large organizations. For a typical 10,000 person organization,’ this amounts to 78.4M lost per year. Organizations are on an endless journey of transformation, digitization and structural changes, which make work ever more complex and demanding of humans, who have grown less tolerant of it with every generation. HR teams should evolve their employee performance framework of “Will x Skill” to ‘Will x Skill x Hill’ to account for work friction.
4. Changing roles of managers — The old way of always fighting fires to make up for the lack of flow in work is not actually the manager’s job. They should be coaching on career and skills development, providing guidance and feedback, yet most of their time is spent absorbing or diffusing friction. Companies need to support them by systematically removing friction and re-focusing managers on boosting employee growth and career mobility.
5. AI/ML — It’s difficult to talk about future trends without mentioning artificial intelligence and machine learning. Both will eat up a bunch of transactional and tedious tasks that HR does which will free them up to focus on the aforementioned trends (converting friction into flow). It will also support the evolution of managers to accelerate the business. HR can be a catalyst for this shift and show both parties the benefits they can each derive by working together.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how this quote has shaped your perspective?

I credit my wife for most of the enduring lessons that have become part of my life. One that has stayed with me and also influenced the philosophy underlying FOUNT’s product. On our first dinner date many years ago, I might have said something silly as I was trying to impress… she stopped me there and said, ‘don’t be a prisoner of your own perspective’. It took me a while to recover and realize that she was right — that’s exactly the leap that leaders need to make: Shifting their perspective to their employees and see the work environment employees live in day in and day out. That reality is in many ways more real than the view from the top, as Uber’s CEO recently demonstrated to his leadership team when he started driving and delivering food for Uber: He struggled to sign up, got tip-baited and was punished by the app for rejecting rides…

Our readers often like to follow our interview subjects’ careers. How can they further follow your work online?

I encourage readers to follow FOUNT Global, Inc. on LinkedIn and visit our website where they can learn more about reducing work friction and improving employee experiences at their organizations. Reviewing FOUNT’s 2022 State of EX report findings is also an excellent way to understand the essence of our work. The report found employers should dig deeper to find the root cause of employee dissatisfaction and correlate which misaligned workflows, policies, behaviors, technologies, and processes are most important to solve for key talent segments.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.

Business News & Notes: March 23rd – 29th

FOUNT Global Inc. a D.C. business that conducts workplace analysis, has built an app to help companies fix internal bureaucracies which impact employees in their jobs. FOUNT offers targeted surveys that give upper management insight on company culture and work environment issues that cause the most frustration and attrition.  The technology won the attention of Series A investors in a round led by Lavrock Ventures, based in McLean, enabling it to invest in engineering and product teams to expand the scope of its surveys. FOUNT’s customers include adidas, Siemens and TEKsystems with offices in Falls Church, Bethesda and Glen Allen.

Read more from FCNP on their website.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Business Journal as part of DC Inno’s roundup of local tech and startup fundings.

A D.C. company has built an app to help workplaces get feedback on finding and fixing internal bureaucracies that keep employees from being more effective at their jobs — and it just raised $8 million to further hone its tech.

FOUNT Global Inc., a workplace analysis company, dispatches targeted surveys that give upper management a heat map of sorts showing which corporate culture or work environment issues are causing the most frustration and, notably, result in attrition.

The technology won the attention of Series A investors in a round led by Lavrock Ventures, based in McLean, with participation from existing backers Osage Venture Partners, of the Philadelphia area, and Grotech Ventures, of Owings Mills, Maryland.

With the new funds, FOUNT plans to invest in its engineering and product teams to expand the scope of its surveys. Currently, the firm targets them to workflow issues in the health care industry and others that rely more heavily on call center setups, but CEO Christophe Martel said he sees potential across more industries. By the end of the year, Martel said, he sees his 25-person remote team growing to 35.

Their approach, however, will continue to center on the surveys. Take a FOUNT client, Northwell Health, for example. The large New York health care system, which counts more than 81,000 employees, might see considerable nursing turnover, and Fount will direct its surveys to get the root of what’s causing the most friction in workflow, rather than asking more general questions around whether they have sufficient tools for the job or are satisfied in their current positions.

“Unlike big typical employee surveys that go to everyone,” Martel said, “we tend to only take a relatively small sample of the population who understand what these blockers are and get really sharp data that the leaders can go and act upon and make the environment better for employees.”

As Martel describes it, “if 10 people said there is a pothole on Connecticut Avenue going north on this side of the road, that’s all you need to know, to know that there is something to fix. So instead of surveying the entire D.C. population to know how they feel about Connecticut Avenue, it’s actually a much more targeted approach to understand what to fix in people’s workflows and work environment to make their life better.”

FOUNT was founded in 2022 as a spinout of Germany-headquartered employee experience consultancy TI People, which had a D.C. footprint. In its first year, FOUNT collected 20 customers, including sportswear giant Adidas, German industrial manufacturing company Siemens and IT services company TEKsystems, based in Linthicum, Maryland, but operating offices in Bethesda, Falls Church and Glen Allen.

Martel declined to disclose the company’s revenue, but said it more than doubled last year’s recurring revenue.

The company works to distance itself from other big-name survey giants like Qualtrics, arguing its output is the analytics and insights, not just the survey administration itself. Though, Qualtrics, a $1.5 billion revenue generator based in Provo, Utah, also offers curated group feedback — and just inked a deal to sell for $12.5 billion to private equity firms.

Ultimately, Martel said, Fount’s most difficult job often lies in convincing a company’s C-suite to adopt the perspective of its employees.

“One of our customers didn’t realize that [employees] had to juggle seven systems to respond to a customer,” he said. “It’s that kind of thing where when you look at it from the perspective of employees, you suddenly see that work is not really ergonomic.

“The problem is not the worker,” Martel added. “It’s actually the company ecosystem that the workers work in that is actually really difficult for workers to navigate.”

This article was authored by Donte Kirby, Staff Reporter at DC Inno.

Practically everyone gets the Sunday scaries every now and then. In fact, three in four workers say they’ve experienced it before.

But there’s a difference between occasionally feeling anxious about going back to work and dreading the start of every work week. For many call center agents, that latter experience is far too common. They stay up at night worrying about the moments of weekday horror to come. And in many cases, high-friction work environments play a huge role.

If you’re not already thinking about your agents’ Sunday night experience, your call center might be a friction hotspot. But it’s never too late to reverse course. Here, we’ll explain how work friction makes agents dread their job and how to identify the highest-friction moments in their day.

Work Friction Makes Agents Dread the Call Center

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re familiar with work friction. (And if not, our white paper is a great starting point.) For call center agents, like all workers, work friction can make it harder to do their jobs. Eventually, they’ll start to dread going into work.

What do these moments of friction look like in the call center? Sometimes, a keyboard keeps sticking while an agent is updating up a customer’s information. Or agents have to navigate a constant flood of Slack pings. Other times, it’s a manager who is too busy to help out when an angry customer is on the line. And more often than not, it’s a combination of all these things and more.

These friction points are frustrating on their own. But most call center agents experience several moments of work friction in a single workday. And these moments tend to snowball throughout the work week. By the time folks log off on Friday, they’re completely drained – with only a couple of days to recharge before they’re back in the wringer.

In a high-friction work environment, agents can quickly lose their motivation to go to work. Sure, a vacation or mental health day might provide temporary relief. But if the environment stays the same, that dread will begin to creep back. And that comes with high costs.

Festering Work Friction Can Rattle Your Business

When agents can barely stomach the thought of going into the office, it starts to impact their health and performance – not just their motivation to show up. Left to fester, the underlying work friction can poison every part of the call center environment.

For instance, picture an agent who could barely sleep because they were anxious about another grueling work week. They might start to…

• Doze off at their workstation.
• Sound drained or exhausted on customer calls.
• Partially complete (or outright skip) key steps in their workflow.
• Drag their feet between customer interactions.

When this happens week in, week out, it’s a clear sign of burnout – a top reason behind the double-digit increase in turnover rates since 2020. This turnover can create a vicious cycle as team instability starts to impact morale. And alongside the clear human cost, high turnover can translate to thousands spent on hiring and training that goes out the door once the next cohort quits.

But that’s not all. The effects can ripple outward to…

• Customers. When agents always sound exhausted on the line or fumble their answer to a billing question, it gives customers a reason to take their business elsewhere.
• Managers. Managers may feel pressured to reduce agents’ average handle time or boost flagging CSAT scores – tough asks when they don’t know the root cause of agents’ poor performance.

If you’re turning a blind eye to work friction, you could be putting your entire call center at risk. To avoid a costly downward spiral, it’s important to minimize friction where possible. The next section explains how.

To Ease the Sunday Scaries, Ask Workers What’s Causing Them

To quickly reduce friction, leaders often race to implement a host of solutions: CRM updates, headset improvements, workflow tweaks, and more.

But this scattershot approach wastes time and money. Your HR team could open up dozens of workstreams to test out solutions, only for none of them to solve the exact problems affecting agents most.

To solve work friction, don’t assume what workers need. Just ask them directly.

With targeted surveys (aimed at a fraction of the call center team), you can identify…

• The most common work friction moments for agents.
• Exactly what’s causing the friction.
• Specific actions to improve the work environment.

Once you have this information, you can prioritize friction points to tackle, test solutions, and monitor their impact on agents’ daily experience. 

For instance, if several agents report feeling frustrated with a multi-step approval process that keeps dragging out their handle times, you can experiment with alternative processes that balance efficiency and risk mitigation. 

The right alternatives, of course, will depend on the specific moments of work friction your employees are experiencing. With that in mind, follow up with employees regularly about the solutions you’re testing (say, every month) to see if there’s an observable impact on their satisfaction.

Done right, this approach can help call centers clarify the steps needed to tamp down work friction – and, in turn, the Sunday scaries.

Work Doesn’t Have to be Dreadful

Let’s be honest: even with the best of call center environments, most agents will still get the Sunday scaries at some point. But it shouldn’t be a weekly experience. 

When you take the steps to find and remove work friction, your employees can start their Mondays with a healthier frame of mind. That means less burnout, attrition, and wasted money on stopgap solutions.

Want to get started? FOUNT can help. Let’s get in touch.