Resources

AI investments are expected to top $2.5 trillion by 2033, but for all its promise, organizations are still struggling to measure its impact. While 79 percent of leaders know they need AI to stay competitive, 59 percent worry about quantifying productivity gains.

This is the economic reality of AI. With investments that can run into the tens of millions of dollars, AI tools (and the leaders who bring them to the table) are under enormous pressure to demonstrate their cost savings or productivity gains as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that’s not the general timeline for most AI solutions, which often take years to prove their worth.

The solution lies in work-level data. In this piece, we’ll explain how to classify your AI investment based on the work it impacts and how to measure its impact so you can get a clear assessment within months – not years – of whether the investment is paying off.

Classify Your AI Investment: Highly Defined vs. Open-Ended Work       

To measure an AI tool’s impact on work, you have to first define the nature of the work it’s meant to impact. In our experience, the biggest differentiator is whether a worker’s tasks are clearly defined or open-ended.

AI projects for workers with well-defined roles tend to be those that carry the highest expectations for productivity improvements. Examples include…

• An AI-enabled chatbot to assist call center agents.
• A coding tool to speed up the work of software developers.
• A paperwork-reducing tool aimed at reducing attrition among healthcare workers.

These transformations come with very clear goals and substantial investments, putting leaders under intense pressure to know whether their AI tools are working as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the second category of AI transformation involves tools designed to increase the productivity of general knowledge workers, such as…

• ChatGPT to help with crafting memos and email messages. 
• CoPilot to assist with a variety of administrative tasks.

These transformations tend to be a lighter lift with less pressure, a smaller investment, and a lower demand for strict bottom-line results.

Measure AI’s Impact on Employee Work

Regardless of the nature of the work AI is disrupting, the way to evaluate the investment is to measure the work. But how do you do that? The answer starts with work friction.

Work friction is anything that gets in the way of a worker doing their job, including people, processes, and technology. A broken headset, for example, or a professional development approval process with too many layers.

To measure work friction, you have to survey workers directly about the moment-to-moment reality of their work. Unlike employee experience surveys, which ask how workers feel about various aspects of their jobs, work friction surveys aim to identify what’s actually happening as they go about their days.

When measuring the impact of AI tools on work friction, you can ask survey questions about how the tool impacts work moments: Is it making them better? Worse? Adding new moments of friction? The answers are your first indicator of whether the AI is delivering a positive ROI.

They do that by highlighting both “success stories” (i.e., where the AI is making work more efficient or workers productive) and problem areas, which gives you a clear indication of where to stay the course and where to adjust.

Best of all, the valuable user feedback you get can help with AI transformations targeting both well-defined and lesser-defined roles. Every AI implementation comes with costs, risks, and questions about whether to expand, alter, or abandon the use of a tool. Work friction data can tell you very clearly if AI is making employees’ work easier or more streamlined.   

A Third Category: AI Tools For Enterprise Services

A third and quickly growing type of AI transformation involves tools designed to assist in providing enterprise services to employees, such as help with payroll or PTO requests. These types of projects generally carry significant cost-savings expectations – as well as high levels of scrutiny from workers. 

Here again, work friction data can provide critical feedback as to whether an AI tool is meeting employees’ needs. For example, we recently worked with a firm that was looking to reduce operational costs and improve the employee experience by investing in a variety of AI chatbots, employee self-service portals, and advanced service management tools.

However, the project was plagued early on by low adoption rates and growing employee frustration, for a number of reasons:

• Processes that seemed straightforward on paper became complex when applied in real-life scenarios.
• Gaps in resources and misaligned systems left employees to solve many problems on their own.
• The new system proved to be less efficient in real life than on paper.

But by studying work friction data to understand exactly where employees were experiencing difficulties with the new system, the firm was able to revise its implementation to take a more targeted approach. This led to streamlined processes and simplified task handovers that resulted in higher employee adoption rates and $2.3 million in annual operational cost savings.

In AI Transformations, Only Employees Can Tell You What’s Working 

The wave of AI will be coming for almost every role within an organization eventually. Even the bluest of blue-collar jobs will be touched by AI at some point in the not-too-distant future. That’s why it’s so important for leaders to figure out how to evaluate these projects on a shorter timeline.

The key is gathering data on work tasks directly from employees. Only your employees can tell you if AI is working. That’s why work friction data is so important. It can serve as a leading indicator for AI success – and provide key guidance for adjusting a deployment that may not be working as expected. Ready to find out more? Get in touch.

Once upon a time, digital transformations were inherently top-down propositions. A company would roll out a new tech tool or software solution and everyone was expected to fall in line and start using it. And when things went wrong, employees just needed to muddle through while the company tried to fix things – while simultaneously smoothing things over with staff.

Bottom-up initiatives, true to their name, flip the script. They rely on employees to lead or at least willingly participate in the digital transformation through their changed behavior, rather than through an imposed requirement. AI projects are classic bottom-up initiatives – they only succeed if employees can readily see how the new tool will make their lives better.

Bottom-up transformations carry their own benefits and risks, some of which you can control (hint: make sure you have plenty of usable data) and others that are out of your hands. But the main differentiator is a shift in mindset – from one that involves a mandate to one in which your employees more fully participate. Here are some things to consider before you make a switch.

Taking a Bottom-up Approach to AI Projects

The success or failure of any AI project lies in whether your employees choose to use the product or tool in question. For example, let’s say you’re looking to introduce a new AI solution designed to help your software developers conduct technical discovery more quickly. 

Under a generally successful version of this bottom-up scenario, you make the AI tool available to the developers as a possible solution, providing them with as much information and training as possible. The rest is up to them. As they begin to use the AI, they find that this crucial process is much easier to complete and the tool gains widespread adoption. There’s more to determining the ultimate success of your AI solution (read on), but this is a positive start.

In another scenario, let’s say your CTO introduces the new AI tool and requires your developers to use it. There’s an assumption here that AI will make things easier for them, but in practice they find the tool difficult to work with. Eventually, they abandon it in favor of their prior way of proceeding through technical discovery and the project stalls.

Judging the Effectiveness of a Bottom-up AI Project

The above examples illustrate a key truism for any bottom-up transformation – that is, if employees don’t see much value in an AI solution, they won’t use it and your project will fail. On the other hand, if the AI tool helps augment their work and / or reduce their pain points, you may be on the road to a successful transformation. But “success” in these kinds of situations can often be hard to pin down – how do you accurately measure productivity, after all?

This is where a better understanding of work friction can help guide a bottom-up AI project from the very beginning. What exactly is slowing your developers down in the technical discovery process?

Work friction data allows you to see where problem areas are happening before you ever choose an AI tool, giving you a better idea of whether the solution you’re considering will truly address your employees’ pain points.

Work friction data can also be used after the transformation rolls out to determine if there have been real gains in productivity, as evidenced by reductions in work friction. This will in turn give you a better handle on ROI for the project – a notoriously difficult-to-pin-down metric when it comes to AI.    

The Pros and Cons of a Bottom-up Approach

Any digital transformation comes with its own unique benefits and risks, and a bottom-up approach is no exception. Some of the positive aspects of taking a bottom-up approach to an AI project like the software developer example above might include:

• It’s a more organic way to foster change. When employees embrace the technology of their own volition, you’re less likely to encounter wide-scale pushback or resistance.
• Because employees are willingly participating, there’s not as much need for massive and time-consuming post-rollout change management efforts.
• It’s a participatory process. Employees may pitch in to help solve problems that arise with the new tech because they’ve already gotten on board with the change.
• Because they weren’t forced into accepting anything, employees tend to feel more engaged with a bottom-up transformation – and more valued overall. 

Of course, no digital transformation is a sure thing. Even a bottom-up approach carries its share of potential risks, including:

• If a bottom-up initiative doesn’t go well – that is, if your employees don’t pick up on the new technology or they refuse to use it – change management efforts or after-the-fact mandates probably won’t be very effective.
• If the AI doesn’t work like it’s supposed to or doesn’t deliver the value that employees are expecting, they’ll probably abandon it. And you may not get another shot to reconfigure things and try again – once employees have deemed the tech a failure and returned to the tools and processes they already know, it will be difficult to get them on board for a second attempt.
• If your employees get excited about solving the problem you’ve laid out but don’t necessarily like the AI solution you’ve offered them, they may turn to their own ideas for taking care of things. In this scenario, you’ll run the risk of having a network of unsupervised and difficult-to-manage “shadow IT” running beneath the surface of your organization. 

None of the above benefits or risks necessarily represent a slam-dunk argument for or against a bottom-up approach, but all of them are worth keeping in mind as you prepare an AI project. And it’s worth noting that the more data you have to work with going in, the more likely you are to realize more of the benefits and sidestep some of the risks. 

Does a Bottom-up Approach Make Sense for Your Digital Transformation?

Not every project (or even organization) is a good fit for a bottom-up approach. In each case, a company will have to weigh the benefits and risks of such a move. But having access to solid, actionable work friction data to determine how the project in question is likely to impact the day-to-day workflow and pain points of your employees is one of the best ways to evaluate its potential – and track its ultimate success or failure.

If you’re considering a bottom-up digital transformation, learn how we can help.

In this episode of the Hafner CX podcast, Volker Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of FOUNT, joins Prof. Nils Hafner to discuss the critical aspects of managing change and enhancing customer experience in organizations. Their conversation centers around the intricate connection between employee and customer experiences, the necessity of a structured approach to change management, and the benefits of leveraging AI-powered tools. 

The podcast provides valuable insights into the importance of employee experience and the role of work friction management in driving business transformation. By focusing on structured change management, reducing friction in customer service, and linking employee well-being to customer satisfaction, organizations can achieve remarkable improvements in their overall performance. 

Podcast Transcript in English

Nils: Welcome to “Hafner’s CX Podcast.” Today we have Volker, CEO and co-founder of FOUNT Global, as our guest. Hello, Volker! 

Volker: Hello, Nils. I am delighted to be on your podcast. It is a pleasure to share my insights on productivity. 

Nils: You’ve had a long career in Human Resources Management, particularly in digital HR research at CEB Gartner. Could you tell us a bit about your journey and how it led you to founding your own company? 

Volker: Absolutely. My career has been dedicated to understanding and improving employee experience and workplace productivity. I spent several years at CEB Gartner focusing on digital HR research, and that experience highlighted the critical role of employee experience in overall organizational success. 

Nils: That’s fascinating. What inspired you to start your own company? 

Volker: The idea stemmed from the realization that many organizations struggle with work friction—those small obstacles that cumulatively hinder productivity. Our software aims to identify and reduce these friction points, ultimately improving employee satisfaction and performance. 

Nils: Can you elaborate on how your platform works? 

Volker: Sure. Our platform uses targeted surveys and analytics to identify moments of work friction within organizations. We quantify these frictions and provide actionable insights to help companies streamline their processes and enhance employee experience. By automating and optimizing workflows, we reduce the manual effort required from employees, allowing them to focus on more meaningful tasks. 

Nils: It sounds like your solution addresses a significant need in the market. What are some common friction points you encounter? 

Volker: Common friction points include inefficient processes, unclear policies, and lack of proper tools. For instance, employees often face challenges with outdated software or cumbersome administrative tasks. Our platform identifies these issues and suggests improvements to enhance productivity. 

Nils: That’s impressive. How do you ensure the data you collect translates into meaningful action? 

Volker: We use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to benchmark and analyze the work environment. By understanding the specific pain points employees face, we can recommend targeted interventions. This approach ensures that our clients see tangible improvements in their operations and employee satisfaction. 

Nils: Can you share a success story from one of your clients? 

Volker: Certainly. One of our clients, a large multinational corporation, was experiencing high levels of employee frustration due to inefficient onboarding processes. By using our platform, they identified the specific steps causing delays and implemented streamlined procedures. This resulted in a significant reduction in onboarding time and an increase in employee satisfaction. 

Nils: That’s a great example. How do you see the future of work evolving with technology? 

Volker: Technology will continue to play a crucial role in transforming the workplace. Automation, AI, and data analytics will become more integrated into daily operations, helping organizations to operate more efficiently and effectively. Our goal is to stay at the forefront of these developments and provide tools that help our clients navigate these changes successfully. 

Nils: It sounds like you have a clear vision for the future. Any final thoughts you’d like to share with our listeners? 

Volker: I’d like to emphasize the importance of continuously seeking feedback from employees and using that data to drive improvements. The workplace is constantly evolving, and staying attuned to the needs of your workforce is key to maintaining a productive and positive environment. 

Nils: Thank you, Volker, for sharing your insights. It has been a pleasure having you on the podcast. 

Volker: Thank you, Nils. It was great to be here. 

Listen to the Podcast in German:

Apple Podcast: Hafners CX Podcast on Apple Podcasts

Spotify: Episode 14 – wie Friktionen die Service Profit Chain stören – Hafners CX Podcast | Podcast on Spotify

The insurance industry has gone to great lengths to simplify processes for customers – which often means offloading complexity onto claims adjusters and other employees. But at what point does excessive complexity for employees become a problem. That is, when does internal complexity do more harm than good to the bottom line? And where should executives start when they’re ready to solve it?

These questions can be answered with quantitative data.

Unfortunately, most executives (in insurance and elsewhere) don’t have that data handy and don’t have a system for collecting it. In fact, most don’t even have a name for the phenomenon I just described.

But we do: it’s called work friction. We also have a framework for identifying the biggest sources, measuring its impact on your bottom line, and figuring out how to minimize it so your employees can work more efficiently and more effectively – and be motivated to stay with your organization longer.

Identify Where the Work Friction Exists

Work friction, as the name implies, is anything that slows a person down while they do their job.

Work friction can take the form of bad technology (like a bluetooth mouse that never connects right), clunky processes (too many approval levels for disbursements), and even people (managers who don’t check in about career goals).

Every job has friction. The goal of looking at your organization through a work friction lens is not to eliminate friction entirely but rather to find the most expensive points and reduce the friction there as much as possible. As I mentioned above, that’s the kind of question you can answer with quantitative data. But almost nobody understands how to collect that data.

In the absence of data, most leaders rely on hunches or anecdotal evidence. Maybe, in response to rising attrition rates, you go on a listening tour of the claims team. And maybe one particularly eloquent adjuster explains their workplace frustrations so well that you’re completely captivated. You channel resources toward solving that problem first.

Or maybe there’s no listening tour. Maybe you see the attrition and you know exactly what drove you crazy when you were working as a claims adjuster 15 years ago and you set about solving those problems.

While both of these methods will likely have some positive impact, neither is evidence based. They’re a bit like getting to a destination without using Google Maps. Yes, you’ll probably arrive, but you may waste a lot of time and effort by taking a roundabout route.

The alternative is to gather hard data about where work friction exists. You can do this by conducting targeted employee surveys, asking your workers about moments in their day where they struggle and how much impact each moment of work friction has on their ability to do their job.

From there, you’ll have hard data to guide your next steps.

Measure the Impact of Each Moment of Work Friction

In customer-facing roles like insurance claims adjusters, there are two distinct types of work friction:

1. Friction caused by customers
2. Friction caused by you, the employer

The first type of work friction – say, rude or abusive customers – can be upsetting. But it’s rarely a driver of attrition. This is because, while nobody likes being yelled at on the phone, many claims’ adjusters recognize that the occasional rude customer is part of the job. Nobody is to blame but the customer themselves.

The second type of work friction is much more often a driver of attrition because employees understand that this type comes from problems that their employer could solve but has chosen not to. One common example we see, especially at larger organizations: managers don’t regularly talk with their director reports about their career goals.

Why not? There may be several reasons.

In roles that require less experience (call center positions, e.g.), executives often assume that employees are not committed to the company and so don’t bother with career coaching. In roles like claims adjusters, executives may assume that, because employees are already somewhat specialized, they already understand their career opportunities.

At larger organizations especially, both assumptions are typically wrong.

In reality, what we’ve found is that many people join large companies specifically because of their perception of access to a meaningful career path.

This is a huge ah-ha when we uncover it in the work friction data, usually because it’s an entirely solvable problem that leadership was totally unaware of.

Eliminate the Most Expensive Friction First

Once you’ve got data on where your employees experience friction and how much impact it has on their daily work, you can start ranking your various work friction sources by cost to your bottom line, either from lost productivity or excess attrition. From there, you can prioritize solving them by potential impact (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Work friction moments visualized by their impact on productivity

If, for example, your claims adjustment team has high attrition rates because they’re frustrated by the arduous process of disbursement approval, you can invest in reimagining it, whether via additional training, new automation, or hiring more people.

The ROI this kind of investment can deliver is often on par with what vendors of various digital transformation solutions promise (our customers often see between $1 million and $3 million in productivity gains or savings from improved attrition). What’s more, approaching attrition and productivity from a work friction lens leads to solutions that are better tailored to the actual needs of your workers.

Most Hunches Are Wrong. Use Work Friction Data to Eliminate Wasted Work

In our work with enterprises, we’ve found that, about 75 percent of the time, the problem that an organization invests a lot of money in solving is either not the biggest problem or not solved in the most effective way. And in nearly every case, this happens because the organization lacked quantitative data on work friction.

Product teams wouldn’t dream of investing in a new feature without first gathering detailed user feedback. Corporate leaders should approach their employee experience the same way: identify moments of work friction, measure their impacts on employee productivity and retention, address the most impactful ones first, and continue to measure the impact.

Our software helps you do exactly that: from gathering solid baseline data to providing dashboards where you can track your progress, it ensures that your organization invests in the right solutions for the most pressing problems your organization faces.

Want specifics? Book a demo today.

You’ve probably spent countless hours and tons of money to remove friction from the customer experience. But are you also investing in the people who drive that customer experience from start to finish?

Friction doesn’t just exist on the customer side – it also plays a role in how effective your team can be. If your environment makes it difficult for employees to do their jobs, it can lead to work friction. As a result, you may have a harder time meeting deadlines because tasks take longer, poor customer service because agents are limited by procedures, and high turnover rates as employees become frustrated with work friction complicating their daily tasks.

Here’s everything you need to know about work friction and how reducing it can help improve your company’s efficiency.

What Even Is Work Friction?

Work friction is the energy it takes to overcome any obstacle that gets in the way of an employee doing their job, accomplishing a goal, or having their needs met. It can come from anything that unnecessarily complicates tasks, frustrates employees, or makes it more difficult to provide a great customer experience.

Examples of work friction include:

• Subject matter experts who are hard to reach, making it take longer to resolve customer issues and lowering resolution times that hurt customer satisfaction
• Excessive paperwork and filing requirements for routine tasks that slow down productivity by taking working time away from employees
• Unclear systems or policy for pursuing internal promotions or department changes that can lead to frustration and turnover
• Limited support and training for new hires that extends the amount of time it takes them to become comfortable, limiting their productivity

Essentially, anything that makes it harder, more complex, or less efficient to complete a task is work friction.

What Causes Work Friction?

Work friction can come from anywhere, including people, tools, procedure, and policy. However, they generally begin with a system that was put in place to help employees consistently do their jobs correctly.

According to Gartner Research, 50% of teams attribute work friction to being overwhelmed, which was likely caused by the rigid and inefficient processes that 48% of employees blamed for work friction.

The report revealed that when employees are limited in how they can problem-solve and perform their jobs, it’s harder to keep up with workloads. As they become overwhelmed, the level of work friction increases, leading to further inefficiency.

Some specific causes of work friction include:

• Strict procedures that limit problem-solving ability for customer service agents
• Inefficient communication practices that extend resolution times
• Out-of-date tools and resources that lengthen response times
• Inefficient procedures for cross-departmental coordination when resolving complex problems
• Lack of clear project timelines that complicate task prioritization
• Unclear onboarding assistance and guidance for new hires

Work friction can also be caused by angry or emotional customers who create stressful situations for customer-facing employees. Without proper de-escalation procedures, these conversations may lead to poor morale and an increased turnover rate.

How Work Friction Creates Inefficiencies

Work friction hurts both employees and organizations by interrupting productivity and worsening employee morale.

Work friction prevents employees from being as efficient as they’re capable of, leading to as many as two wasted hours per day. They may spend more time than necessary on daily tasks, be limited in the results they can produce for prospects and customers, and feel demotivated by the lack of impact they’re able to make.

When an employee has to work harder and spend more time doing their job, it increases the likelihood of burnout.

Burned-out employees are less likely to dedicate their full effort into their job, which reduces their efficiency. They may also be less tolerant when it comes to dealing with unruly customers, less likely to listen to management, and break procedures that they feel are holding them back. They may also stop prioritizing a great customer experience, lowering customer satisfaction and hurting your business’s reputation.

Burnout can also lead to a lower job satisfaction rating as employees struggle to see their individual impact. In fact, 95% of employees say work friction makes them feel bad about their job.

As a result, the work friction’s negative impact on employee morale can lead to higher turnover rates that increase training costs and put a staffing burden on your organization.

Why You’ll Want to Correct Work Friction Before It’s An Issue

Every workplace experiences some level of work friction, but that doesn’t mean it has to become a problem for your organization.

A friction-free environment enables better customer experiences, reduces turnover to minimize training costs, and improves your bottom line by building an employee-friendly culture that encourages productivity and well-being.

Implementing work friction solutions before problems arise allows you to create a more open dialogue that lets employees have more influence on their daily work experiences. They’ll also have the tools, training, knowledge, and access they need to thrive, which helps improve your business as a whole. 

With employee input, you can build a more collaborative working environment that helps everyone stay happier and more efficient.

Work Friction vs Organizational Friction: What’s The Difference?

You might have heard of organization friction before, but how does it compare to work friction?

Organization friction refers to the obstacles that get in the way of your organization’s goals. These limiting factors can include:

• Resistance to change
• Bureaucratic procedure that makes decisions take longer to finalize
• Improper infrastructure that makes it difficult for your organization to perform as expected. 

Meanwhile, work friction comes from the processes, procedures, and decisions that interfere with your employees’ goals. 

Organization friction also affects the entire company on a larger scale and defines its culture, strategies, and performance. It comes from systematic and procedural decisions that push the organization in a certain direction – for better or worse.

These high-stakes decisions made on an organizational level mold the policies and procedures that contribute to work friction. So, organization friction can often lead to work friction. 

However, the impact of work friction – reduced performance, high turnover rates, and poor resource management – can be felt cumulatively on an organizational level.

How to Spot Work Friction

Work friction is common, but it’s not always easy to notice.

It’s hard for higher-level executives and managers to keep tabs on how every employee feels about their job. You usually can’t see the day-to-day impact that procedures and processes have because you’re not working with the same systems and tools your employees do regularly.

Instead, you can turn to data for the insight you need. 

There are a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you see when a certain department or process is achieving worse results, taking longer, or becoming more expensive than it should.

Indicators of work friction include:

• Low customer satisfaction
• Long response times
• Poor feedback from customers
• Missed deadlines
• High absenteeism
• High attrition rates

When you see something that sticks out, it’s a good idea to look further into it as a potential area for improvement.

If you want to identify and correct causes of work friction, you’ll need to know what indicators to look for.

What Is Work Friction Intelligence?

Work friction intelligence involves identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing the issues that need to be resolved to reduce work friction from your organization.

After identifying the areas where work friction is impacting your business, you can begin to address them. And while it may sometimes seem like a huge undertaking, with the right insights, you can find ways to make quick and easy but impactful changes.

Fortunately, when you’re able to collect and quantify data with a tool like FOUNT, you’ll gain actionable insight into which friction points are a priority through simple, easy-to-read reports. These reports can often identify high-value changes that you can make quickly without overhauling entire systems or procedures.

Instead of countless meetings and deliberation, you can leverage the asset with the most insight – your employees – to prioritize your friction-removing efforts.

Incremental Steps to Take to Smooth Out Work Friction

Removing work friction isn’t usually an overnight effort. It takes insight, listening, problem-solving, and measuring to get right– and when you do, it’ll make a world of difference for your employees and organization.

Here’s how you can resolve workplace friction.

Identify Areas Where Friction Occurs

The first step to solving any problem is identifying it.

As we mentioned earlier, you can look for a history of performance issues as indicators that work friction is impacting employees’ ability to do their jobs.

If customers are unsatisfied, projects are taking longer to complete, or your turnover rates are higher in certain departments, you should look into it further as a potential friction point.

Alternatively, you can ask your employees. Accepting anonymous complaints, requests, or other feedback is an easy way to identify what systems and procedures you need to look into further.

Collect and Analyze Employee Feedback

Once you’ve identified areas of friction, you need to find out how those limitations are holding back your team. And who better to ask than those affected by them?

The easiest way to collect feedback is short, targeted surveys that allow you to quickly gather specific information about the process, including what’s working, what you can improve, and what issues should take priority.

Work friction software makes this even easier by allowing you to sort responses by tenure, salary, gender, department, and more. These filters allow you to narrow down who’s most affected by the friction and pinpoint where changes are most likely to impact friction.

Create and Implement Solutions

Your surveys have probably given you a lot of insight into the inner workings of your organization’s day-to-day. Now, you need to take action.

Depending on the type of friction and where it’s occurring, coming up with solutions will involve different department leads.

For example, systems issues may require you to work with your IT lead while difficulty pursuing new roles within the company is more likely to involve your HR team.

You may also choose to have managers consult with employees or deliver surveys to those who are most affected by the issues to collect ideas to consider.

Measuring The Impact Of Your Efforts

After you’ve implemented your improvements, give it some time – usually three to six months – to have an impact. Then, it’s time to remeasure employee sentiment.

To collect additional feedback, you should conduct another, more targeted survey to different employees who are experiencing the same moments. This way, you can get an accurate idea of how the changes are impacting the department or team as a whole.

Afterwards, repeat the survey to see how answers have changed. You should collect feedback from the same people on the same topics and compare the new results to the initial data.

If feedback has improved, you can consider pushing further in that direction or leaving your solution in place for longer to collect more data.

If feedback is the same or has gotten worse, consider whether your changes come with growing pains that will improve over time. If not, consider another direction to address the friction points.

Fighting Work Friction Before It Becomes a Problem

Minimizing the impact of work friction is a critical step in creating a better, more efficient, and happier workplace.

Work friction is caused by inefficiencies throughout the daily operations of your organization. From out-of-date tools to unclear procedures for resolving complex problems, the systems and guidance that you provide your workforce impact their efficiency, morale, and quality of service.

The best way to identify friction points that need improvement is to ask the people who use it every day: your employees. 

You can use targeted surveys to collect crucial data like where the friction comes from, who’s impacted the most, and what limitations it’s imposing on your employees.

Once you’ve collected feedback and implemented solutions, you should conduct another survey to evaluate whether your solutions are working.

Fortunately, FOUNT makes it easy to identify, quantify, prioritize, and remove friction points from your workflows and operations. 

You can use our friction-fighting software to collect and analyze information about friction in your organization. You’ll gain valuable insight into what’s holding your employees back and how much of an impact it has on their productivity and job satisfaction, allowing you to pinpoint friction before it becomes an issue.

Get Started With A Free Demo Today

Employees are one of your most valuable assets; let them guide you towards a happier, healthier, and more efficient workplace and organization as a whole with the insights provided by FOUNT.

Book a demo today to see how you can remove work friction from your organization and employees’ daily workflow.

Your new AI tool is fully integrated into your team’s workflows. You’ve made sure everyone has the training they need. Now all you have to do is sit back and watch the productivity gains roll in, right?

Not quite.

Workplaces are complex organisms. You can’t change one thing (like automating certain tasks) without ripple effects. The seldom-discussed Phase 2 of AI transformation is figuring out how automation tools change employees’ work and adjusting as needed to account for those changes.

In this piece, we’ll take a look at why AI tools can have ripple effects within an organization, how to identify these effects, and how to adapt to make sure you’re still enjoying the benefits of increased automation.

The Ripple Effects of AI Tools

Picture a call center for a telecom company. The company introduces an AI agent that can handle the simplest 15 percent of customer calls. After a period of adjustment, the tool is working great – but call center agents are facing new challenges.

Now, because all the simplest calls are handled by a bot, human agents are facing more complex customer scenarios in every conversation. What’s more, customers with complex issues still have to go through the AI agent to get to a human – and they’re often frustrated by that. In some cases, the AI tool isn’t providing helpful summaries of a customer’s needs, so that agents are forced to ask people questions they’ve already answered.

The result for call center employees is that the nature of their work has changed. Now, instead of dealing with some combination of simple and complex calls, they’re dealing exclusively with complex calls and with a higher portion of agitated callers.

To do this changed work, they may require a different skill set or different tools – stronger deescalation skills, for example. This might require additional training for some employees.

And what about the systems call center agents use to look up customer accounts? Are those efficient? Do they load quickly and let agents view a customer’s entire history with the company from one screen? If not, the wait times while agents load information could further exacerbate caller agitation.

Things continue to ripple from here. Will agents need additional breaks to recover from stressful interactions? New mental health benefits? Will you need to have additional managers available so agents can escalate calls more easily? Will you need to give agents greater latitude in granting refunds or applying promotions to appease angry callers?

I could go on, but you get the idea. Automate work, and the remaining work changes. Now let’s take a look at how you can identify and address those changes before they cause  new problems.

How to Identify What AI Tools Change

While we don’t know in any given AI transformation what exactly a new AI tool will change, we do know that it will cause changes. This is why it’s so important to have a way to track those changes and measure their impact on employees’ ability to do work.

FOUNT’s work friction framework is designed for exactly this. It involves conducting targeted surveys of impacted workers. Unlike traditional employee experience surveys, which typically ask how employees feel about their work, work friction surveys ask about the work itself: how did the AI tool impact your ability to do xyz. What is your satisfaction with doing abc. Etc.

From these surveys, we gather data on two things: moments (aka tasks workers complete throughout the workday) and touchpoints (aka people, processes, and things workers interact with to do their work).

We then assess two components of the moments and touchpoints we measure:

1. Impact, meaning to what extent it impacts the work a person does; and
2. Satisfaction, meaning how well that moment or touchpoint is currently working.

With this data, it’s easy to measure where the AI tool is having the greatest positive and negative impacts – and where unexpected consequences may be playing out.

Now let’s take a look at how to react to that data to make sure your organization continues to benefit from your AI investment.

How to Adapt After Implementing an AI Tool to Maintain ROI

Let’s return to our hypothetical call center. The AI bot is handling 15 percent of call volume, but the remaining callers are both more complex and more demanding than they were pre-AI tool. As a result, the productivity gain you’re seeing is only about half of what you budgeted for.

(Related: How to Assess the ROI of Current AI Initiatives & Prioritize Future Investments) 

You need to change something to get those productivity numbers up, but what?

The answer lies in your work friction data. Look for moments and touchpoints that have a high impact score and a low satisfaction score.

These are the components of work that make a big difference to an employee’s ability to get their job done and that are not functioning well.

Maybe you discover two areas with high impact and low satisfaction:

3. The AI-to-agent handoff
4. Looking up customer information in the company database.

From text responses to the survey, you learn that agents don’t have enough time to read the AI’s summary before being connected to callers. This is stressful, in part because callers tend to get frustrated when they have to repeat their situation to the human agent.

You also learn that looking up customer information is frustrating because agents have to access multiple databases that aren’t always synced. Load times can lead to delays, which can add to callers’ frustration.

From here, you have two obvious levers to pull, one of which is easy and low risk. You increase the delay between handing a caller from the AI to a human agent; when you survey workers again a week later, they’re much more satisfied with that part of their work. What’s more, text comments note that having more time makes it easier to diffuse customer frustration.

The internal systems are still a pain point, but now you’ve bought yourself some time to figure out this bigger, longer-term issue.

In AI Transformations, Launch Is Only the Start

Launching an AI tool may feel like a culmination: you’ve done the research, done the training, perfected the tech setup, and then you’re live! And while go-live may be the end of the first phase of your AI journey, it’s only the start of the rest of it.

Introducing automation to a system as complex as an employee’s work inevitably changes it, often in unpredictable ways. To make sure you’re providing employees with the tools and resources they need to do their jobs and staying on track to enjoy the benefits you planned for from your AI investment, plan to measure work friction after launch.

Identifying places of high friction will help you know what the next best steps are as you proceed down the road to becoming an organization powered by AI.

WASHINGTON, DC / ACCESSWIRE / June 6, 2024 /‍

FOUNT Global, Inc. announces it has been selected by AFWERX for a SBIR Phase I contract in the amount of USD $74,885.00 focused on “Work Friction Commanders Decision Tool” to address the most pressing challenges in the Department of the Air Force (DAF). The Air Force Research Laboratory and AFWERX have partnered to streamline the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) process by accelerating the small business experience through faster proposal to award timelines, changing the pool of potential applicants by expanding opportunities to small business and eliminating bureaucratic overhead by continually implementing process improvement changes in contract execution. The DAF began offering the Open Topic SBIR/STTR program in 2018 which expanded the range of innovations the DAF funded and now on May 13, 2024, FOUNT Global, Inc. will start its journey to create and provide innovative capabilities that will strengthen the national defense of the United States of America.

“We are honored to be selected by AFWERX for this opportunity. At FOUNT, we are committed to delivering actionable insights that address work friction and supporting the mission-critical needs of the Department of the Air Force.”

Ian Powell, Chief Sales Officer

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

About FOUNT Global, Inc.
FOUNT is a SaaS technology provider focused on identifying, quantifying, and reducing work friction. The platform leverages targeted surveys and powerful analytics to provide enterprise business leaders with actionable insights. With over 7 million friction data points available for benchmarking, these strategic insights support digital transformations, optimize AI adoption, uncover hidden organizational work friction, resolve operational challenges, and improve productivity. Founded in 2022, FOUNT has headquarters in Washington D.C., London, and Hamburg. Visit www.getfount.com for more information.

About Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)
The Air Force Research Laboratory is the primary scientific research and development center for the Department of the Air Force. AFRL plays an integral role in leading the discovery,development, and integration of affordable warfighting technologies for our air, space and cyberspace force. With a workforce of more than 12,500 across nine technology areas and 40other operations across the globe, AFRL provides a diverse portfolio of science and technology ranging from fundamental to advanced research and technology development. For more information, visit www.afresearchlab.com.

About AFWERX

‍As the innovation arm of the DAF and a directorate within the Air Force Research Laboratory, AFWERX brings cutting-edge American ingenuity from small businesses and start-ups to address the most pressing challenges of the DAF. AFWERX employs approximately 325military, civilian and contractor personnel at six hubs and sites executing an annual $1.4 billion budget. Since 2019, AFWERX has executed 4,697 contracts worth more than $2.6 billion to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base and drive faster technology transition to operational capability. For more information, visit: www.afwerx.com.

Company Press Contact:
press@getfount.com

SOURCE: FOUNT Global, Inc.

At its core, increasing productivity means making it as fast, simple, and easy as possible for employees to do their work – and with the right approach, you can make it happen.

However, it’s essential first to understand what’s working and what isn’t. 

Uninformed changes waste time and money because they don’t address the underlying problems that need to be solved, like investing in new software instead of training employees who struggle with technology. 

The wrong changes can even create resistance to change, making further improvements harder to implement.

Data-backed improvements are the best way to combat wasted resources, missed deadlines, and obstacles interfering with employees’ work, otherwise known as work friction. But making these informed decisions requires an understanding of the tasks workers perform and the resources they need to do their jobs. 

This insight comes from practices like process mining and work-focused employee listening that answer whether the solution to productivity issues is new software or additional training.

Both strategies work well independently to help optimize work productivity and efficiency. Together, however, they give you valuable insight into a process’s efficiency and its impact on worker productivity.

This piece will explore process mining and work-focused employee listening, highlight their differences, and explain why they can work well together.

Processes Become Complicated; Process Mining Simplifies Them

Process data mining is the practice of finding ways to make work processes more efficient by reducing the number of steps and time it takes to complete them. It aims to remove redundant or unnecessary steps that slow productivity.

Process mining tools track and gather data on the steps it takes for employees to do various jobs, like switching apps or creating support tickets for customer service. 

After collecting data from a group of employees, it analyzes each of their individual journeys and creates a new, optimized process that reflects how workers actually complete the tasks.

But why do processes need to be mined and optimized if they were built to be the most efficient and straightforward path to completing a task?

Over time, conditions change. New policies, tools, and circumstances arise that force processes to be adapted to fit their new requirements.

A great example is the global pandemic. When remote work grew popular because of social distancing, many processes could no longer be completed in person. Businesses had to adapt by moving them online.

Process mining allowed these businesses to continue improving their processes as they added new tools and learned more about efficient remote working.

However, it didn’t consider how these changes affected workers’ productivity. That’s where work mining could have helped minimize the work-from-home growing pains for businesses.

Work-focused Employee Listening Looks at the Employee, Not Just the Process

Processes guide how employees perform tasks, outlining the step-by-step journey they should take from start to finish to work as efficiently as possible. However, in reality, the path is far less linear than you hoped for when creating them. 

Processes are more than just the steps workers take to do their job – they also encompass the interactions between people, including other employees and customers, involved in completing tasks. 

These interactions change how workers navigate processes, requiring them to adapt the steps they take to accomplish their goals.

This need for adaptation is where implementing process mining alone falls short. You can’t see WHY they’re completing tasks a certain way. You can only see the steps they take, without context, limiting insights into what improvements you can make to reduce the amount of work employees perform.

But what exactly is work, and what insights can be gained from employees’ work feedback? 

Work is everything that a worker does. 

It is not just a process as a sequence of steps, but thoughts and situational intuitive activities to get to a certain goal.

The goal of work-focused employee listening is to make work easier. It involves examining the tasks (work-moments) and touchpoints (tools used to get the task done) they perform and the intention behind them to better understand if there are any friction points in their day-to-day work.

When employees must overcome restrictive processes or ineffective tools to do their jobs, work friction that affects overall productivity is generated.

For example, complicated processes that take too long to complete or outdated tools that don’t work efficiently both limit how much work employees can do in a day.

Work-focused employee listening looks for moments where the current resources, including processes, are limiting employees’ productivity. 

Optimizing Process Efficiency vs Worker Productivity

Process mining aims to improve process efficiency, reducing the time and effort it takes employees to complete tasks. In contrast, work-focused employee listening addresses the underlying reasons behind individual productivity, aiming to reduce the obstacles and unnecessary effort employees face in their daily work.

But what’s the difference? Doesn’t improving the process increase productivity? Not exactly.

An optimized process provides the guidelines for completing a task as simply as possible. However, things rarely go according to plan. 

For example, if a customer service agent needs to check with a manager before offering a discount or refund, but that manager isn’t available, the process hurts their ability to provide great customer service. 

In theory, the process is great; it creates a positive customer experience with minimal waiting and prevents unauthorized refunds that can impact cash flow. 

However, once an essential step of the process can’t be completed, like getting approval, it creates friction.

Instead, work-focused employee listening highlights where things usually go wrong and how much impact they have on productivity FROM the employee perspective. From there, you can develop new processes that accommodate common situations workers face or equip them with tools or training, improving their productivity.

Who Can Use Process Mining or Work-focused employee listening?

Both process and work-focused employee listening are valuable for improving a workforce’s efficiency and productivity. But they’re not for everyone.

Process mining is an automated, data-based process. It requires access to multiple data points so the tool can look for areas where the process slows down, unnecessary or redundant steps, and necessary changes from the original process. Without access to this rich data, the tool will only be able to mine the processes it can monitor, which limits its effectiveness.

Alternatively, any business can use work-focused employee listening. Targeted work-focused surveys collect work friction and other work-related types of feedback from employees directly, with results aggregated and quantified, ultimately providing insight into the specific barriers and inefficiencies that hinder productivity and employee satisfaction. It doesn’t require internal data or advanced infrastructure to get started.

Process Mining and Work-focused employee listening: Two Sides of the Same Coin for Optimization

Process mining and work-focused employee listening are different but equally important and effective.

If you think about it, they’re also complementary.

Process mining provides quantitative data that helps to create more efficient processes and streamline tasks. The data shows whether the process is doing what it’s supposed to and if it’s as lean and efficient as possible to increase productivity. 

However, it doesn’t provide insight into WHY employees do things a certain way or how the process impacts their experience at work.

Work-focused employee listening considers the human side of productivity, including the thoughts and actions involved in employees’ work. It is not just collecting data, it qualifies it to help discover whether the policies, procedures, and tools workers use create more or less work. 

You can use process mining to identify and improve inefficient processes and work-focused employee listening to determine whether the changes are helping or hurting employees’ efficiency.

Together, process mining and work-focused employee listening create a clear picture of the efficiency of different processes and how they affect worker productivity. This combination provides valuable insight to help optimize operations to benefit both the organization and employees.

Remember: Workers are the ones who have to use processes on a daily basis. Take advantage of their insight to help you build better processes and identify changes that make work easier.

We would be pleased to present a use-case scenario during a 30-minute meeting – schedule call here

Almost inevitably in multi-faceted enterprises, different departments – from HR to IT to operations – tend to retreat to their own territories, making it difficult to measure bottom-line performance across the broader organization. Part of the problem with this kind of siloed approach is that the KPIs from one department – say, percentage of tickets resolved in IT or number of product recommendations for retail associates in customer service – often don’t translate to another. 

But when the board of directors is looking for productivity updates or areas to cut costs, you need universal KPIs.

When you need to evaluate the effectiveness of a digital transformation initiative, you need universal KPIs.

Essentially, whenever you need to measure bottom-line performance across the full organization, you need universal KPIs.  

Looking at quantified data on work and employees’ everyday activities is a way to get everyone on the same page and get every department measuring those big-picture metrics. And when you start to get those kinds of work friction insights, you’ll be able to bridge the silos and get the whole organization speaking the same language.

Work Friction Measures What Gets in the Way of Work

Many organizations tend to lack a clear understanding of their employees’ day-to-day work – particularly those moments when they run into obstacles to performing their best. As a result, many big decisions are based on assumptions that fail to take into account the voice of the worker. Work friction looks to remedy this problem by using data to better define and quantify the critical moments and pain points of employees’ everyday experiences. 

What’s the potential value of knowing where work friction lies within your organization? Gartner research has found that dealing with work friction occupies two hours a day for two-thirds of employees in a given company. For an organization with 10,000 employees, that’s 3.1 million hours – the equivalent of 1,568 FTEs – and $78.4 million lost per year. 

While each department in an organization has different job-specific goals and metrics, work friction is something that can be reliably measured across the entire organization. In reviewing and analyzing that data, not only can you determine what needs fixing, but also which fixes to prioritize. And when you put those solutions in motion, you can more easily determine how well they’re working through metrics like cost savings and productivity increases.   

Reduce Work Friction to Increase Productivity and Reduce Costs

No matter the specialized function of any group of employees, they inevitably have pain points in their day-to-day work that impact their ability to maximize productivity. That’s why reducing work friction can and should be a goal in every department. 

For example, we recently worked with a financial services company that was looking to increase productivity among its 1,000-person software development team by deploying AI chatbots and code assistants to save time and eliminate repetitive manual tasks. In practice, however, the company ran into lackluster adoption from the team and ultimately found it nearly impossible to quantify the benefits of these tools. 

What the company really needed to understand was how the AI tools were impacting its developers’ daily activities. By focusing on identifying and measuring their work friction, the company could better understand why the AI tools weren’t being used to their full capacity among the team and target friction management efforts to the specific areas of work friction that developers were experiencing.   

By pivoting the AI rollout based on work friction data, the company was able to better demonstrate to the developers how the technology could facilitate their day-to-day work. The developers, in turn, could better see the promised results and were therefore more inclined to use the tool. As a result, the organization was able to realize the productivity increases and cost savings (to the tune of $5.4 million) it had hoped the tools would provide.

Reduce Work Friction To Decrease Attrition

While not a major concern for many organizations right now, employee attrition tends to be a recurring (and costly) issue. In fact, according to research from McKinsey, employee disengagement and attrition could cost a median-size S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million a year in lost productivity – that’s at least $1.1 billion in lost value over five years. Here again, reducing work friction can help. 

We recently worked with a retail logistics group that was experiencing severe capacity restraints, increased overtime and onboarding costs, and higher error rates due to spiraling attrition among its first-year warehouse order selectors. While the company had increased salaries and rolled out enhanced benefit packages to stem the tide, none of these expensive measures had worked. 

But by studying the first-year employees’ work friction – including day-to-day pain points involving training, warehouse navigation, and shift scheduling – the company was able to implement a number of targeted solutions, communication plans, and new processes that directly addressed their most pressing concerns. The result was a 35 percent reduction in first-year turnover that translated into annual cost savings of more than $4 million.    

Focus on the Specific to Measure the Universal

For many large organizations, a siloed approach to different departments has become something of a default setting. And it’s a setup that makes it almost impossible to find KPIs that resonate across the full organization. 

But while work may vary from department to department, focusing on work friction is a way to uncover actionable insights on bottom-line metrics – including productivity, efficiency, cost savings, time management, attrition, and more. The key is to make sure you’re getting the full picture of work friction by basing your conclusions on solid data. We can help.