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Have you ever felt slowed down at work by small, annoying tasks? This is called work friction, and it can make it hard to get things done and affect how well we serve our customers.

The podcast episode “Work Friction: Less is More” from The CX Leader Podcast talks about how to deal with these issues. Host Patrick Gibbons and guest Christophe Martel, CEO of FOUNT, share ideas on how to make work smoother for everyone.

Christophe defines work friction as the myriads of tasks—like excessive documentation and endless meetings—that detract from customer interaction. Such tasks dilute productivity and diminish the quality of service provided.

“Friction is everything you do when you don’t spend time with customers. That’s all the documenting the stuff that you’re doing and participating in endless meetings to try to close the loop on the matrix.”

These tasks take away time that could be spent with customers.

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

Transcript

PG:

It feels really good when we’re productive, right? But when something gets in the way of completing our work, man, it can ruin your day.

CM:

Friction is everything you do when you don’t spend time with customers, right? Like, that’s all the documenting the stuff that you’re doing and participating in endless meetings to try to close the loop on the matrix, like, these are all things that take time, and that’s time that’s away from customers.

PG:

Let’s take a look at reducing the friction we experience in our work on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:

The CX Leader Podcast is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

PG:

Hello everyone, I’m Pat Gibbons, I’m host of this week’s episode of The CX Leader Podcast. And as always, thank you for listening. You know, it’s never been a better time to be a CX leader. And we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. You know, we’ve all experienced it. The nagging, frustrating, and sometimes maddening feeling we get when something collides with our productivity. And while it can sometimes feel trivial, that type of friction, it just adds up and it affects our interactions with our customers, thus affecting the customer experience. So how do we minimize those points of friction in the workplace? Well, our guest today has a unique perspective on work friction and can help us unpack this topic. Christophe Martel is the CEO of FOUNT, a software platform designed to help reduce friction and improve productivity and employee experiences. Christophe, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

CM:

Thanks for having me this afternoon.

PG:

Well, it’s you know, this is an interesting topic. Like many professionals, I’ve kind of become more and more interested in these topics that look at the interaction between the employee experience and the customer experience. You know, we all know there’s a connection, but really getting into the details of that and knowing how to drive things that are, you know, crucial to employees that we know have an effect on customers, really, you know, trying to address those issues. That can be a tougher situation. And I think this is, you know, right in the middle of that. So, so let me start at the beginning. You know, the term “work friction,” what do we mean by that, and how did you get into this?

CM:

So, I got into it by having worked for a long time and experienced a lot of work friction firsthand.

PG:

Okay. That’s sometimes how…

CM:

In various…

PG:

…It happens,

CM:

…organizations.

PG:

Right?

CM:

Yeah. but actually, uh, more recently, I worked for a company called CEB. Uh, the Corporate Executive Board, where it was a business leader for many years. On, you know, head of EMEA based out of London, and realized firsthand, first of all, the how important customer experience is, and it was also a topic we studied at the time, and also realizing how important employee experience was in driving good customer experience. And in that in many ways, right. Like, first of all, you know, cranky customer facing employees, don’t make for great experiences for customers. But also, people that don’t stay in seat very long are, you know, up and the customer experience because you now have someone new and is not yet, you know, trained enough to serve customers at the, at the right standards and so and so forth. So tried to figure out a way as a business leader to solve that problem of how do I manage employee experience in a way that’s more deliberate than what it currently is, never really managed to do so and accept, you know, the typical things of better leadership and better culture, etc. and then shifted roles and moved to HR and became CHRO for CEB, uh, and to actually take a shot at fixing this employee experience thin, and discovered that as a CTO is also really hard to do,

CM:

…you don’t really have visibility into what is really happening when people do their work. Uh, and that kind of brought, uh, me to, uh, creating FOUNT, which is about understanding not so much how people feel about the company they work for and, uh, even feel about the work they do. But what it is that gets in the way of them being successful at their work or being successful in all these things they attempt to do while at work.

PG:

Right.

CM:

And that includes learning and growing and everything else.

PG:

Yeah, maybe, um, give us a few examples of, um, you know, common friction that someone would see in a particular position.

CM:

So in customer facing roles. So think about sales folks. Friction is, uh, everything you do when you don’t spend time with customers.

CM:

Right? Like, that’s a, uh, all the, uh, the documenting the stuff that you’re doing and participating in endless meetings to try to, you know, close the loop on, on, on the matrix. Like, these are all things that take time and that’s time that’s away from customers. Um, when you are in a more, uh, customer service environment, call center environment, uh, it’s everything that prevents you from serving your customer in the way that you would want to. And that means if it’s a complex policy situation, do you have all the right tools at your fingertips to solve the problem? Do you have the right escalation, escalation, uh, path that is available to you to problem solve or not? Right. And so that is, uh, and when you don’t, it’s actually makes employees incredibly frustrated that the company asks them to do, uh, what is a difficult job, usually, uh, and doesn’t make it as easy as possible for them to do so. So juggling multiple systems, uh, multiple sources of information, like, all of that stuff gets in the way of doing what they’re trying to do, which is to do a good job with customers. And then the last one in the retail world where, um, when a cashier machine breaks down, what does the person at the at the till do? Uh, except being embarrassed by the line that’s just, you know, getting bigger and bigger by the minute. And when no one comes to help and fix the machine. Uh, it’s a it’s just a very bad situation to be in as an employee because you’re letting customers down. Uh, and you personally feel pretty terrible.

PG:

Right.

CM:

Uh, so these are these are examples.

PG:

Yeah. No. That’s good. And I you know, I think it starts with the premise that you got to expect most people want to do a good job. You know, I’m, I’m thinking just of a recent example. It’s a maybe a trivial one. But, you know, I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and and this has happened repeatedly. They’ll log in and they, they usually have this frustrated roll of their eyes. They’re like, oh, the system’s rebooting, you know, and…

PG:

…you know, they they’re experiencing frustration. And some of it is because they know that I’m just standing there watching them, you know.

CM:

And also it reflects poorly on them. Right. So that the company that they work for, uh, has not made it easier for, uh, for you to get what you need. It’s it’s a and we did research on this with the, uh, like the main reasons why people dislike work friction are not about their, their financial or even career interests. It’s all about, uh, it wastes my time. It slows me down, makes it hard for me to do a good job. Um, it makes more work. Like I’m basically wasting. Like, why do you make it harder than than it should? And when you think about, uh, us as customers. Right. So remember that these employees are also consumers on, you know, the other side of their, uh, of their day. They’re used to a pretty, uh, frictionless experience as consumers. And and that gap is, is growing.

PG:

Right.

CM:

Uh, and with every passing generation, there’s less tolerance, uh, for putting up with the, you know, the… I think it was called the Sunday to Monday shock. Right.

PG:

Uh huh. Well, you mentioned something that was just, uh, crossing my mind is the generational side of this, I’m assuming, um, again, I’m thinking young people are so comfortable with technology and the way that they, um, that issues are solved and shopping is done. And, you know, there’s an omnichannel approach to so many things. You can go in a store, you can do things online, you can do it on the app that, uh, yeah, the tolerance level must be…

CM:

Yeah.

PG:

…particularly low with that audience. Is that what you find?

CM:

It’s absolutely our data shows it experienced professionals and know that experience is shaped by expectations and expectations. Uh, for, you know, Gen Z workers are pretty different from, uh, I don’t know, mine. Right. There’s there’s born in France in the 60s. I have pretty high tolerance for work friction because I’ve seen all kinds…

PG:

Right.

CM:

…of it. Uh, but, uh, my son, who was uh, was 22, has very different standards, and that kind of governs the kind of employer and the kind of work that, uh, you would want to do. Um, and that, you know, um, uh, is just an evolution of, uh, of, uh, that, that is, that is driven by his experience as a consumer. Uh, that is more and more, you know, digitally enabled and, and frictionless.

PG:

Right. Right.

CM:

So it’s, uh, so for us, the definition of work friction is anything that gets in my way at work that shouldn’t. Right. So the it’s, uh, not not all friction is, is bad, right? The work is often full of friction because, you know, customers are not always, uh, happy, etc. but the employees understand that and they, they can deal with that as long as the company doesn’t make doesn’t make it harder than it should, uh, to conduct, uh, the work that they’re trying to conduct.

PG:

I would think too, in, you know, in some industries there would be regulatory issues that okay, that it’s it’s a step in the process. But many are it’s established for the right reasons. But I think, like you work in the hospitals or with nurses and so forth, they probably have those. But uh, you try to make them as easy to work through as possible.

CM:

Yes. So one very interesting thing about, you know, the work friction is in the eye of the beholder, right? It’s very much like a, honestly, CX, like a good customer experience is in the eye of the customer. Anyone inside the company who pretends they know, uh, doesn’t. Well, for, uh, employees, it’s the same thing. Uh, and so if you think about the regulated environments or, uh, banks, for example, uh, the of all kinds have usually very heavy processes that makes customer experience more difficult than it should be. Um, and also that makes employees experience more difficult than it should be, as long as the perception from the employees is that the bank does everything it can to make it easy for them, they’re okay with regulation. They understand why it’s there and the purpose it serves. And I would say the same thing about, uh, nurses and doctors, etc. uh, they know where the the line is for. Yeah. What is imposed by the regulatory environment. And, but how you help me deal with that difficulty and how you show up when, uh, I get in trouble, that is how you get judged.

PM:

Right. Right. Yeah. I think it just seems like a lot of it is just being able to empower employees with the right tools, processes and such that they feel like they can be effective in what they do.

CM:

Yes. So the notion of empowerment is a is very familiar to and to the CX world indeed because it’s a it’s a real quality word. Right. It’s a let them you know, like in the hospitality business like let employees solve problems as they see them on the spot and be empowered to do so. Um, what what ends up empowering people is not, uh, lots of great communications and or trying to make them feel empowered. It’s actually about making it easy for them to make the right decisions and to carry out what they’re trying to, to do.

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

And in most organizations we work with, in customer facing roles, you see, uh, an amazing amount of opportunity to remove things rather than add things. And there’s a very big tendency for, uh, companies that are trying to solve employee problems to say. Let’s buy a new piece of technology and put it in there, because it’s going to make it easier for them. But you do that. And how do you know if it really is making things easier or not? Uh, and that is the the concept that FOUNT stands for, which is you don’t know unless you have data that shows what activities are made easier by that investment you’ve just made. And where has that investment actually slowed things down? Because we often find that a new things also create friction, and maybe not in the initial area that it was intended to solve, but in other areas and often the superposition of platforms and tools, etc. ends up creating so much complexity for employees that, uh, yeah, you may solve one thing, but actually create more friction overall.

PG:

Right.

CM:

And so that that phenomenon of, uh, kind of in customer facing roles, less is more, uh, is a really powerful one that, uh, our data tries to enable, uh, leaders to, to start acting on, Uh, to make work simpler, uh, for their customer facing teams.

PG:

Right.So what are the ways that, um, that you, your platform or your work helps identify all the points? And what are people trying to do to reduce work friction?

CM:

You know, so the first, uh, first thing that’s that’s really maybe that’s worth mentioning to this audience is the the link between EX and CX is well documented. Most of the organizations we work with have connected these data sets in some way, shape or form to say, we know that if our employees feel better about their work, they’re, uh, you know, going to deliver it better CX. Uh, one of our customers mentioned recently, for every two points of NPS going up, I know that it’s, uh, about $450 million of extra revenue that will come in. So there’s a very clear understanding of that.

PG:

Right.

CM:

Uh, there’s also a clear understanding that the drive to reduce friction for customers tends to take that friction and to bring it in-house. Right. Because where else is it going to go?

PG:

Right.

CM:

Uh, and then so now, uh, some of the friction that customers use to bear is now borne by employees. And then comes the question is like, well, how do you manage that? Like how do you first of all identify it? And the way we we do this is with what we call a moment centric approach. So that…

PG:

Okay.

CM:

…i s, you know, familiar to any CX practitioner, except that the universe of moments that you have to consider for an employee is much more complex than the universe of moments that the customer has, uh, because employees do, uh, you know, have lots and lots and lots of different activities that they carry out at work. Plus they have things that they do at work that have to do with their life at work, such as I want to learn. I want to grow my career. I want to change roles I want to deal with. I don’t know, a situation at home and the company needs to help me. And on all of these dimensions, whether it’s in the activities of work or the activities that are more tied to my life at work, friction is likely to occur. And the question is how much occurs. And we are measuring that. But also the question is what causes it? And in each one of these moments, you have a different set of interactions that are going to create friction, very much like in this world that you have to unpack and you have to get in the weeds of it to go and find data that will tell you what to fix.

CM:

Um, so, uh, it’s, uh, you know, it’s just a massive, um, mapping essentially of, uh, the experience of employees, uh, that gets in the detail of the moments and touchpoints that they experience. And that is where you find friction. You can quantify it, and once you can quantify it, you can bring that back to leaders that essentially shape the work. So operations leaders, CX leaders, IT leaders, and put everyone in front of that data set and say, okay, how do we collaboratively solve for all these touchpoints that are not doing the job that they’re supposed to do?

PG:

Right. And…

CM:

And then things move.

PG:

Yeah. And I assume that there’s they would go through kind of a prioritization. They’d be looking at here’s…

CM:

Yes.

PG:

You know…

CM:

Very true.

PG:

The ones that I should start with or that here’s easy ones that we could tackle right away is that, uh…

CM:

Yes.

PG:

…kind of the process.

CM:

So the prioritization is about where when because the question is, you know, since it occurs in a moment when someone is trying to do something right, or an employee is trying to solve a complex customer issue, for example. Uh, so which of these moments, uh, um, contain the most friction? So in a call center environment, handling an abusive caller, for example, is very high friction. Uh, because it’s tough, right? Um, uh, and then which of these moments are high importance for these employees? Uh, and this importance level can be measured on impact on their intent to stay at the company. So, you know, this makes me so mad that you have so much friction that I will quit.

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

Uh, or it can be measured on the impact it has on their productivity or various other dimensions. Um, and usually because friction is everywhere and this universe of moment is really complex, companies tend to focus on like a pack of two, three, four, five moments at a time and get those better and then move on to the next tranche.

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

Um, very much like you do in the CX world.

PG:

Right? Right. Interesting. Uh, so, you know, when I think of all of this together, um, what what do you see as the overall business impact? I mean, how do you measure to be able to say, you know, we’ve been effective at eliminating some friction and, you know, here’s here’s the effect it’s had on our business.

CM:

So, um, first of all, to measure friction. Uh, you don’t have two, two ways about it. You have to get friction data. And so…

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

…if you if you think about the world of employees, most of the data that we have about employees in large organizations is essentially engagement data, right? Sentiment data, how people feel about the company, its strategy, and so on and so forth, which is all great when it comes to, you know, um, good engagement and good team dynamics. But it doesn’t tell you anything about what gets in people’s ways.

PG:

Yeah,

CM:

Um, and

PG:

It’s a good point.

CM:

Um, so the, the so the first things first, you’ve got to measure this. You got to get friction data to do it. Now, the impact it has when you start improving and reducing friction is pretty significant. That’s impact is distributed in three channels. Uh, you know, uh, the first one is wasted work. When people deal with friction, they waste time. Uh, and actually Gartner, uh, estimated that it’s about two hours per worker per day. That is wasted to work friction, either…

PG:

That’s significant.

CM:

…you know, hacking through it, passing it on to somebody else, uh, you know, being just stomped by it and just discouraged, uh, or burning out with it, whatever the whatever it is, like two hours a day is a massive amount of waste at work.

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

Um, so channel one, channel two. Uh, it takes a toll on discretionary effort because people, uh, that, that feel that their company does not have their back when it comes to doing the job they’re supposed to do, like, well, you want me to go the extra mile, and yet you make it difficult for me to do my work. Right. Like that doesn’t feel like a balanced, uh, story. Um, and, um, there’s a notion of fairness, like. Yeah, you. If you have my back, I’ll have yours. Uh, and discretionary effort is very important for good CX. Right. Like that is where, uh, going the extra mile. Uh, you know, figuring out a creative solution does not happen if you’re, you’re not feeling it as…

PG:

Right?

CM:

…an employee.

PG:

Right.

CM:

And then the third is intent to stay right. And intent to stay is basically your attrition rates. And you know that the leaky bucket is a terrible curse in the world…

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

…of CX. Uh, because people come in and walk out and, uh, CX suffers every time. So, uh, from our estimates and from customers that we work with, for someone who 10,000 people organization reducing friction by about 20%, we’re talking about a $30 million, uh, $30 million a year opportunity.

PG:

Right.

CM:

Uh, that’s pure cash, right? So this is not growth or things like that. It’s…

PG:

Bottom line.

CM:

…dollars saved. Bottom line.

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

So, uh, that is significant. And for, you know, and that’s just reducing friction by a fifth. So it’s not solving it all. Um…

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

Yeah.

PG:

That’s no it’s it’s significant. And as you kind of go through those those steps of what’s involved and I think you know just like we said in the opening, it can be really frustrating. And I think any of us can see how that can easily lead to um, you know, attrition and, you know, all the impacts along the way…

CM:

That’s right.

PG:

…and how it affects the customer. So…

CM:

And by the way, there is a belief that our data actually seems to, uh, to challenge in many cases, which is people leave managers, the people, you know the story. People…

PG:

Yes.

CM:

…don’t leave organizations. They leave managers?

PG:

Right.

CM:

Actually, uh, you find that people don’t really leave managers. They leave work. It’s the work that they don’t want to do,

PG:

Yeah.

CM:

Because it’s just they don’t feel that they can be successful. And, uh, yeah. Now, maybe the manager plays a role in there, but the manager is just a touch point in the story.

PG:

Right.

CM:

Uh, the way the work is organized is actually usually not the manager’s choice. Certainly not in, uh, in big scale customer facing roles. So…

PG:

Uh. Makes sense. Well, Christophe, we are at the point of our broadcast that we always ask our guests for some take home value. So specifically, we’re looking for one tip or piece of advice that a CX leader could take away from this conversation and put to use right away in their organization.

CM:

So first thing is actually not a piece of advice, but just an observation from many of the organizations we work with. CX leaders play a huge role in managing EX. Uh, this this system of employees and customers on both sides of that little fence there. You need to manage that as a system. And we see that when CX leaders partner with employee experience leaders, great things happen. They can use similar tools. They can, uh, you know, get results on both sides of, of the fence. Uh, so there is a role for CX leaders to play, uh, and don’t expect HR to solve it for you. You got to lean in, uh, and often HR doesn’t have the right tools to help you solve it, but that’s another story. Um, now, the thing that I would do if you’re kind of new to this idea of friction, uh, like work friction, go and sit down with, um, a frontline employee, a customer facing employee, uh, and ask them about, uh, the three, 4 or 5 big things that they do in their work and pick one of these activities and ask them where they experience friction in that activity and listen to what they say. And you will hear often pages long of reason why their job is difficult because the company makes it difficult. Uh, and just realizing that the elephant is in the room is kind of step one. Uh, then once you know it’s in the room, you can, um, figure out how to measure that and how to improve it over time. Uh, but just that’s, that’s a way of spending an hour in talking with one of your customer facing employees, understanding what their job is like and what where they experience friction. Uh, you’ll see how much opportunity there is for improvement.

PG:

Right. It’s a great suggestion. And of course, the thing I love about it is it truly is something that somebody listening to this podcast could leave their desk right now, or when they get into work, if they’re listening in the car, they could go do this today. So you followed the rules. Very well done.

CM:

Thank you. Well, I came prepared because you’d asked me so.

PG:

Yeah. It’s good. Good. Um, Christophe, if somebody wants to continue the conversation with you, can they reach out to you either on your website or LinkedIn? What’s what’s the…

CM:

Absolutely.

PG:

…best way?

CM:

So on our website is is getfount.com and many of many of these things are there. There’s a research there’s white papers, there’s um blogs newsletters all kinds of things, uh, little demos and the like. And then to reach out to me on, on LinkedIn, uh, I’m Christophe Martel, uh, I’m saying it with the French accent just…

PG:

Okay…

CM:

…to, to show you off. Um, and, um, yeah, uh, just, uh, get in touch. Very passionate about this, uh, this topic. There’s way too much work, friction in the world, and we don’t need it. Really.

PG:

Yeah. Great. So Christophe is the CEO and founder of FOUNT. Christophe, thanks for being on The CX Leader Podcast. Really appreciate it.

CM:

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much, Pat.

PG:

And if you want to discuss this topic with one of our experts, or have a great idea for a topic for a future episode, email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. We’d love to hear from you. And be sure to rate The CX Leader Podcast through your podcast service and leave a review, because your feedback really helps us out, helps us improve the show, and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com. From there you will find all of our episodes, over 300 episodes and a link to our blog, which we update regularly. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We are an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success, and you can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it’s a great time to be a CX leader and we’ll see you next time.

About The CX Leader Podcast

The CX Leader Podcast is a resource for customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM) professionals.  This podcast is hosted by Patrick Gibbons, Principal, SVP of Marketing & Experience Management, he helps companies put their customers at heart of every decision. He spent nearly 20 years working for Walker and lead or co-lead innovative projects.

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Imagine you’re at an organization where the solution to every problem – from internal communication to frontline productivity – is always “more.” More software. More policies. More meetings. More metrics. Before long, as professor and psychologist Robert Sutton puts it, you feel like you’re “walking in muck.”

Sutton calls this experience “addition sickness”: what happens when organizations solve problems by piling on new tools, policies, and initiatives. Constantly adding more stuff can cause the kind of chaos and clutter that creates work friction. And that can impact organizations’ bottom line.

How can digital transformation leaders cure addition sickness? We’ll explain how in this piece. But first, here’s a closer look at what this ailment looks like at most organizations.

The Three-Pronged “Virus” that Causes Addition Sickness

The “virus” that causes addition sickness exists in practically every organization. Sutton breaks it down into three prongs:

• Humans default to addition. When people confront a problem, they tend to ask,  “What can I add here?” instead of “What can I get rid of?” If there’s a communication challenge between teams, the urge might be to add a new collaboration tool instead of looking for barriers that could be in employees’ way (like complex email approvals or a daily deluge of Slack messages).
• Organizations reward addition: Organizations often celebrate leaders who spearhead a new tech rollout or internal policy initiative. This creates a tangible incentive to add more to the work environment.
• Leaders can’t always see their “cone of friction”: This is the range of people affected by someone’s actions and decisions. In the context of addition sickness, the act of constantly adding more has a real impact on employees (something we’ll get to in a bit).

By now, you can probably see how easy it is to become infected with addition sickness. In the next section, we’ll dive into the biggest symptom and how it impacts organizations.

The Biggest Symptom: Rampant Work Friction

Addition-sick organizations tend to have a lot of work friction: i..e, technology, policies, and processes that make workers’ lives harder. 

Remember the analogy of walking through muck? For employees, it’s as if it takes ten times the effort to do their jobs. Just imagine the experience on the ground: toggling between five disconnected digital platforms, requiring three separate approvals for a customer email, etc. 

As employees’ work environment grows more complex, they become less efficient and productive. Over time, they become less satisfied – and often burn out altogether.

For organizations, the bottom-line impact is significant. To start, there’s the constant spend on hiring and onboarding due to high turnover. But there’s also the lost productivity from overburdened workers. And the organizational knowledge that disappears with every employee resignation.

The takeaway? Addition sickness has a steep organizational and financial cost – one so big it’s hard to quantify.

The Cure: Use Data to Subtract and Simplify Friction

We’ve talked a lot about the “addition” part of addition sickness. But it can also help to think of this condition as a failure to subtract: i.e., to simplify what exists before adding something new.

In many cases, the organizational problems that leaders want to fix stem from work friction that already exists. If that friction isn’t resolved, any new policy, process, or tool will only make things worse.

The cure for addition sickness, then, is to fix work friction. One of the best ways to do that: ask employees where friction exists for them and how it impacts their daily experience.

With great work friction data, you can design solutions that target real employee problems. Maybe that means streamlining an approval workflow. Or simplifying your tech stack. Or introducing no-meeting Tuesdays. No matter your approach, you can continuously measure its impact via regular employee check-ins and adjust as needed.

Sometimes, the ultimate solution might actually involve adding something new. But by adopting a work friction lens, you’ll be able to do so in a way that makes workers’ lives easier.

Pave the Way for a Friction-Free Organization

If you’re worried your organization suffers from addition sickness, you’re not alone. If we had to bet, it’s a condition that likely plagues most organizations today. But it doesn’t have to.

By fighting work friction wherever it exists, you can create a simpler and healthier work environment for your employees. And in the process, you can protect your bottom line.

If you’re not sure where to start, FOUNT can help. Give us a shout – we’d love to help work flow at your organization.

As we’ve noted in the past, about 70 percent of digital transformation efforts fail. But digital transformation itself isn’t going anywhere: it’s the only way that organizations can adapt to the current moment and position themselves for future success. So, researchers have been investigating the root causes of failure and have identified five:

1. The CEO doesn’t provide enough high-level narrative about the transformation.
2. The organization doesn’t address its skills issue (e.g., the team doesn’t have the right skills or those with the right skills are busy doing non-transformation work).
3. The organization lacks the correct change management infrastructure.
4. There aren’t enough leadership oversight meetings throughout the project.
5. There isn’t a team or division dedicated to tracking progress.

In this piece, we’ll explain how organizations can address the third item on this list. We’ll outline three concrete ways to manage change at any point in a digital transformation to improve return on investment.

1. Measure Productivity, Not Just Adoption

In many digital transformations, adoption is a popular metric for gauging success. The software vendor promises a certain improvement on current operations, so it’s reasonable to assume that you can estimate the improvement you’ll see based on what percentage of your team has adopted the new software.

But there are a couple big problems with using adoption as the main gauge of success. First, it’s a trailing metric. Measuring adoption from one week to the next doesn’t give you a sense of the momentum of the project, only what has happened to date. 

Second, measuring adoption doesn’t give you any insight into how to improve it. That is, in many transformation projects, leaders are able to measure adoption but not the reasons for adoption (or lack thereof). This means that, in trying to improve adoption (and therefore position themselves to achieve the ROI promised by the transformation budget), they have to rely on gut instinct or generic “best practices.”

The third problem with using adoption as the primary metric for evaluating the success of a digital transformation project is also the biggest: adoption is only a proxy for the real thing you want to improve, which is productivity (or effectiveness). In other words, we measure adoption with the underlying assumption that, when employees adopt the new software or way of doing things, they will be more productive and / or effective in their work.

In reality, though, the very reason some employees resist adoption is that the new system or software makes their work harder or makes them less productive. They’re trying to get their work done as efficiently as possible and are resisting the new way of working because they see it as a hindrance.

Understanding this is crucial to improving the ROI of a digital transformation project. To fix it, let’s look at the second strategy.

2. Ask Employees Where They Experience Obstacles

In digital transformation projects, the work of change management is often the work of removing obstacles that prevent employees from embracing the change. We call these obstacles “work friction”: any technology, process, or person that makes an employee’s work harder.

Let’s say you launched a transformation project 60 days ago, but only 30 percent of your sales team consistently uses the new software. And only 10 percent is using it exclusively, as is the goal.

Rather than doubling down on internal messaging or increasing switching incentives, this is a great time to conduct targeted surveys to identify sources of work friction for the sales team.

When you look at survey results, you realize that most of the sales team doesn’t understand labels within the software, which were set up by IT. The labels are different from what’s in your old system, and your salespeople are frustrated by clicking around to try and find the resources they need, which adds way too much time to their workflow.

You set up a working group to create new labels, get them implemented with IT, and immediately see adoption double. From there, you work with new adopters to spread the word to laggards that the biggest pain point has been fixed. A month later, you run a new survey to understand additional sources of work friction so you can continue to improve adoption, productivity, and effectiveness.

3. Reconfigure Software to Work For Every Department

Notice that the solution to low adoption wasn’t to throw out the new software and start from scratch. And that’s true of many digital transformation projects that aren’t seeing the ROI leaders had hoped for.

More often than not, when a new system isn’t working as anticipated, configuration issues are at least part of the problem. Too often, though, leaders don’t realize this because they don’t have the right change management infrastructure in place: they aren’t looking for individual points of work friction that are preventing adoption and effectiveness.

At any organization, a software’s initial configuration depends on the vendor and specific salesperson you work with, the onboarding team you get, and the internal people consulted during setup. Often, this default configuration works for some groups and doesn’t work for others. This is why leaders may get contradictory feedback about the success of the new software: some groups love it, while others hate it.

With the framework of seeking and correcting work friction, it’s much easier to assess individual reports and adjust software instances for different departments so that everyone’s experience is positive.

Crucially, reconfiguring software is much less expensive than either accepting low adoption or investing in additional software or services to try to achieve the adoption levels you originally budgeted for.

Check These 3 Things at Any Point of a Digital Transformation Project

Managing change is a crucial part of carrying out a successful digital transformation project. Measuring the right things and understanding how to adjust them to improve outcomes is essential to managing change effectively.

Wherever you are in your current digital transformation project, you can improve its ROI by assessing productivity, identifying points of work friction, and reconfiguring software or systems to eliminate the sources of that friction. If you’re interested in discovering what that looks like for your specific organization, get in touch.

This guest post from Sam Lodaria, an MIT Certified CDO & Transformation Professional and a Strategic Partner & Advisor in technology strategy and digital transformation. With over 15 years of experience helping businesses across various industries navigate the complexities of tech integration, Sam offers practical advice grounded in real-world applications and successes. 

__________________________

Introduction to Digital Integration Challenges

In our relentless pursuit of progress, we often balance innovation with the realities of practical implementation. Identifying which digital initiatives add the most value to our business is not just about choosing new tools—it’s about integrating them seamlessly into our existing frameworks. This process, akin to walking a tightrope without a safety net, calls for a strategic and considerate approach.

The Challenge: 

Integrating new technologies can be daunting, often raising concerns about initial productivity dips and potential disruptions that might affect team morale. However, these challenges can be mitigated by adopting a methodical approach to digital transformation.

The Visionary Leader’s Reality

Leaders are more than just technologists; they are visionaries who aim to maximize the benefits of digital investments. This involves not only adopting the latest technologies that should perfectly align with core business objectives but also ensuring these are seamlessly integrated with daily routines of hundreds if not thousands of employees, and not creating additional work friction. Utilizing employee-centered work data (such as those provided by FOUNT), is one of the keys to this process.

The Blueprint for Successful Integration

Integration AspectKey ConsiderationsQuestions to ConsiderStrategic AlignmentEnsure technology aligns with business goals.Does this technology address a genuine need? How will it enhance operations or create new revenue streams?Stakeholder EngagementInvolve key stakeholders early in the process.Which stakeholders should be involved from the beginning? How can we gather and incorporate their insights effectively?Incremental ImplementationAdopt a phased approach to integration.What are the phases for rollout? How can we structure feedback loops for each phase?Training and SupportEquip the team with the necessary training and resources.What specific training is required? What resources and support structures are needed for confidence in use?Measuring ImpactEstablish metrics to assess digital initiative success.What metrics will assess success? How will these metrics guide future technology decisions?User-Centric Design ThinkingFocus on addressing the end user’s pain points.How do we ensure the technology addresses user needs? What methodologies will we use to test and refine user experience?Agile Methodology for FlexibilityApply agile methodologies for flexibility and rapid adaptation.How can agile methodologies be applied here? How will agile enhance flexibility and feedback adaptation?Leverage Data for Decision MakingUse data analytics to inform strategy and identify significant impact areas.What data should we analyze? How can this data identify bottlenecks or high-impact areas?Promote a Culture of InnovationCultivate an environment that supports innovation and calculated risks.What can be done to foster an innovative culture? How can we encourage and reward risk-taking with new technologies?Continuous Monitoring and OptimizationMonitor and refine the integration process and technology based on ongoing insights.What processes should be set for continuous monitoring? How will insights from monitoring influence optimization?

Digital Initiatives Driving Business Transformation

Technologies such as automation, AI, and cloud computing transform businesses by increasing efficiency, enhancing flexibility, and enabling informed decision-making. Moreover, by aligning these initiatives with specific business goals and customer needs, companies can seamlessly integrate cutting-edge technologies, maintain productivity, and lead in digital evolution.

Action Plan: 

• Reflect on your current digital strategy.  
• Identify one area where new technology could be integrated with minimal disruption.  
• Armed with the insights shared today, commit to taking a calculated step towards this integration. 

In conclusion, embrace the journey of digital integration with confidence, knowing that each step forward is a step towards unlocking unparalleled value for your business. 

About Sam Lodaria

For over 15 years, Sam has helped businesses and organizations of various sizes (startups, midsize, and mature) across diverse industries drive successful transformation initiatives. Sam has led end-to-end technology implementations, built Centers of Excellence (CoE), and guided corporate functions to manage and maintain their systems’ tech stacks and automation initiatives.

Sam posts on LinkedIn daily at 7.15 am ET. Follow him for insights and “how-to” content on Digital Transformation, AI, Automation and Leadership.  

To learn more about work friction, download our latest whitepaper.

In today’s modern employment, talking about making work satisfying and efficient is more important than ever.

In this episode of Work for Humans Podcast, Dart Lindsley and FOUNT’s Co-founder and CEO, Christophe Martel not only talks but also explores the essence of what makes or breaks the modern work environment.

This conversation challenges the conventional HR focus on people as the problem and instead shifts the narrative towards the systems that shape their work experience.

“It’s a jarring thing to say to an HR executive, what we’re solving for right now is not a people problem. We’re solving for a system problem, work environment problem. In HR, it’s great to be super focused on people but actually, why don’t we let go of that a little bit and try to understand the environment in which we put them and try to reduce the hill that they have to climb, when they work.”

The FOUNT’s mission is to measure and mitigate work friction through a data-driven approach. By collecting and analyzing first-hand employee experiences, FOUNT identifies the specific touchpoints and moments that contribute to work friction. This granular insight enables organizations to implement targeted interventions, streamlining processes, and removing unnecessary hurdles that employees encounter in their daily tasks.

You can listen to the full episode on Spotify. A transcript from the episode appears below.

Transcript

CM:

It’s a jarring thing to say to an HR executive, what we’re solving for right now is not a people problem. We’re solving for a system problem, work environment problem. And it was Edwards Deming, who said, put two perfectly great employee in a bad system, and the system will win every time is exactly that. In HR, it’s great to be super focused on people but actually, why don’t we let go of that a little bit and try to understand the environment in which we put them and try to reduce the hill that they have to climb, when they work. That’s very similar to actually what a good customer experience organizations have done, which is iteratively remove friction and effort for customers by getting to know more and more what their first-person experiences.

DL:  

Welcome to the Work for Humans Podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. According to Gartner research work friction costs employees almost two hours of work a day. For a company with 10,000 employees that translates to a staggering loss of $78 million a year. Workplace friction costs companies time and money, but it’s also one of the most severe design flaws in the experience of work. It makes employees feel angry, disrespected, and hopeless. Our guest today Christophe Martel spent decades in leadership roles in customer facing functions across four continents. But when he became the Chief People Officer at CEB he was shocked to learn that HR lacks the kind of tools that are available to even the most primitive customer experience teams, and especially tools to research employee experience with enough detail to have any hope of identifying real solutions. Christophe is president and co-founder of TI people, a consulting firm dedicated to improving employee experience. He’s also the co-founder and CEO of FOUNT, a software startup with a mission to measure and mitigate work friction. In this episode, Christophe and I talk about how his career led him to co-found FOUNT, the data driven model behind his work, and how to measure first person experiences to solve large scale business problems. We also discussed the types of work friction, and their impact, the difference between work friction and organizational friction, who’s responsible for the most important employee experiences and other topics. If you enjoy this episode, of course, be sure to subscribe, wherever you listen to podcasts, to show your support. And now I bring you my conversation with Christophe Martel. Christophe Martel, welcome to work for humans.

CM:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

DL:  

On this show, we often move into the highly theoretical. Today, we’re going to be talking about a very practical approach, I believe, to solving the challenge of work experience. And we’re going to be talking to you about FOUNT. And so, if you could tell the audience what FOUNT is and how you arrived at it. 

CM:

So, my background is mostly as a business leader for most of my career. I’m originally French, as a business leader in France then moved to Asia, where I spent seven years to the US and visited different aspects of sales, marketing and business leadership, most recently, prior to founding FOUNT with a company called CEB, the Corporate Executive Board, based out of Washington, DC, where I spent 15 years most of which was spent in the EMEA region, building the business there, and to a pretty significant business. And where the question of work experience was kind of critical to the success of business, as you know, in Europe, when people get upset, they go on strike faster than you can say experience is, so it was always an important lever to the health of the business. And with that ambiguity of whether was me as a leadership team as a business team to own it, or to HR centrally or locally and what were the different roles played by everyone, and eventually actually switched gears and moved to the HR team and became CHRO for the company moved back to Washington DC, which is where I’m now based, and kind of had a completely different lens on this question of the experience of work for employees, and found it also very difficult to crack from the HR lens for similar reasons, which is who really owns what, in that complex web of things that happen and life with individual at work. So, it was kind of a frustrating path from that perspective of trying to solve that problem from a business side, making a little bit of inroads, but more anecdotal than anything, same thing on the HR side, and felt that that was the problem worth solving. And there’s nothing like data to bring two sides of the table together on one common truth, and essentially created a data model and an approach that is entirely human centered, to reflect the experience of people at work with a great amount of focus on the friction that they experience during work.

DL: 

We’re going to get into that data model, because I’m always very interested in data models and what they tell us about how we think about the world. But FOUNT is first and foremost, a discovery tool for experience in a company. Is that an accurate statement?

CM: 

That’s good, discovery research, friction finder, the problem for addressing work friction and experience issues in a big company, is that these issues are invisible to the center. So, the workers that are doing the work, know these issues really well. They know when friction happens, and they know what causes it. And they know how much friction it causes. But by the time it gets to the top of the house, most of that story gets garbled in any way is not quantified. And when you can’t quantify things in, in a big matrix company, no one is able to act to measure progress and to know that they’re solving the right things. So, FOUNT is a platform that essentially eliminates all this. And you could call it a discovery research tool. From our perspective, it’s actually that plus, essentially, a closed loop environment where people can understand what gets in the way of employees, they now quantify what’s most important, what’s most painful, kind of pain point discoverer if you will, and go take action on it. And then measure the impact of that action on the back end.

DL:  

You’ve said friction a couple of times, it’s a key idea in your work, what is it? And why does it matter?

CM:  

They’re going to, I’d start with the end. Why does it matter is because actually, Gartner did a piece of research showing that it costs two hours of work per day per worker, on average. So, some is more, some is less. But that’s a huge amount, right? That’s 25% of someone’s working time spent working around work friction. And I’ve been in the workforce for long enough that I’ve experienced that myself, I think everyone we talked to has their own personal experience of what it is. And it’s essentially, in layman’s terms, the stuff that gets in my way, and that shouldn’t when I’m trying to do my work or when I’m trying to do the things I need to do when at work. Now there’s a more refined definition, which is that work friction is the energy that an employee expands to overcome resistance that they feel disrupts their pursuit of a goal. So, everyone is trying to do stuff at work. And, of course, many things get in the way. But some of these things are acceptable from the point of view of workers. So, for example, an irate customer is not really the company’s fault, but more their customers irate nature. However, making it complex for me to solve a customer problem when that’s my job to do. And you making me expand way too much energy with seven different screens, eight different databases, let him said that doesn’t work and so on so forth. That is when employees blame the company and feel terrible about the work they’re doing.

DL:  

Yeah, for a while now I’ve had an two by two in my head. One axis is how much effort and then the other axis is, how stupid is this effort that I’m having to expend, and people know when it’s stupid effort. And they know when it’s so stupid that it’s disrespectful. 

CM:

Indeed.

DL:  

I want to part out a couple of these different things. What are the kinds of friction?

CM: 

Friction is essentially anything that gets in my way. For a human, it’s like, this morning, I tried to make coffee and the water doesn’t come through that gets in my way. Is that work friction? no, it’s life friction and one of these things that happens. Work friction is what gets in my way at work. But it’s the part of what gets in my way up work that I feel, shouldn’t get in my way at work, right. So, there’s a component of personal expectations of how my experience should be when I am at work, and I’m trying to do what I’m trying to do, whether it’s getting paid, or solving a customer problem, you should make that as easy as possible for me. And in a way, it’s very similar to the notion of customer effort in the customer world where, if I’m dealing with my phone company, or with the pizza around the corner, and I’m trying to get a pizza delivered, there’s certain expectation I have of how much effort is going to take me. And if you go beyond that, and you make it really difficult for me to get my pizza or really difficult for me to change my contract, then I’m going to resent you as a provider. And that’s very much the same in the context where an individual essentially buys work from, buys a job from their employer, and also buys a set of services that include learning stuff, and growing my career and all these things. And I kind of expect that all of these things are going to work without undue effort on my part. So, I think it’s essentially this notion of wasted effort, wasted time, on the part of an individual that feels that their time and their energy is precious.

DL: 

What’s the difference between work friction, and organizational friction?

CM:  

That’s the other part of the question, which is really a matter of perspective. So, who is talking, workers actually do not see organizational friction, workers only see what they see, as part of their experience. Now, they, of course, can conceptualize organizational friction. But that’s not typically what they live. The leadership teams and people who organize the work are the ones who look at things in terms of organizational friction. And from their perspective, it’s really a matter of whether processes seem to work. And if the gears that power the organization seem to be running as smoothly as possible. So, you can actually have a highly functional organization with very little friction, organizationally, where work friction is really high, simply because processes work well. But when you put them all together on the plate of an individual, who is essentially the user of all these processes at once, that individual may feel a terrible amount of friction, and having to deal with inconsistencies between these things. 

DL:

I have an analogy for that. So you know that I’ve spent a lot of my life doing process improvement, leading process improvement teams, among other teams, when you look at throughput, and you look at, for instance, the throughput of a highway, and you measure it from the outside and you say, look, I’m trying to optimize the throughput of this highway, it doesn’t matter to throughput, whether the cars are really close together and moving slowly, or whether they’re really far apart and moving fast. You’ll get as many cars passing a particular point in the highway at the same time, but the experience of those in the cars is going to be radically different. 

CM:  

That’s a great analogy. I’m fond of that. Very good.

DL: 

I’ve seen this, where a fantastic customer, external customer experience has been created at the cost of incredible human heroics, and waste, not heroics. Because sometimes it’s heroics. But oftentimes, it’s just drudgery to make that customer experience happen. And it’s particularly bad. I’ve seen it happen where everybody doing these tedious tasks are highly educated. And they’re like, this is not what I got educated for, you know, to do these tasks. So, I very much understand now that the difference between the two, there’s a key phrase in there though, which is that it’s energy and employee expense, to overcome resistance they feel disrupts in the field is really important. It’s a first-person experience of the work, their pursuit of a goal.

CM:

Yup.

DL:

What are the goals that are acceptable in that definition?

CM:  

Good question. They’re the goals that are acceptable to the employee. So again, depending on who you’re talking to, and ask, let’s say the CEO of an organization, what are the goals of your talents segment X, a role X, and what’s going to come back is usually whatever goals are associated to their job description, and their performance metrics. And the thing is that those goals are actually organizational goals. They’re not necessarily the human goals. Now, the two may coincide at times, right? So, for example, we approached this question with the assumption that humans at work, for the most part, are all trying to do their best. So, take a salesperson, give them a goal, and they’re going to try their hardest to go and hit that goal. So that’s the case where the organizational goal, which is I want to go and close this many new customers, and the individual goal meet. But then there’s a bunch of other goals that are completely invisible to the organization. So, for example, I want you to come to the office because it’s good for the company. And, yeah, if you go and spend an hour and a half, in the highway that you were talking about earlier, where your experience is one of an hour and a half of frustration on your way to work. That’s the human goal, which is I’m trying to go to work so I can get my work done. But this is very painful, I’m actually now wasting an hour and a half of my life, producing nothing, and not producing anything meaningful for the organization. So, in other words, it’s a net zero experience that is completely invisible to the organization. So, what we see is that organizational goals are typically aligned with silos that produce the processes that are supposed to support connected things, right. So, for example, the goal of a talent organization is to try and help people learn and grow their skills. Very rarely do we see those organizations having goals that are aligned with the real goal that an individual has, which is, I actually want to learn the stuff I want to learn so that I can go and get the job I want to get, so that I can go and move to the part of the organization that I want to move to, and so on so forth, which are completely absent from whatever learning focus the L&D organization may have. And so, where human goals sit, is that the level of altitude that tend to be invisible to organization, and what’s driving them is a really important question behind the whole experience slash friction aspect. And whenever one gets in the way of those goals, that is when you’re creating friction that people resent. 

DL: 

There’s a couple of things in there. One is, whenever I see companies trying to optimize experience, one of the things they want to do is they want to say all people want the same thing. And what they’d like to do, and there are lots of books on this, which is I’d like to boil it down to people want three things, autonomy, mastery, purpose, something like that. And everybody wants them the same. And it’s an attempt to turn what people want into a kind of formula, which is that if I can input autonomy, mastery and purpose, then I’m going to get output of productivity, the way you’ve defined friction, is it can be quite personal and quite individual. And there might be a lot of diversity in what different people experiences friction. 

CM:

Indeed, as we know, experience is a highly personal thing. My experience is different from yours always. And that’s the beauty of humans, right? We’re all different. And as such, our experiences are going to be different, our perspectives are going to vary ever so subtly, and sometimes drastically, that’s will make our lived experience different. So that’s kind of a starting point. And friction is a little bit the pain aspect of the experience. That would be another way to look at it is what is it in your experience that’s painful, and that if you could do away with it and be happy. So as such, it is an individual thing. Now, what’s really interesting about that, is that it transpires in our data. So, we were talking about commuting earlier, during the whole continuing tension between return to work and not. When you look at the commuting activity for individuals the moment of going to work, you find that between like on the cusp of Boomer or Gen X, whatever it is, commuting is just fine, because we kind of learn to live with it a while ago, for Gen Z, my son commuting is ridiculous. Why would I want to waste my time in this way? And as you see that in the data with very stark score differences between demographics on who entered answers the question that was expensive commute. And that is true not only with things like commuting, but also with a tolerance for friction during the work. So, in other words, tolerance for digital things not working. For Gen Z, very low for not being able to find information as quickly as I could find it on TikTok, same thing, and I understand why in this big bank, it’s so complicated to go and find the most basic thing. And that’s a real issue because the gap between what leadership sees, and leadership tends to be more my generation or a little bit younger, versus what workers expect, which are in the Gen Z category at an increasingly large rate, that gap is becoming larger between the beliefs of leaders and what we see people expect on the frontline. One of the ways that we bridge that gap is through data, the moment where you show leaders how much expectations are being on that, at the very minute level of the interaction level by the company, then you see real action taking place, because no one wants to make promises that they can keep. 

DL:

Who owns the sites of friction?

CM:

Good question. So, there is one aspect of stuff that gets in my way that shouldn’t. But it’s actually a very small aspect, which is interpersonal friction with my manager. And when I say it’s small, it’s small, frequency wise, in terms of how often that seems to be a problem based on our data. But when it happens, it’s a real problem. So, if you have a manager that has a relationship issue with a worker, then that’s a very bad situation. And that’s the center of all friction almost for that little system. But for the most part, we see data showing that people find their managers useful in most cases, and not generating too much friction. What we see generating friction are things like sets of processes that don’t align with each other, and even more sets of tools, processes, and cross functional team rules, if you will. So, these systems where you have several roles that are supposed to work together, and where the role alignment and rules of engagement between teams is not very functional. That is where you see a massive amount of friction, waste, and all kinds of nefarious effects. So, who owns that, that’s people who design processes, who design policies, who design jobs and teams, workflows. And so, it’s a combination of operations leaders, HR leaders, IT leaders, business leaders, who are all combining essentially, to create this work environment that people perform.

DL:

Now you make in one of the white papers that I read a very important distinction, I think between there are HR owned processes that are HR executed and then there are HR owned processes that are business executed and then there are business owned processes that are business executed. And those business own processes are things like customer support, for instance, where we’re going to have a call center, and HR doesn’t own those processes, but it has an enormous effect upon the experience of the employees. And so how ready are HR organizations, in your experience, to pick up the ownership or influence the quality of the experience in business owned processes? And what proportion of experiences that anyway? Is it the majority of experience? And if not HR, then who?

CM:  

So, HR readiness? Let’s start with a fraction of the question, how ready is HR to accept or agree that employees are their customers? Right? Because that’s kind of the prerequisite to say, oh, I probably would behoove me to reduce friction for you. I would say that at a theoretical level, let’s say 50% ready, depending on the organizations at a practical level, I would say that it’s true for digital HR leaders, so people that own platforms that deliver digital services, because the friction is contained into the digital realm. And there’s a natural playground to go and try to make things easier. And definitely lots of talks about it. Now, when it comes to higher order, HR experiences, like for example, I want career mobility at this company, because you promised it to me, that is where HR starts losing its ownership, as you described earlier, because my career mobility is, of course, shaped by HR policies and HR career frameworks and HR platforms, like if your skill platforms and things of that nature is very, very shaped by the business to and by the business, in particular by people’s managers, and how their coaching their team members on their career path and what they could do next, and where they’re headed, and so on, so forth. And actually, the design of all that maybe on the HR side, but the delivery of it is really mostly on the business side. And for all the important conversations that also include interviewing for an internal role with a hiring manager. These are all outside of the control of HR. So that’s where the model starts to break of HR owns, all HR experiences actually owns what I would call HR direct, or HR services experienced that can be digitized, service now things, etc., workday things. But outside of that realm, that model starts to break. And now when you go into the business, and then the frontline, where HR has more of a consultative role, actually to the business to organize things like, Okay, how are we going to organize our shift policy and this particular call center, all right, and that’s not something you can do centrally, it needs to be done locally, in partnership with the business leaders, with operations, leaders, and so on, so forth. So, HR still has a role there. But the design is much more business driven than HR driven. So, in terms of appetite, and ambition, for HR, that level, one thing, I think is probably maybe up to 70% rating, when you go to those level two experiences that are about growth and learning and things that are higher order and more complex experiences, where it’s really a continuum of experiences between HR and managers, and senior leaders, and everyone plays a role. That’s more, I would say, 30-40% of understanding of, yeah, we can still play a role there. And then when you go to the business level, I think that’s scenario where we see HR being good counsel, but pulling back in terms of, okay, let’s own this. Now, what we do see in some organizations, very few of them, but in some is that there is a team that may be an HR or outside of HR, but it actually doesn’t seem to matter as much. That is an employee experience team that kind of declares not necessarily the ownership of all experiences, because that would mean that they’re really the executive committee and CEO of the company, but declare that they want to orchestrate across these multiple silos that we’ve talked about HR, IT Operations, Business, etc. They want to orchestrate experiences to make sure that the organization can provide consistently good experiences to everyone, which to your point earlier, doesn’t mean the same to everyone. But it means that the level of friction that is delivered by the company to its employees, is consistently acceptable for the various personas that operate in there. So, these are very ambitious organizations, there are a few of them, and actually quite successful. And data is key to be able to do that. Because to pull apart such a complex landscape. You can’t do it without data.

DL:

And do you find that there are also companies that are ready to think about the experience of employees in the business owned experiences, where it’s the business side of the house, that’s saying, hey, we want you to come in and help us to understand what’s going on here.

CM:

We work with organizations that are approached this big landscape that I described it kind of like level one, level two, level three, some approach it from the pure HR angle and said, you know what, I’m going to make HR the best HR in the world, because I’m going to monitor the quality of design and delivery of all my HR products and services to all employees. I’m going to optimize it constantly and keep improving. And that’s great. Now what you’re missing there to your earlier question on where are most experiences happening? What you’re missing there is that when you do that, I remember what feedback we had from one employee was how often do you interact with HR. And they said, “Well as low as possible”, because people spend most of their time trying to do their job. So, the lion’s share of experience is in the day-to-day work. However, when HR own experiences go wrong, people get very upset. And that is when it’s things that have to do with pay with being able to take a break with things that are just vital for people’s survival. So, it’s hard to put an important scale on these things. I would say that HR experience, my own experiences are less frequent, although most individuals are thinking about their career path and their comp and their thing on almost daily basis, even fleetingly, right, like, do I really want to continue doing this? Or do I want to do something different? And by the way, what could I do to get paid more? So, this is all a bit of a mixed universe, which makes it why it’s so complex to unpack. But in general, people spend more time just doing their job. So just doing HR stuff, you’re leaving out a huge potential cause of dissatisfaction for employees, which is, you asked me to do a job and you make it difficult for me. So, you asked me to serve a customer and solve their problem. And neither my systems, nor my tools, nor of my knowledge base, nor my lines of support are helping me solve that problem. I look like a fool to the customer, I deliver a poor customer experience, I’m not doing my job well. And that can is a huge trigger of burnout, disengagement, and just low productivity. That’s the reason why we see some companies where HR is more reluctant to approach the problem in that nontraditional way, if you will, to start with the business, where you have business leaders where I have an attrition problem, or I have a productivity problem, like two hours of work a day, that’s a lot of money for 10,000 employees is something like $20-$30 million, right? So that’s cash to buy this, like good to recover it, you give it to your CFO as a Christmas present. And we see operations leaders, CX leaders that are eager to deliver great customer experience but realize it can’t go at the expense of employees, having great appetite to drive that even if HR doesn’t necessarily want to partake. 

DL: 

I think that the CX organizations, in particular, have an awareness of it. Because the whole service design industry has really good data that shows that the experience of a customer is closely related and correlated with the experience of the person providing the service. And so that’s been in that world for a while. And I can see why leaders of those organizations would understand the importance of that correlation. And I want to talk about the model that you use, and in particular, the use of the word “moments” and I will tell you in advance that I have often in my head disparaged the idea of moments that matter.

CM:

That’s totally.

DL:

Okay, and yet you use the word moments. So, let’s talk about why you’ve disparaged them, and how you use them.

CM:

Moments are essentially things that people do that help them reach their goals. Right. So, in other words, sometimes it’s an activity, sometimes it’s a set of activities. And it’s a loose definition, because it’s actually a zoomable definition. Right. So, you could say, going on parental leave as a moment, taking leave as a moment. Yeah. Actually, when you dive into it, it’s well, really preparing to go is a very different moment than being on parental leave, is very different from coming back. So, there’s now three moments, right, and you can actually break it down. As long as you want to zoom into the experience into smaller and smaller moments that are essentially, I’m trying to do something, right. So, it could be if you’re to micromanage the experience of new hires, you could say, okay, parking your car on the first day, parking your car in the garage is a moment. And okay, you interact with a bunch of stuff in there, the parking attendant ticket, you get refused, because you don’t have your badge yet, that’s a moment, then finding the reception because it’s not obvious from the parking lot. So, these can be just broken down as long as you want. But moments are essentially activities or sets of activities that people undertake in pursuit of a goal. Now, why do we disparage the term moments that matter? For the reason that you decided at the beginning, which is that different moments matter to different people? And so, the notion of moments that matter seems to suggest that there are some moments that matter to everyone which on average I think is true, but is sending a false narrative out into the airwaves of, well, that’s kind of like really like a process, isn’t it? Right. So, it’s like a thing that kind of works for everyone and we can cookie cutter out. But what you realize this that, so, example of commuting, commuting is a moment and people take it as a work moment, by the way, because the goal is not to go to the beach, the goal is to go to work. So, I’m doing this in service of my work, and I’m wasting my time doing it. Well, Gen Z would say 25% satisfaction with that moment, Gen X would say 25% because I’ve learned to kind of listen to something in my car, right, like whatever. And so that’s an example of, it doesn’t really matter to this part of the population and actually really matters to those. So, the big picture item that says these moments matter for everyone ended up being wrong for at least parts of the population. And that is true for HR moments. It’s also true for work moments, right? So, we see that some work moments are very painful for certain combinations of gender, race, tenure, for example, versus others. And these variations are drastic, like they literally scores single to double, depending on the demographics. So that’s why the big, blended view at the enterprise level of this matters a lot to everyone is misleading. From a service design perspective, you actually have to understand who you’re designing for. 

DL:

I agree with that, I’ll tell you why I’ve looked down on moments that matter is because almost always seen them. That idea brought in by consultants who are saying that the most important moments in the company for HR or HR moments, and that they translate that into a digital strategy, which is we’re going to sell you a lot of consulting dollars to solve your systems experience. And in my research, nobody’s ever quit their job because their HR Benefits Portal was confusing. I mean, maybe I’m wrong about that.

CM:

That’s what our data shows, too. 

DL:

Yeah, people quit. And they quit for a lot of reasons. And I’ve never quite found the expert on quitting. Maybe you’re the expert on quitting. But it’s often because of look, my hourly experience of doing my job sucks.

CM:

We did recently, some work with a really large organization and the healthcare industry, with call center agents, where you see this universe of moments that includes work moments, like solving a complex customer issue, for example. And God knows that health care system in the US is complex. And so that’s a really hard thing to do, in terms of the importance of that moment. So, the degree of impact it has on my intent to stay at the company. So that’s has to do with quitting, that importance is actually in exactly the same ballpark. As another moment, that’s actually an HR moment, which is figuring out my career at the company. What was very interesting is that these two moments are, one of them is clearly business driven, which is essentially, the support lines for this newly hired agent are not really working to help them solve complex customer problems. And therefore, they feel terribly exposed, because they’re new hires than the first six-nine months. And I really can’t do this job because I’m trying to solve a problem, and I can’t, so I’m letting the customer down. And I don’t want to do that every day. So maybe goodbye. And at the same time, they were promised a great career opportunity at this big companies. And it turns out that no leader was talking to them about their career opportunities, because they were new, and they were not supposed to move. And now you have two things happening one, this is a job that has meaning because you’re going to help people who need health care, and so you’re going to help them that promise now is not being met. Because you asked me to do it. I’m doing my best, but you don’t help me. And then that’s on you company. And at the same time, you tell me that I’m going to have great career opportunities, but no one tells me about it. No one talks to me about it. I’ve been here for six months; I still don’t know where I’m going to go next. I don’t know if I want to keep doing this work, by the way, because of the other moment. So, you now have a combination of things that say you know what? It’s like almost like stereo audio, you know, it’s like, I’m hearing the full picture that maybe I’m not made for this job or for this company.

DL:

Another way to say that is, I don’t like where I am, and I don’t see a way out. And I think there’s something at the core of it, which is that there was a promise made, and there’s a betrayal of that promise.

CM:

An expectation issue. 

DL:

 Yeah. And why I don’t call it quite an expectation, simple expectation thing is that betrayal is much more burning than, oh, I thought I was going to get a cheeseburger, and I didn’t get any cheese or something. Right? That’s not a betrayal. That’s an accident.

CM:

I agree. No, it’s a really good point, there is a birth of my pizza example. Like, if the pizza is not as good as advertised, I won’t feel like a betrayal. However, the situation I just described feels like that. Yeah. And that’s kind of one of the issues that we see with high performing HR departments, actually, that are experts at crafting exceptionally good-looking EVPs that get announced to candidates. And that include things like career mobility, and growth and meaningful work and things that they resonate with candidates. And then when these candidates come in, that’s where that betrayal potentially happens if these things are not delivered.

DL:

What I like to do is, I’d like to explore the arc of an engagement. And I’d like to explore the arc of that engagement through the data model, because I think that the data model is really interesting. And I’m just going to say the way I think of it right now, and you can help me clarify it, which is that first of all, there are moments, and you must come in, you must decide on the scope of the moments that are going to be a part of your engagement, then you must have a breakdown of those moments. And then you get an understanding of what I’m guessing here how you do this, and then you can tell me if I’m wrong. And then you do an assessment of the friction in those moments. And then you go to what are the sources of that friction. Is that approximately the right arc?

CM:

Yes, I would rephrase this as not an engagement actually, because it’s actually a platform that does that. So, the initial onboarding involves something like that, because it’s more of a learning opportunity for a customer of learning. Okay, so how to pick those moments, or how to build those that are missing to complete the picture, and so on, so forth. So, we have hundreds of these things in our library, if you will. And it’s an entire model of work that dives into all of the aspects that we’ve talked about. And that goes into roles-specific moments, right. So, for roles, like nurses, developers, some of the most difficult roles to retain those that suffer real productivity challenges, and so on, so forth. And essentially, what our customers do is to select the set of moments, the set of demographics and personas that they want to go and measure. And the first layer of analysis is about understanding, in which moments are these employees encountering the most friction. So when do they experience most friction, and which of those moments are most important to them with a control variable that is either intent to stay or NPS or any kind of way to represent their happiness at the company, if you will, and what we see on that two by two that has importance or a level of impact it has on my engagement, if you will, on my willingness to work here or recommend displays versus how much friction I encounter when I do this activity. What that allows companies to do is to prioritize their focus is one thing that I experienced with HR, as a CHRO and then with many organizations that we worked with is that HR tends to macro solve, and to do broadband solving, using sometimes very powerful tools and very broadband tools. Let’s put it this way. Things like yeah, let’s improve leadership for the leaders in this place, because that’s going to solve for some of the pain points, or let’s digitize everything that we can digitize like so some of the things you mentioned earlier. For us were actually much more about, you know, as you know, experiences and friction doesn’t happen at a macro level. For employees, it happens in the weeds. So, for us, it’s about getting down to the carpet, literally. So, the things that people are trying to do. And there’s a lot of these moments, right and so you can have I don’t know, like an array of 10,15 ,20,30 for a given role, and you can’t fix them all, they all have friction, by definition, nothing is ever perfect. So, the question is, which are the three that are really most painful for folks where there’s most friction, and also most important to them. So, once you know that, that allows you to go focus on those three and say, Let’s make those better, it will make people happier, and also most likely to make them much more productive.

DL:

Okay, so you figure out which moments, which personas, instead of an event, it’s you create the ability to measure those on an ongoing basis for friction. 

CM:

Yes, that’s right.

DL:

You identify the ones that are causing the most friction, which is, again, this is a first-person experience of the work, not a third person experience of the work, somebody’s looking down at it. And then your model, generally, is there an owner? Do you assign an owner to that moment?

CM:

When possible? Yes, with HR owned moments, you can find very natural owners. Right, so let’s say we talked about parental leave, there usually is a team that’s in charge of making that work of designing these things. And we have organizations actually, that have created a governance model that has journey owners, moment owners, and we’re going to talk a little bit later about touch points. So, where that’s kind of calibrated, which means that whatever data is collected, it gets into their workstation for them to take action on. Now in the business, you can find that ownership can be more diffused, because who owns the moment of solving a complex customer issue? While actually that’s like pretty much the entire operations team and leadership team and their business, because it’s really a system issue, right? And so, for those moments, ownership is harder. Now, what we do with those moments is to dive a click deeper, because moments are defining when people are experiencing friction. But the question is, now what causes it and that’s when touch points come into play, that are essentially digital, physical things. So, you know, it can be a piece of software, piece of hardware, like a headset, computer, can be processes, it can be people from other teams, it can be policies, is all touch points, things that I interact with when I’m carrying out this moment. And the question is that these things actually are there for a reason, they’re all supposed to facilitate that experience to support, right to make that moment possible. But that’s when reality hits, and where some of these resources that are supposed to support these moments, are not actually doing the job they’re supposed to do for whatever reason, whether it’s misalignment, dysfunction, too much complexity, whatever the story may be, what the platform does, is to quantify each one of these sources of friction to see what’s high friction, low friction in there, that is causing the moment to fail, basically right? the moment to be difficult.

DL:

And I would imagine that touchpoints are highly integrated with each other. So, you know, the system and the people.

CM:

Well, actually, they are, but what we find, you know, in larger organizations, there’s so much opportunity for these things to go wrong, that it just by themselves without any system around them. That you know, one of our customers, career mobility, when you ask HR is like no, no, we have like newsletters going to everyone to announce all the jobs that are now available in the region so that they you know, people get excited about these things. Well, it turns out that that went to spam. And by definition, you don’t know it goes to spam, because it’s just no one receives it. These are the kinds of things that happen constantly, they’re kind of the quality breaches that externally are very well tracked with customers, internally are not tracked.

DL:

That’s very encouraging, actually. I mean, it’s very encouraging to think that if we just had visibility into the true experience of this moment, there are some things that could just be fixed. 

CM:

Yes, exactly. And they often have an owner too, these touch points, right. So, there’s somebody who writes the newsletter, and they’re like, oh, my God, I didn’t realize that no one got it. Now, let me go and talk to it and we’ll figure it out. And you’re asked about HR readiness earlier. What we’ve seen for organizations that are adopting this way of working is that HR is actually very eager to go problem solve, provided that they have specific data, right? So, if you give the HR owner for the career framework, data tells them that new hires don’t understand it, they’re going to get after it. They want their products and services to be valued. They just don’t have data to tell them if it is. So that’s like a very first basic step, actually, to move the dial.

DL:

And so, the discovery of which touchpoints are having these effects. Is that, for instance, a sort of a ties and sprint, where you go in, you pull teams together, or are there other methods to find those issues?

CM:

The discovery of the touch point is really done by very simple interviews with a worker that is gearing up this given moment, often the teams we work with are themselves worker who use some of these products and services. And we can tell you, yeah, no, I interact with X, Y, and Z resources. And the beauty of the approach is that it’s not set and done, right. So, the platform is completely flexible in that you can add or remove touch points, you can essentially evolve your understanding of the ecosystem that your employees are working in, over time. So initially, yeah, maybe you didn’t map out the entire list of touch points, but that’s okay. Because as long as you get to the majority of them, and then you refine over time, you will get there, right. So that is done with as little invasion essentially as possible. Because a Kaizen thing tends to be whole, its whole schedule, etc., more simple half hour interview actually get there much more efficiently and accurately enough, knowing that we’re not looking for perfect, we’re looking for iterative. And that’s kind of the secret there is you can’t transform, solve all this stuff, you have to prioritize it. And, you know, essentially grind it, iterated over time. And then you see things moving really quickly.

DL:

So, the attraction of solving at large scale is that if I’m in the center, it’s something that I can scale to do. In other words, I can’t solve every little moment in the company from the center. And so, we looked for these sorts of area of effect spells that we can cast that are going to have the largest effect possible. So, you must need to enable fairly small parts of the company to improve themselves to make this work.

CM:

Very good. So, there is a and one of our most advanced customers has a pretty sophisticated governance structure for this data that essentially is managed at journey moment, touchpoint level, globally, regionally and locally, these owners we’re talking about are actually defined in that way. So global owners are always aware of what’s happening in their realm. Because innovation comes from there, right between different regions between different business units, some people solve problems in a way that’s super elegant, that will can be reused elsewhere. Others have a very local solve, because it’s about, I don’t know, the French way of being and it only works with the French, then that will just stay in France, because actually experience is a local sport. Right. So that is one of the issues that I remember, CEB with not a huge population, but 6000 global employees. And it was very hard to know, what were we delivering to whom, in all of these regions, right, in Australia, in Germany, in APAC, in the UK, everyone has different expectations, different betrayal filters, if you will. Right. And so, the question of localizing global experiences is very important. But it doesn’t mean that local can do whatever they want. So, there’s got to be a governance system for global to know, what is global, globally design and localized or whatever it’s called by the frontlines. And that data allows to the visibility and the sharing of both problem identification and solutions in that kind of structure.

DL:

I’ll tell you, one of the reasons why I’m so interested in this data model is that it’s a data model that essentially breaks down first-person experiences. So, my background, among other things is business architecture and business architecture is a very global view of what are called basic service functions. And so, a basic service function, all of these things are third-person views of things. And so, all you care about with a basic service function is the outputs. What are the inputs, what are the outputs, you have capabilities inside them, but the whole thing is from the center, you’re going to look at things from above from the sky, you’re going to count what comes in and out of them, and measure what comes in and out of these chunks of things, and you have a hierarchy. But that hierarchy is, of chunks of things from a third-person perspective. What you’ve done is you’ve created a hierarchy, that is a breakdown of first-person, things of what it’s like to be inside, what I would call a basic service function from the outside. And that’s why at the most granular level, in the most granular level of business architecture, what you have is capabilities, and what you have at the most granular level is touch points. Why are they touch points? Because they are actually the surface that a first-person experience is engaging with. That’s why they’re called touchpoints. And so, it’s a really different point of view. And yet, it’s very systematic.

CM:

Yes. First thing about this data model is that it’s actually not about people. And it’s a jarring thing to say to an HR executive, to say what we’re solving for right now is not a people problem. We’re solving for a system problem, and the environment or work environment problem, and ecosystem problem, whatever you call it. And it was Edwards Deming, who said that if you put two perfectly great employee in a bad system, and the system will win every time is exactly that. In HR, it’s great to be super focused on people but actually, why don’t we let go of that a little bit and try to understand the environment in which we put them and try to reduce the hill that they have to climb, when they work. And that’s a shift in perspective, that’s sometimes difficult for HR teams would have been rightfully so, you know, kind of steeped into the, it’s all about people, the will, the skill, and how we develop them and etc., etc. It’s always about doing something to them. Whereas here, what are we talking about is actually how about, we don’t do anything to them, we actually remove things from their path, to try to make it easier for them to do so it’s kind of like a less is more approach, which that is one thing that we see some of our customers note is it actually removes things from our list. Because we actually know, what are the most important things we need to solve? What are they precisely, then we can reduce our set of workstreams to just what we need to go solve the problems and then move on. So, there’s a something that’s very similar to actually what a good customer experience organizations have done, right, which is iteratively, remove friction and effort for customers, by getting to know more and more of what their first-person experience is, except in the world of work. It’s so much more complex, because the journeys and the moments are just infinite, right? People spend so much time at work doing so many various things, with a touch point universe that is much more complex than any customer interaction. Universe wouldn’t be.

DL: It’s an interesting problem. Because as a customer, my coffee shop, I’m going to walk in there, I’m going to get a cup of coffee. That’s my total touch point. That’s my total experience of that company.

CM:

Well, actually, the Starb…, I don’t mean to assign you to Starbucks.

DL:

Thank you, thank you for not for not identifying me. 

CM:

Exactly. But the coffee shop, the temperature, the speed of the service, whether they call you by your first name, because you ordered online like all of this actually are touch points, that the better ones actually optimize. Apple did that with Apple Store, actually, they really just thought through is not just going to fix my phone.

DL:

I agree with that. The only difference I want to make is that for me, that’s five minutes of my day for somebody working inside the coffee shop. 

CM:

Oh, God, yes.

DL:

That’s like eight hours of their day. And so, the surface that I’m interacting with, although it’s quite complex, you’re right in terms of all the things that add up to that moment. I think all the touch points that add up to that moment. If I’m inside the company delivering that service, it’s much more of my life.

CM:

And by the way, it’s very possible that the friction that we’ve taken away from you, getting your coffee at just the right temperature etc. is now transferred to me barista because my job has become so much more complex and no one actually inside the company knows that that friction is now mine. And that creates this engagement, frustration, and so on so forth.

DL: 

Right? Because we’re not measuring it, all we’re measuring is. 

CM:

Exactly.

DL:

The Net Promoter Score of the.

CM:

Or the trailing indicator, basically, right? So.

DL:

Of me? the person drinking the coffee.

CM:

You’re also measuring maybe an NPS level score of employees, right to see how happy they are. But that is a trailing indicator of the friction that we just talked about.

DL:

Ah yeah, that’s really right. It’s fascinating. I have several closing questions that I always ask, but I’m going to ask them in reverse order, in your case, which is I’m going to ask you, what does your job cost you? So normally, what I ask is, what do you hire your job to do for you? And I asked that first. But I’m going to start with the cost question, because it’s so close to friction. So, what does your work cost you?

CM:

It costs me my sleepless hours, let’s put it this way. We’re a small company, tackling an enormous business problem, two hours a day per worker at the scale of the US economy, it’s, I don’t even want to calculate it. And the other side of that problem is that there are many employees that are more miserable at work than they need to be. In large companies, this is especially true, and that is actually completely unintentional on the part of companies. And so that feels like a real silly problem to have that should be solved. So, the cost is worth spending it. But yeah, what it’s costing is a bit of obsession on it, right. And the difficulty to think outside of that realm that is already gigantic, and that I’m very passionate about. So, it’s taken a toll on my personal time, family time, and all kinds of things that go with the mission to build a business like that.

DL:

The way we’re talking about it today, it’s two hours a day of betrayal, and disrespect. In many cases, the feeling of betrayal and disrespect and the feeling of waste of life, a big chunk of my day is going to stuff that on my two by two is stupid. And that’s my life that I’m spending. 

CM:

That’s right. It’s actually the first data point that came out of our researchers. That is the first thing people name as “Why do you feel bad about work friction?”, is it wastes my time. And it’s essentially, actually reading them in sequence, it wastes my time, makes it harder for me to do a good job, it’s disrespectful and it makes things harder for customers. And in none of these things. These are the four top rank, none of these things is impacting my, the cash I take home. It’s all about how I spend my life, basically. So, you’re absolutely right, that that’s the most precious thing we have.

DL:

So, you kind of answered the question of what you hire your job to do for you and that, but I’m still going to ask it.

CM:

I’m hiring it to fulfill me, basically, there is something about doing the job that you feel that you want to do. That’s a real luxury in a way that I’m very thankful for to say, I want to crack this code. And it also gets to be my job. So that’s a pretty great hire on my part, I think. Because I don’t feel that I’m wasting my time. With all the difficulties and challenges that go with building a business like this. It doesn’t feel like a waste of time or waste of life. 

DL:

And I think there’s two things that I heard and fulfilling for you. One is, it’s fixing something in the world that’s out of place. It’s making a difference. It’s helping people two hours a day, times the number of people working. And it’s a puzzle to solve. You said that a little bit, which is that cracking this code?

CM:

Yeah, that’s what it is, it’s a pretty big one to solve. And by the way, we co-created the solution with a bunch of big companies. So, we didn’t just make it up. But feels like we’re cracking it now what the what remains to be cracked, as many of the questions you asked, actually, is how to have companies realize that it’s possible. One thing we hear often is, well, yeah, I have 30% efficient in the front line, but as part of my business plan, and anyway, I can’t really reduce it because everything we tried to do about it has not worked. So, there’s kind of that almost acceptance of work friction as being I don’t know, it’s like having a bear sitting on your couch every night eating all the cookies. And it’s been there forever. So fine, just leave them be and both from an attrition and a productivity perspective, it’s actually a huge business opportunity that some companies are seeing and diving into, but many others are like, I don’t know, it’s kind of part of the furniture.

DL:

It’s a really important topic in general on this show, which we often come back to, which is, first of all mental models, and the mental models that people are holding of the company. A second one, though, is agency, which is that everybody in the stack that you were describing in your breakdown, needs to feel that they have the freedom to solve the problems that are there.

CM:

Yes

DL:

Those two things are probably related, which is that I have a mental model in which I have accepted the bear on the couch eating the cookies. And in fact, we’re burying in cookies on the couch company. That’s what we do. I don’t know exactly how to say that. But how do you take somebody and say, No, you’re a hunter.

CM:

That’s right. And then at least you know, you have a broom, like use it to get the bear out. One thing that we’ve seen, and I mentioned this earlier, is that HR teams, in junior or senior levels, the moment where they see very clear data about how the stuff that they built is not doing the job that is supposed to do with a percentage score, they go fix it, they will find a way. And actually, that’s where there’s a lot of hope through this is that in the business, they find a way because there’s business reasons to do so. And they move pretty fast. But even in HR, the nature is like, I actually got this job in HR to go and help people, if the thing I created is not really helping them, because the data tells me so I’m going to go make it better. And to get competitive actually, like in a good way, data is the wake her up or to these kinds of things. I’ll tell you one thing that comes to mind talking about this, this bear on the couch thing, everyone hates the bear, actually, CEOs, executive committees, CHROs, they all don’t want to bury it in the cookies. And neither do employees, it’s rare to find actually a ground that is so common on if I could recover these two hours in my day to do things that I want to do. And maybe I keep one hour to go and do bicycling or visiting bears at the zoo or whatever. And the other hour, the CFO takes it, or whatever the story may be, there’s really a shared benefit for employees, and for leadership teams. And in places where we’ve done some of this work, you actually see employees leaning in because they can feel that actually you’re trying to make things better for me, which is often a bit of a challenge of, well, I give feedback to everyone, but nothing gets ever gets done. Touch points and things like that are things that you can take action on and make better, and people can see them move. So, what we’re seeing is a little bit of a realization for companies that number one, it is possible to tackle these things. It’s not a once and done and to your point, digitizing the entire HR department is not going to really solve the employee experience problem. But actually, continuous improvement of these moments, of these touch points with increasing coverage of that landscape of experiences that go from basic HR things all the way to day-to-day work. And there are companies that are actually now embarking on this because they can see the path, even though it may take years to get there.

DL: And those companies generally have as a top line objective, something related to employee experience?

CM:

Yes. And there’s also, you know, a combination of things. It’s a, we kind of believe that, you know, happy employees’ equal better company, more productivity, and so on and so forth. So, there’s that I guess is usually there, there’s a clear top line thing to say, Aren’t and we hear this from operations leaders, like it’s so complex to work here, we have people doing nonsense work, we lose three FTE out of 10 with managing wind data, it’s kind of so that drives to simplification actually, is a very concomitant access for leadership teams. That is bottom line impacting and then there’s the CX crowd that knows that any customer facing team that does frowny face is basically kind of, you know, it’s contagious, right? And so is the smiley one. So, it’s a combination of things that can triggers these kinds of realization that then, you know, move people forward.

DL:

Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today. Where can people learn more about you and more about FOUNT?

CM:

Learn about me on LinkedIn, Christophe Martel, I’m CEO of FOUNT and FOUNT website is getfount.com. Go take a look. Peruse the white papers. Some of them are a bit dense but just thank you so much for listening.

DL:

I don’t think the white papers are dense, very clearly written. I actually sent a message on LinkedIn to the person who wrote them. And I said these were really good.

CM:

Thank you for doing that. She is an excellent researcher.

DL:

Yes, and an excellent writer. So, thank you very much. It’s been great, great talking to you.

CM:

Thank you, Dart, it was a pleasure.

About Work for Humans Podcast

The Work for Humans Podcast discusses why and how we should use design principles to improve work experience. This podcast is hosted by Dart Lindsley. He has held HR leadership roles at companies world-renowned for their talent practices. He is currently head of Global Process Excellence for People Operations at Google and before joining Google led the Human Resources Transformation Planning and Analysis organization for Cisco Systems.

To learn more about work friction, download our latest whitepaper.

There’s a good chance you’re experimenting with generative AI right now. You might even be testing a few tools at once: a support assistant for call center agents, a coding copilot for software devs, and so on.

Each experiment has the potential to help your team work faster and smarter, saving you money in the process. But a staggering 80 percent of AI experiments fail – and the cost of error can be disastrous for your workers and your bottom line.

In this piece, we’ll break down this error cost to understand where it comes from, how it manifests, and how you can optimize each AI experiment for success.

The Source: AI Experiments That Create Work Friction

Like any new software, generative AI changes the way employees work – in good and bad ways.

In call centers, for instance, we’ve found that generative AI chatbots can be incredibly helpful for experienced agents. If a complex issue comes up on a support call, they can query the chatbot for help. The bot will return a few potential solutions, and the agent can choose the best option for the customer’s needs.

But new agents tend to have a harder time using generative AI. They might not have the knowhow to craft effective prompts. And they rarely have the experience to choose the best AI-generated solution. As a result, generative AI can become a stressor on already-stressful calls: new agents may agonize over support decisions and start to freeze up.

Experiences like this are a fixture of failed AI experiments. Even if the technology benefits some workers, it may not help – and could actively hurt – others. In other words, generative AI can create work friction. In the next section, we’ll explain how that translates to error cost. 

The Cost: Wasted Work, Wasted Money, and Employee Attrition

High-friction AI experiments tend to cost organizations in a few important ways.

Consider the call center example: a new agent might use generative AI to help solve a complex customer problem. But maybe their initial prompt isn’t concrete enough to return a useful set of support options. So they waste time editing their query. And they waste more time stressing over the best solution.

Apart from extending the call itself, all that wasted time equals lost productivity that snowballs as the day goes on. But the agent is still under pressure to hit their call quota. 

Together with other stressors (angry callers, absent managers, etc.), the added frustration of unhelpful AI might be enough to tank their job satisfaction. If they remain unsatisfied, they’ll likely start looking for a new job.

What does this mean for the organization? Wasted work, higher turnover, and a failed AI investment. And that’s just for one experiment. Without a strategy to keep generative AI from causing work friction, it’s easy to see how so many experiments flop – racking up huge costs in the process.

To Slash Your Error Cost, Uncover AI Work Friction with Data

The good news is that there is a way to boost the success of your generative AI experiments. The key is to continuously monitor AI’s impact on workers and tweak your technology or rollout to better meet their needs.  

With targeted surveys – aimed at a small sample of employees – you can quickly understand…

• How generative AI affects employees (i.e., if it creates or removes work friction).
• How generative AI experiences vary (e.g., among new vs. tenured workers, younger vs. older employees, etc.).
• Whether there are other factors affecting the AI user experience (like inadequate job training).

In the case of call center AI, maybe you learn that AI-generated support options are too complex for new employees. So you test a model that uses plain language and only offers a single recommendation per query.

Or perhaps you discover that the AI user experience becomes almost frictionless after a year on the job. So you limit regular AI use to more experienced employees and gradually onboard new hires to the tool at the nine-month mark.

No matter your approach, work friction data can help you adjust your AI roadmap in an evidence-based way to maximize the technology’s value. And if an experiment creates too much friction, you can pull the plug before the error cost skyrockets.

Experiment with Confidence

Generative AI experiments are expensive by default. To ensure that money is well spent, let work friction data guide your implementation. When you do, you’ll eliminate bad experiments more quickly and achieve productivity gains with successful experiments faster – with minimal impact on frontline workers. 

If you’re ready to gather the data you need to experiment with confidence, FOUNT can help. Let’s start a conversation.

In this episode of the Science of CX, Steve Pappas speaks with FOUNT’s Co-founder and CEO, Christophe Martel about the critical link between a seamless employee experience and overall business success, touching on the impact on retention, engagement, and customer experience.

Christophe shares his firsthand experiences with the friction that employees encounter in their day-to-day work lives. He talks about the critical issues surrounding work friction and presents valuable insights to help organizations enhance operations and productivity. His insights are shaping the conversation around the negative effects of unaddressed work friction and its profound consequences on business outcomes. Listen to the full episode and read the transcript below.

“It’s actually not about the employee. It’s not about making employees better. It’s about making the environment better… You want to make the environment easier to perform in.”

Listen to the episode:

Key Takeaways:

1. Work Friction is a Critical Issue: Christophe Martel highlights the pervasive issue of work friction, emphasizing its significant impact on both employee and customer experiences. He describes work friction as the invisible headwind that employees often face, leading to frustration, disengagement, and, ultimately, negative consequences for customer interactions. 

2. Employee Experience is a Shared Responsibility: Martel argues that work friction spans across various departments, including operations, finance, and leadership. All levels of the organization, from senior leaders to individual team members, play a role in creating an environment that minimizes work friction and promotes employee satisfaction.

3. Data-Driven Approach to Work Friction: The importance of adopting a data-driven approach to identify and address work friction effectively. This approach allows organizations to prioritize efforts, focus on the most impactful areas, and collaboratively work towards resolving issues to improve both employee and customer experiences.

4. Leadership Awareness and Collaboration are Key: Christophe underscores the critical need for leaders to be aware of the work friction their employees face and to bridge the gap between leadership perceptions and employee experiences.

By recognizing the invisible headwind, adopting a shared responsibility approach, leveraging data-driven solutions, and fostering leadership awareness and collaboration, organizations can create environments that minimize work friction and maximize satisfaction and engagement.

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

Transcript

SP: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of the science of CX. I’m Steve Pappas, your host. As we’re getting towards the tail end of the season, I’ve explained many times how we go about delivering the content and designing the content for each season. There was one area that really kind of stuck out to me as needing a little more concentrated effort and that’s the area of friction and I’m going to let our guest explain what that really means today, from the employees’ perspective, from the customer’s perspective, the generalized work friction, we’re going to talk about how it happens, how to recognize it, what to do about it, and why that’s an important area for us to be discussing, especially today, especially in the economy that we’ve got today and especially in the way the workforces are evolving. So, to help me welcome in Christophe Martel and Christophe comes to us from Washington, DC and we’re going to have a great conversation about work friction. So, thanks for joining us today, Christophe.

CM: Thank you for having me. Good to be on your show.

SP: I know we reached out and we wanted to fill a gap and I didn’t want to have this season finished without us touching upon a very important issue and what you and the folks over at FOUNT to your company do with your platform really helps in those areas. So, let me give folks a little bit about your background just so they understand who we’re talking to today, and why this is an important episode. So, Christophe Martel is the founder and CEO of FOUNT. It’s a platform that helps companies identify and fix the causes of work friction. Now prior to founding FOUNT, he held a variety of executive leadership roles at the advisory and consulting firm CEB most recently, GM for the EMEA region and Chief Human Resources Officer, CEB was acquired by Gartner for 2.7 billion in 2017. FOUNT’s clients are some of the world’s leading organizations including Adidas, UnitedHealth Group, Siemens, PepsiCo, UBS, T-Mobile, Ralph Lauren, Pfizer and Discover Financial. With a resume like that, Christophe, I have to start at the beginning here to understand why did you found FOUNT, because obviously, you recognize the real problem in the marketplace, and develop the solution to solve it. But I’d like to kind of get into your head a little more as to how did you see this problem evolve? And when did you think about well, we’ve got to solve this?

CM: So, actually experienced this problem firsthand to begin with, as an employee, every employee out there is familiar with things that get in their way that shouldn’t, these may be things that HR should be doing and is not doing, these may be things that have to do with the workflow, with tools that don’t work with processes that don’t align, et cetera, et cetera. So experienced a lot of that, have been around for a while so had plenty of these experiences. As a business leader, which is what I spent most of my career doing, business leaders know that employee experience is a really important thing. It matters for retention, it matters for people’s engagement and discretionary effort and also it matters to CX there’s no way to create good CX without having employees that are satisfied with our work and I found that as a business leader, I was struggling to figure out how to create a good experience and remove friction for employees.

At CEB I shifted from the world of business leadership to the world of HR, thinking that I was gonna have a wide-open lane to go and fix this friction problem, turned out that HR on its own can’t do it either. And in this way the question of work friction that’s very related to the question of employee experience and a big driver of it ends up being owned by everyone that the company. It’s not just the business, it’s not just HR, it’s not just managers in the front line, it’s actually everyone that has to fix it. And because everyone owns it, no one owns it. That’s what typically happens. And by the way, that particular challenge is one that’s very true in the CX world. So that led me to try and figure out a data and analytics way to quantify when friction happens for workers, and what causes and why data and analytics simply because in large organizations, which are typically the most impacted by high levels of friction, data is king or queen when it comes to moving things, if you want to transform anything and prove anything, you need data to quantify the problem and to measure whether it’s resolved and that’s what the FOUNT platform does.

SP: Interesting. So, I would go as far as saying that all of us in leadership capacities, and I’ve been in the C suite for many years, is, as leaders and executives, one of the biggest facets of our job must include removing the friction from the employees so that they can perform better, because we are investing incredible amounts of money with every employee. If we look at it from the investment in every employee that walks in through our doors, that we hire, the training, the amount of work that goes into them before they’re even productive for us. Many times, we find that there’s not enough return on the investment in an employee until many months down the road. And if there is friction in their way to be able to perform at the level, we expect them to, we’re actually setting them up for failure. So, I think one of the qualities in leaders has to be to remove friction. Why this is so important to talk about, and to talk about now, is that let’s challenge all of the leaders out there to say, you know what you invest in all employees today, the economy is beating us all right now, it’s hard to find the right people, it’s hard to hold on to the right people. So maybe now we’ll go into FOUNT a little bit more, how do we analyze whether or not we are creating the problem that doesn’t allow them to perform at levels we expect. And then we’re having a workforce that we don’t even see the return on the investment before they’re already gone. And we’re doing it all over again. And we don’t realize the amount of money that is being spent in this area, when we think that some leaders might think you go over to the wall, you turn on a switch, and that person is going to be at 100% Plus, right away. Because we know that doesn’t happen in really any business. So how do we recognize the problem of friction? And maybe we are putting due to our processes, our technologies, our training, all of our things that are in front of every employee, we might not be designing the workforce properly, and are creating the friction. So, let’s all be honest. Think about whether or not you’re being reasonable about have you given them all the tools? Have you given them the right training, and all of those things? So, I want you to address that, because how do we recognize where we have a problem?

CM: You started with the term leaders and leaders have a dual responsibility. One is the responsibility to demonstrate every day, empathetic leadership. And that means being attuned to what their teams are feeling, what they care about, and so on, so forth. And leaders have made great progress over time. And COVID showed actually that many leaders showed their best colors during that time. Leaders actually wear another hat that is often underappreciated, under-recognized, and in particular senior leaders, not frontline leaders, which is to design the work environment. And the work environment is not just the workplace – the buildings and even the technology that people use – but it’s actually the set of processes of technologies, of policies, of workflows that are all supposed to together combined to create value for the organization. Usually all of that is designed with the organization in mind, not the worker. And the role of the leader as a designer of that system is essentially the one that right now is not being fulfilled by most senior leaders, mostly because they underestimate the amount of complexity that system is bearing down on to workers, particularly in the frontline.

I will quote W. Edwards Deming, who was the founder of the total quality movement many, many years ago, who said, “Take a great employee and put them in a bad system, the system wins every time”. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about. Essentially, you have employees that are, for the most part, trying to perform as best they can. But operating in a system that makes it difficult for them to perform. And that is what we call work friction.

It takes a toll in many ways. Number one, it is costing two hours of work a day per worker, on average, that’s a Gartner study that found that out a couple of years ago. So, think about the cost of two hours of wasted work per day. For an organization with 100,000 people and recognize the opportunity there to recover even one hour of it is pretty exciting. It also exacts a great price in terms of people’s engagement, we actually did research recently that showed that for 70% of workers, essentially work friction is something that makes them want to quit, makes them want to stop working, stop performing. They think it damages their experience, the customers experience and is essentially demoralizing. So, you may lose an employee because of it. But you also may have an employee that is not working at their fullest. Simply because she’s frustrated with the amount of work friction they have to deal with day in, day out.

When you add the costs of wasted work – which is a pure productivity impact that CFOs would love to get their hands on – and the cost of lowered engagement and therefore higher attrition, you end up with an immense opportunity for leaders to actually pay attention to how that system that work environment is designed to make it essentially more ergonomic so that the workers have the easiest path possible to reach their goals.

Part of the issue here for leaders to not do this is two things. Number one, they don’t recognize that this is a problem. You see great leaders who are excellent at engaging their teams, walking the floors, doing everything they need to sustain morale, but actually not being that sharp on designing a great working system for their workers, most often because their assumption is that investing lots of money in technology is going to reduce friction and God knows how much is invested in technology and AI is the latest version of this to essentially make processes work better, have easier everything. But in fact, when all these processes, and these technologies converge into the work of a, let’s say, frontline worker, what you find is that their world is actually getting more complex with every layer of technology that’s added to their portfolio. And that is a dimension that organizations don’t know how to measure, don’t know how to get data on. And that is what the FOUNT platform does. And interestingly, the only ones who can see work friction, and who can describe it and identify where it comes from all the workers, typically, we see in companies, so healthcare organizations, insurance companies, banks, when you ask leaders, what is causing work friction for your workers, usually hypotheses that leaders have on what causes it are 180 degrees from the reality of what the workers see. And that’s a big problem, because you have leaders investing essentially, to solve the wrong problems. So, part of the job that the FOUNT platform does is to make sure that the problems that are faced by workers are clearly described, so that investments go after the right things, rather than adding to the complexity that’s already marring their work.

SP: Well, before we go on to how do we realize it and how do we fix it? Let me go a little deeper, if you will. Now, based on what you just said, the employee’s world is getting more complex. One thing I found in all of the consulting I’ve done is that employees find a way, they are resourceful, they can figure things out, they can figure out workarounds. But what I’ve also found to be true is that those workarounds, none of them are sanctioned by the company. None of those are the standard operating procedures. Those are not the ways you should get around a system and be able to fill in those fields quickly and get through the job. How much of it is also contributed by the fact of the way we produce the KPIs for those employees that there may be work friction there. But the employee says yes, but you pay me for the throughput, or you pay me for the Ubers, you pay me for the metrics, I have to find a way, how badly does the house of cards start to fall down, when that adds to the problem.

CM: So not to all work friction is created equal in the eyes of employees. And I’ll give you an example from healthcare call center environment, pretty complex job, very complex policies for coverage in the US, as you know and when you measure the amount of friction, and how important for a given employee is the friction they encounter in different kinds of calls that they have every day, what you find is that when they handled an abusive caller, somebody was very mad at whatever problem, it caused a lot of friction for them. However, they do not blame the company for it. They blame the caller. However, when it is about handling a complex issue, so a complex policy question. And that often requires them to lean on subject matter experts or like an internal knowledge base, etc. What you find is that they get very frustrated if they cannot find the solution, and they blame the company for it. Because in other words, you’re asking me to solve problems for customers, yet you don’t give me the tools to do it. And I blame you for that as a company. So, the reaction to work friction in terms of how much resentment it creates from an employee perspective, is very different depending on what they expect to be difficult and what they take on as well. That’s part of my job to deal with people that are irate, versus what they believe that companies should have figured out. And that bar that I’m describing, actually is constantly evolving generationally. So, Gen Z has very little tolerance for friction that they think shouldn’t be there, then they’re been raised in the age of Instagram, and social media, etc, etc. So, where things move quick, well, if it doesn’t move at that pace, when they’re trying to solve a customer problem, as an employee, they get very frustrated, much faster than someone like me. So, the notion of work friction is essentially relative to the individual and their tolerance for it and that is something that companies need to appreciate in the eyes of the worker, not the eyes of somebody who was overlooking processes and operations.

SP: It brings to mind when you talk about the company, not giving them the tools to be able to do the job. It reminds me a number of years ago, I remember, one of the large healthcare companies did a study of all of its frontline employees and found that they were taking well over 20% of every call, just looking for things.

CM: Well think of the two hours that I talked about 25% of a workday. It’s almost an invisible headwind that leaders are unaware of, but that employees know really well. And by the way, in the world of customer, if you remember Matt Dixon’s book – he was a CEB alum  – about the effortless experience, it was actually a very similar finding for customers saying what drives customer loyalty. Is it the Wow, or is it customer effort? Well, it turns out that it was customer effort. That was the highest driver. It’s the same thing here. It’s like it takes too much effort for me as an employee to try and do the job that you asked me to do. So that’s what create disloyalty and employee’s disengagement.

SP: Well, I think we’re putting the spotlight on a very important area. If I think about it, if the company is not giving the employee the right tools, imagine the companies that have large scale business process outsourcing in other parts of the world, and they never get half the tools the employees get, and always feel like I have a harder time doing the job for my client. So, it actually exacerbates the problem even further. When you have to take an already problematic process set, whether it’s technology or process only. And you have to then airlifted into a business process outsourcing organization somewhere else in the world, where English may not necessarily be their first language. Now you’ve made the problem even more. So, we’re highlighting a lot of the issues because it is a big problem. And it’s one that every executive, and every business leader at all levels of the organization need to address because it permeates through an organization. So, let’s talk about not only the employee experience, but let’s talk about the customer experience and how does that take a hit when work friction exists in the organization, because I’ll tell you from my own retail experiences, my wife and I will turn to each other and say, that person really hates their job. It’s visible, they wear it on their sleeve, they don’t try, but it’s visible. But how does CX take a hit when all of this happens too?

CM: So perhaps the number one overlooked factor is it drives attrition in frontline roles like call center agents, nurses, doctors, and so on, so forth. And as you know, a new employee is not nearly as adept at delivering good service to customers, or good sales for that matter, than someone who’s experienced. So, the cost of that constant churn and what most of our customers called quick quits, so people that come in and exit in the first six or nine months of tenure, that is essentially due to work friction of all kinds, that takes the direct toll on customer experience, because you have lesser quality service. The second one is actually thinking about what do employees report about how work friction makes them feel and the research we did shows that the biggest thing it does is number one, it makes them feel like they’re wasting their time and there is nothing more demoralizing for a human to feel like they’ve just spent an hour of their life dealing with nonsense and for no reason whatsoever. And by the way, that is the same mechanism that has customers jumping providers when they have a similar experience – like being left hanging on the phone for too long with no answer or being provided the wrong answer. Well, that’s exactly the same mechanism.

The second thing that they report is actually that it damages the customer experience. So think of a typical call center agent or someone to cashier and if the cashier machine is not working in the right way, you now have a very embarrassed person standing in front of that cashier machine with lots of irate customers and everyone essentially is feeling bad about an issue that shouldn’t be there, or waiting for a manager to come and give an approval for something that needs an approval but the manager is out for lunch or whatever the story is, often you find the employee takes the sight of the customers to say I empathize with you and really I feel terrible, not being able to answer your question but my work environment doesn’t let me do it. There is a very big impact there of that happening too often and essentially customer facing employees saying, I’m either going to disengage from this, and that is probably the profile that you mentioned earlier, like somebody just is transactional, and doesn’t connect with you in a customer facing situation or they quit, because no one likes to feel terrible. So, the cost on CX, I think is well understood by companies, if I think of Zappos was a company known for putting employees at the center of their customer service ethics, and on both retention and ability for employees to solve problems, empowerments and actually the work environment that they were working in, they did something really right, and there’s something to duplicate there.

The problem though, is that with every wave of technology and process innovation, this work environment changes and every change is likely to introduce new kinds of friction that are unseen as a yet and so what the FOUNT platform does is to essentially help collect data to know what are the new sources of friction that may be new tools that were invested in with great intentions, but not working for certain categories or workers like new hires, for example, or any other aspect where friction emerges, and friction goes away because friction can be disposed of as long as you know what creates it. So, at the same time, it’s a very frustrating thing when you don’t see it. But the moment where it is made visible the moment where leaders are aware that it’s their job to manage it if you have the right data to identify it, then you can fix it.

SP: Interesting. So, I’ve been involved in a lot of process optimization projects, a lot of knowledge management, so that the employees understood the right way to do things. I would have loved to have had the benefit of the analysis and the data collection that you do prior to that, because I mean, I don’t believe technology alone is the answer to these problems. I think it is process. It’s process optimization, it’s reengineering, the process reengineering from the employee’s perspective, the empowerment and all that and those that think we’re just going to add another piece of technology, it’s just going to make their lives worse, but I would have liked to have had the benefit of that. Now instead, we would do this with the employees and facilitate an employee based and an employee-driven process analysis, and then turn that into well, okay, let’s come to the one way that we can all agree on and let’s now put that one way in a system that everybody can draw from easily quickly and be able to do the job and let’s also address the empowerment by leadership to. So, tell me from the collection of data that your tool does that FOUNT does? What is the results of it? So, what goes back, that is eye opening that allows them to action at that point? And what’s the second half? Is it recommendations? Is it putting a spotlight on the areas where they need a lot more attention? And because we know that you can’t do sweeping projects in any place of business today, you have to prioritize where you put your efforts, even if it’s to eradicate friction. So, what’s the second half of the results?

CM: So, the key word there is prioritization. By definition, there is friction everywhere. The question is, how much of it is there in which matters most in reverse order, essentially, the first job to do is to figure out when is it that employees are experiencing the most friction. So, the win is essentially the notion of moments to which moments which activities are they’re undertaking, for example, handling and abuse of color, or things of that nature. So, which of these activities create the most friction, then which ones are highly correlated with their intent to stay at the company? What that allows you to parse out is, what is it that they’re really blaming the company for, and that as a leadership team, you want to focus on problem solving. Now, within these activities, when you zoom into these moments into these things that people are trying to do, what you uncover is an array of touch points that are processes, policies, software tools, things like computers, and headsets, and things of that nature and then people other teams that are human touch points that are supposed to support that given activity and what our tool does is essentially, to give a score to each one of these touch points within the context of that particular moment and when you manage to see how these different resources that are all supposed to work to perfection, according to whoever designed that, what you realize is that some of them are essentially working fine individually but when you put it all together, you essentially have inconsistency, clashes and things that are only visible to the employee and that is what we uncovered through the data and so the first answer to your question is prioritizing which of these moments are most important to employees and our most painful, like the biggest pain point and I’m not saying the top 10, you prioritize the top three, and start having an impact on that. Because when you do, employees recognize that all of a sudden, you’re understanding that they’re facing this headwind, and you want to make it better. There’s a shift there in mindset from leaders, which is, it’s actually not about the employee. It’s not about making employees better. It’s about making the environment better. Go fix the employee, train them, motivate them, incent them as much as you want. But really, what you want to do is to make the environment easier to perform in and the moment with employees realize that then they’re eager to number one, give more feedback and for them, there’s actually no such thing as survey fatigue. If they feel that whatever they give feedback about gets improved and number 2, they are eager to even contribute to the solution. And so many of our customers use co-creation with employees to actually solve some of these points of friction, because the only ones who know it intimately are the ones doing the work. And they’re often best positioned to not radically transform anything, because that’s not really the scope they have, but incrementally improve it. And actually, just like in the customer experience world, often incremental improvement is the surest way to get results and to create a great close feedback loop.

SP:

So, as you’re describing that, the one thing that I have gnawing at me at the back of my mind is that there may be a difference between the way employees see the work friction, and not just the business leadership, but maybe the top of the pyramid, maybe the board, maybe the C suite might see it differently, even though they may recognize it with a tool. What does it take maybe for them to do the job? What does it take to justify it up through the ranks? Because these days, everybody has a project they need to get done and they’re all going to go through five budget cuts before they see the light of day.

CM: Very good question. You said it right. In our previous segment on prioritization, one of our customers recently had some heavy attrition issues because of their environment, and 40 workstreams deployed between HR and the business and IT to try and resolve it. Well, it turns out that with our data, we realized that most of the 40 workstreams were going after the wrong things. Senior leaders understand really well the notion of solving for the wrong problems, and prioritizing the right problems to solve, to say, if we want to retain employees and make them more productive, let’s have data that shows us what drives that, rather than the gut feel that most business leaders have at the top of the house, they usually started in somewhere deeper in the organization, so they know it well but they knew it really well 10 years ago and when they come to the top, essentially, their compass, as to what is really happening in the frontline tends to be off usually informed by anecdotal feedback that they get from employees when they do the rounds but that’s not the same as data that describes the importance and performance of the various resources that are supposed to support their employees, and don’t. The response we get from senior leaders is I know intuitively that things are not what they’re supposed to be out there on the frontline, but I can’t describe it in a tangible way. And that’s what the data helps to do. And to say, let’s stop investing in 40 things and maybe let’s focus on the three things that will move the dial.

SP: I could see where FOUNT is a friend of the employee and a friend of the business at the same time, because it’s not like you’re going in there, and you’re doing the analysis, because you’re going to bring in a $3 million project and a $40 million technology platform too but a lot of companies may be doing 360 degree views for reviews on an annual basis but that covers maybe one or two questions about the tools and the environment and doesn’t really get to the problems and in those types of things, because everybody knows who’s being reviewed, sometimes it’s your boss and I don’t know if people really push the envelope there. So, you need something like what you’ve got to really drill into the serious root causes and be able to cut the friction off at the source. 

CM: That’s right. And in fact, what is very difficult about the problem is that for CX professionals, we all know that customer experience is a complex thing to figure out and now depending on the kind of customer relationship, let’s say from the pure, simple transactional, where you can have simple journeys and play all the way to patient experience that can be incredibly complex, because it’s now several weeks in a hospital and how do you map that out? Well, the employee experience is orders of magnitude more complex than that, the world of moments that you’re tackling is hugely complex and so that’s what we’ve decrypted essentially and one of the biggest fallacies about this problem is that HR owns it because it has to do with employees, therefore, you know, everyone’s like, well, HR, you take care of it. Well, actually HR only owns some of the moments that we’re talking about. So, things that have to do with career mobility, things that have to do with getting paid, and so on so forth. But what they certainly don’t own is the day-to-day work of people. HR has very little to do with that. That’s actually managed by business leaders themselves, and heads of operations and so on, so forth. So, the key here is, as we said at the beginning of the recording, everyone owns the problem, senior leader operations, HR, finance, everyone. The problem is to attribute the causes of friction to their rightful owners.

Take a typical case of friction in HR. Like I want to go and find a new internal role, because I want to change jobs within the company. Well, is the problem that the platform that I go on to – let’s say Workday – to look at that is not really working? Or, is the problem that the policy doesn’t let me do it? Or is the problem that there’s no real jobs available? Well, you got to get to the bottom of that, because resolving it actually goes to different owners in the company. And it’s the same with workflow. So one of the things that the data approach solves is to be able to stop the blaming, basically, to say, HR doesn’t know what they’re doing, or the business don’t know what they’re doing and say, “Who’s owning some of these touch points that are breaking down for folks? How do we collaboratively resolve it?” And in a way, the principle is not very different from the CX improvement principle, but in an environment that’s much more complex, and where most leaders don’t understand their employees as their customer, where actually, if you shift gears and you say, you’re my employee, you’ve bought a job from me and I’m here to provide you with the product that you bought, which is the job and I hope that you like it and I’m here to ensure that your usage is as good as possible. So remove friction from your job and there’s a bunch of services that the company provides to you that are health benefits, training and learning and all kinds of things and I hope that you like these services too then it’s in a way not dissimilar to a customer relationship with a very complex one and to untangle it, you need the clarity of data, otherwise, everyone gets lost in the generality of leadership and the like. 

SP: I’ve got one more question for you. I know we’ve covered a lot of material. I’ve taken four pages of notes while we’re talking. So, I hope our audience has been doing that too. But we’d like to leave our audience with an exercise, something that just takes us a minute to explain but something maybe when they get together with their team, or on a zoom or whatever that can bring this problem to light even more, we have an exercise we can give them. 

CM: Maybe three, four months ago, we did a piece of research to try and understand what is the disconnect between leaders and employees when it comes to work friction and some of the data that we got was saying that 95% of employees report that it has very negative impact on their intent to stay, that makes them want to take days off because it frustrates them so much, and so on, so forth. And the other side of the research we did was to also ask leaders, how much of a problem do you think it is? And how much do you think you’re addressing it? I think the exercise is one that your audience could mirror actually, try and ask your leaders, “What is the frequency of work friction that you believe employees experience? Is it every day, every week or every month?” I can tell you that on our panel, leaders say that it was monthly or less, employees say that was weekly or less, actually 30% of them said it was hourly or daily. So essentially, try to get in your own organization, the delta between what leaders believe and what employees believe. And so, you can ask the question of 10 employees, and ask the same question of 10 leaders and see the gap between the two. You can also ask the same leaders and employees, whether they believe that work friction has increased or decreased over time and the past year, and what employees say that it increased. What leaders say is that it decreased. So there again, you have a big gap of understanding between leaders who believe that all the investments they’re making and all the actions they’re taking to make employees feel better are having an impact, where employees are actually reporting the opposite. I think that’s an easy exercise that would highlight the dangerous gap there is between leaders understanding and consciousness about this particular issue, and what employees live through every day.

SP: Perfect. If people want to learn more, where can we send them and what might they want to read or understand better?

CM: We have quite a heap of resources on our website. That’s getfount.com, they can get in touch with me, happy to talk to anyone who’s interested in talking about this further. But we have a really deep white paper that describes in 50 pages, what work friction is, how it works, how it transfers between people. By the way, one thing we did talk about is how work friction is actually transferred from customers to employees. So, reducing friction for customers, is now at the expense of employees and then employees actually pass it on to managers, you kind of have a work friction transference happening. So, we have lots of literature to describe this. Some of the data I mentioned earlier in terms of people’s perception of how much work friction matters to them, why it matters, and so on, so forth, quantified, and then also more information about what the platform does and how it works. 

SP: That’s great. Christophe, I really want to thank you for joining us today. This has been quite eye opening. I hope our audience will understand why this is an important issue for them to tackle. And I would not wait, this is important. Check out what Christophe has over at getfount.com and connect with him on LinkedIn. Keep the conversation going. So thank you for joining us. 

CM: Thank you, Steve. Thanks everyone for listening. 

About Science of CX

The Science of CX is a groundbreaking new weekly podcast developed to address the millions of businesses that need to learn techniques to compete better in today’s business landscape, by using CX as the cornerstone of a new strategy. The Science of CX is a podcast hosted by Steve Pappas, he has built his career on building, transforming, turning around and expanding companies globally.

To learn more about work friction, download our latest whitepaper.

Startup recognized for remote work, flexible work locations, and a meaningful sense of purpose

Washington, D.C., January 9, 2024 — FOUNT, a platform that helps companies identify and reduce work friction, today announced it was selected as one of Built In’s 2024 Best Places to Work in Washington D.C. in the startup category. The annual awards program includes companies of all sizes, from startups to those in the enterprise, and honors both remote-first employers as well as companies in large tech markets across the U.S. 

Built In determines the winners of Best Places to Work based on an algorithm, using company data about compensation and benefits. To reflect the benefits candidates are searching for more frequently on Built In, the program also weighs criteria like remote and flexible work opportunities, programs for DEI and other people-first cultural offerings.  

“FOUNT is dedicated to making work easier and more enjoyable for employees, especially our own. It feels good to know that we’ve created an environment where employees are empowered to do their best work.”

Christophe Martel, CEO and co-founder of FOUNT

FOUNT prides itself on building a frictionless culture in the following ways…

1. Work from anywhere: The company has employees based all over the world including Iceland, Indianapolis and Nigeria.
2. Global offsites: Team members gather for in-person regional and global offsites in exciting locations such as Lisbon and Montreal. 
3. Meaningful work: FOUNT employees find purpose in the fact that their contributions help make work frictionless for individuals and companies across the globe.

To learn more about FOUNT’s career opportunities, visit getfount.com/company for more information.

ABOUT FOUNT

FOUNT believes work should be frictionless for employees and employers. The company offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that identify what’s at the root of productivity and attrition challenges. By helping organizations prioritize and fix causes of friction in employees’ work environment, organizations can measurably improve performance and employee experiences. FOUNT’s customer base represents some of the world’s leading organizations including adidas, Siemens, Baloise, Northwell Health and TEKsystems. Founded in 2022 as a spinout of the employee experience consultancy, TI People, FOUNT is headquartered in Washington, D.C. with offices in London and Hamburg. Visit https://getfount.com for more information.

PR Contact: Jack McHugh, jack@propllr.com

As the year concludes, unravel the impact of “collaborative challenges” between employees and their employers when it comes to workplace productivity.

John Hollon of TLNT, a publication that aims to build the workforces of tomorrow, writes about this growing issue casting a shadow over organizations striving for efficiency and better employee experiences.

In the article, FOUNT’s cofounder and CEO highlights key findings from the company’s 2023 Work Friction research.

“While most leaders believe they are well-informed about the work friction their employees experience, this research clearly indicates a stark divide.”

Christophe Martel, co-founder and CEO of FOUNT

He adds:

“Despite record investment in learning and development, staffing, and technology to make work better, employee quit rates have more than doubled in the last decade…”

FOUNT’s Workplace Friction survey highlight that these challenges contribute to absenteeism and attrition, with 95% of employees feeling negatively about their jobs, and 37% feel so bad they want to quit or take days off. Approximately 68% of employees believe collaborative challenges hamper personal productivity and customer service quality.

The article ends by talking about a new way of thinking. Instead of a workplace where everyone competes, the focus is on making work itself run smoother in order to get the best out of people.

To read the full article, visit the TLNT website.

ABOUT TLNT

TLNT is the Human Resources profession’s invaluable destination to explore topics that matter to HR practitioners.