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In today’s dynamic workplace, the concept of work friction has become more critical than ever, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FOUNT’s CEO, Christophe Martel, explains the concept of work friction in this Q&A interview with Jessica Miller-Merrell of Workology, a destination for innovative workplace leaders. He discusses how minimizing work friction enhances employee experiences in global organizations.

In the interview, Christophe highlights how FOUNT’s platform addresses work friction.

FOUNT has developed a moment-centric data model that is anchored to specific activities – not work in general. It uses short, targeted surveys to pinpoint when friction is occurring in employees’ day-to-day workflow, learn what’s most important to fix, and connect solutions to the actual work environment.

Here are the 5 Questions Christophe answered:

Q: What is work friction and what is its impact on the workplace?

Put simply, work friction is perceived by employees as wasted effort and energy they shouldn’t have to expend in order to do their jobs. Everyone’s familiar with it. Picture things like outdated or complex policies, your boss not leaning in on your career planning, or cumbersome tools and environments that don’t fit the most efficient ways of working – there are a lot of examples out there.

Work friction frustrates employees because it makes it harder to do their jobs. But it’s also bad for the business: leaders want things to keep moving without getting stalled. The people who make decisions about new tools and policies don’t always see what employees experience in the day-to-day flow of work. In fact, work friction can only be seen through the eyes of the employee. Through them, you can find out exactly what gets in their way and locate the most important friction points to fix.

Q: Are we seeing more work dysfunction and friction today because of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Yes. Work friction has always been there – particularly at large organizations – but the pandemic exacerbated some things that business leaders maybe didn’t see or understand as well. Knowledge workers were still able to do their jobs while working from home, which opened up conversations about flexible work that weren’t happening before. And frontline workers were experiencing a tremendous amount of friction and turnover until it became evident that the world does not function without them. 

I think what we’ve seen since the start of the pandemic is a lot more listening. But the question is, what kind of listening? Many individuals experience survey fatigue when listening is not connected to positive changes in their work environment. 

Q: How does FOUNT solve the work friction problem?

FOUNT has developed a moment-centric data model that is anchored to specific activities – not work in general. It uses short, targeted surveys to pinpoint when friction is occurring in employees’ day-to-day workflow, learn what’s most important to fix, and connect solutions to the actual work environment.

You only need about 50 data points to establish statistical significance with work friction data. It’s enough to identify and prioritize the things that will have the biggest impact on individuals. This encompasses the full range of work, from common HR moments that all employees experience (such as pursuing a new internal role or taking leave) to specific business moments (such as solving a customer issue or scheduling a shift change). 

The resulting insights are visualized in a simple and organized way, so HR, IT, and business leaders know where to begin. They can connect the dots between their efforts to make improvements and the reality of what is most important to fix, according to employees. FOUNT takes the guesswork out of knowing where to direct efforts and, for the first time, provides metrics to show whether you’re actually making a difference. The benefits: less frustration, burnout, and turnover.

Q: How can FOUNT improve efficiency at the organizational level?

Efficiency is connected to how productive your workforce is and the amount of work wasted along the way. 

Work friction data helps identify those things that may be invisible to those developing the policies or procuring new tools yet get in the way and create friction for workers. So each improvement helps the entire organization be more productive and waste less time and effort – not just in terms of total work output, but also in terms of the ability to do work without the usual headwinds.

Q: How does FOUNT help HR leaders identify points of friction?

HR leaders own core parts of the employee experience, whether that’s onboarding, taking parental leave, taking medical leave, or getting paid. Leaders have embraced a lot of great technology to make that experience smoother – at least in theory. But in practice, they might inadvertently introduce more friction if they don’t understand how each tool or transformation affects employees.

FOUNT helps HR leaders become more strategic with a powerful new dataset. Work friction data gets to the root cause of what’s frustrating employees and causing them to burn out. This enables them to better partner with business leaders and ensure their HR workstreams are focused on the most important challenges facing the business. By establishing themselves as friction fighters within their organizations, they will become even more critical drivers of value to both people and the business.

To read the article on the Workology website, visit this link.

ABOUT Workology

Workology is a destination for the disruptive workplace leader discussing trends, tools, and case studies for HR, recruiting professionals, and business leaders.

Companies know they need to be better in tune with what people at work want and need – whether triggered from the demands of COVID-19, hybrid working plans or from the ongoing reality of competing on talent in the experience-based economy. We can venture to say that empathy is on the rise at organizations, and that is a good thing.

A more empathetic stance, of course, comes with higher expectation for action. Employees feel more heard and expect better experiences from it. In turn, Boards, CEOs, and shareholders expect the organization to deliver on employees’ most important needs as a matter of good business strategy.

This growing consensus from all stakeholders is encouraging. At the same time, it puts leaders that own Employee Experience in the spotlight. They are under high performance expectations and tight timelines for making real impact. Without near-term results, attention and investments risk getting diverted. Worse still, valued talent might seek better experiences elsewhere.

This is a crucial moment where budding EX teams will either ascend into the short list of value-creating functions in their organization or be side-lined for a few years.

The Experience Intelligence Breakthrough

The volume of experiences happening and diversity of people having them at organizations are overwhelmingly large, so how can EX leaders quickly converge on where they are most likely to achieve measurable impact?

Organizations need to build better Experience Intelligence. They need better visibility into the actual experiences people are having with the organization. Better experience intelligence starts with shifting to a new experience-based paradigm to capture data that reflects the complexity of human experiences, allowing a rich and insightful analysis on the back end.

This data framework captures a high-fidelity picture of an individual’s experiences at the point of interaction. Notably, it differs from existing employee listening approaches such as engagement or pulse surveys in that it is specifically designed to capture experience data.

While engagement tools are useful to assess an individual’s degree of commitment to the company, they do not fit the purpose of telling the experience story. Surfacing the specific experience highs, lows, and gaps in the context of an individual’s interactions with the organization is a view that all organizations need but most lack.

At TI People, we have applied our proprietary data framework to collect, organize and analyze over +1M experience data points. This unique dataset offers some noteworthy indicators towards more focused and prioritized EX efforts.

The job matters

First, organizations should recognize that the majority of high impact moments happen throughout everyday work. Specifically, the “I Perform My Job” moment carries the greatest overall influence of all interactions a person has with the organization. The everyday beats infrequent moments, no matter how emotional or personal they may be. It also beats L&D, Performance Management and Mobility moments. Notably, these “Macro” HR moments often attract the most EX management attention despite their relatively lower influence.

Better EX Intelligence, Greater Impact

With that in mind, it is crucial that EX Leaders expand their perspective to encompass both realms of experience to deliver meaningful experience improvement for people and the business. Leaders should continue efforts to understand employees’ experiences of “Corporate Services” like HR, IT and Finance to ensure ease and efficiency throughout. Yet they also need perspective focused specifically on key job segments – as individuals do their everyday work. First-hand, job specific experience data reveals what matters most in day-to-day work and what stands in the way. EX and business leaders can then partner to identify and eliminate obstacles that inhibit performance.

Effective prioritization of EX efforts, and lasting commitment from senior executives to those efforts, demand an experience-centric dataset that reflects the gaps between people’s expectations and their experiences of work. By shifting perspective to a new paradigm, organizations will become increasingly more intelligent about the experiences that matter most to people at work. Better experience intelligence lays the groundwork for more impactful improvement efforts where they matter most.

Employers would be keen to note, experts say, that efforts to strengthen EX must go more than skin deep; perks can only get the company so far, as today’s employees are looking for an experience rooted in purpose.

Christophe Martel expects to see even more investment in EX redesign as the world of work continues to transform.

“While EX improvement can’t happen overnight, the environment may be ripe for it. According to recent research from FOUNT, a provider of an EX management platform, 94% of respondents agree that EX work is a long-term commitment at their organization; more than 60% have an EX strategy for at least the next six months. No long-term strategy is possible without leader buy-in and about 40% say senior leaders view EX improvement as equal to other business priorities.”

Christophe Martel, Co-founder and CEO of FOUNT

Read the full article on the Human Resource Executive website.

Human Resources Director Canada, a publication that focuses on the real issues and challenges facing the HR professional, writes about FOUNT’s latest research.  The article summarizes the fact that employees and managers have different ideas about this issue – and it’s costing money.

“While most leaders believe they are well-informed about the work friction their employees experience, this research clearly indicates a stark divide,” said Christophe Martel, co-founder and CEO of FOUNT, an SaaS provider that conducted the research.

Other key findings include the worsening impact work friction has on absenteeism and attrition and employee well-being. A staggering 95% reporting its negative impact. More concerning, 37% of employees have admitted that work friction makes them feel so bad that they want to take days off or even quit their jobs.

To read the full article, visit the HRD website. To download a copy of the key findings, please fill out this form.

ABOUT HRD
HRD features high level case studies, international and local profiles, interviews with HR directors and industry leaders from around the globe as well as leading newsmakers in the field. Content goes beyond industry standard, offering highly engaging, timely, relevant, innovative and entertaining articles. HRD has positioned itself as the magazine of choice for the country’s most influential HR decision makers.

The best managers wear a lot of hats. They provide strategic guidance and mentorship to their teams. They collaborate across teams to prevent and eliminate silos throughout the organization. Often, they function as a firewall between the C-suite and their front-line workers. 

All these leads managers to absorb both the work friction that trickles down from leadership and the work friction that seeps up from the organization’s foundational employees. 

The more saturated managers become with work friction, the less bandwidth they have to complete their core tasks. This means their teams receive less concrete direction. Individual team members begin to feel unsupported. Then leadership starts to exert even more pressure. 

It’s a burdensome cycle. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every organization has access to data that makes work better for everyone. 

In this blog, we’ll dive into how managers can identify moments of work friction and transition from friction “sponges” to work friction fighters.

Work Friction is a Systems Problem, Not a People Problem

Too often, organizational leadership makes an erroneous assumption about how, and why, employees fail to complete their goals. People are distractible at best, lazy at worst. Priorities are too easily shuffled out of order. People, the thinking goes, are the problem.

But we know work friction – not laziness or distractibility – lurks at the core of inefficient moments of work. The data is clear: work friction is a systems problem, not a people problem.

When organizations put pressure on their managers to “fix” operational inefficiencies, the results tend to exacerbate those inefficiencies, not reduce them. Consider when:

• Employees don’t understand how to navigate short-term leave policies.
• IT pushes a systems update without scheduling comprehensive training.
• Leadership, marketing, and sales have divergent expectations for a client partnership.

Each instance above has at least two things in common:

1. All negatively impact an organization’s bottom line.
2. Team managers are routinely (and mistakenly) tasked with reconciling the issue.

It’s understandable, of course, when employees turn to their managers for guidance. And leadership selects managers to efficiently manage teams. But these days, empathetic leadership and process improvement are impossible without the right data.

Luckily, there is a solution.

Reducing Work Friction Depends On Employee Input

The solution to work friction is simple: equip teams with data that highlights exactly what prevents employees from achieving their goals. With this in hand, everyone tasked with fighting work friction can do so in a targeted, efficient manner. And the business only benefits.

This is crucial. When managers absorb frustrating moments of work, they don’t have the data to resolve, it tends to lead everyone through a loop in which employees:

• Experience a moment of work friction (say, the expectation that they adopt a new productivity suite without sufficient time budgeted for comprehensive training).
• Report the experience to their manager and ask for assistance.
• Wait for their manager to resolve the issue and communicate the solution.
• Lose productive hours working toward their goals, which leads to more moments of frustration.

This work friction loop quickly diminishes an organization’s human and financial resources. 

On the one hand, it silos the employee’s experience of work. This can unintentionally (and detrimentally) make it appear that the issue is localized to an individual experience. Then, as other employees wade through the same muck, everyone’s work becomes further bogged down.

On the other hand, managers tasked with triaging each siloed moment of work friction will soon struggle to see the forest for the trees. This leads to more frustrating moments of work for the manager. Which, in turn, leaves team members unsupported. Which sparks employee attrition.

As with all work friction, the cost is significant, if reducible.

Incremental Steps Smooth Out Work Friction for the Long Haul

If diving deep into the employee experiences that improve work across the organization sounds complicated, there’s good news. The surveys that highlight moments of work friction work best when they’re representative of employee experience.

Effective work friction data, in other words, doesn’t need to be a comprehensive representation of every experience across the company. For example, an organization invested in improving customer experiences might survey a selection of employees from the marketing, product development, and client success teams.

This survey would help highlight how these employees experience their jobs through specific details like how they’re expected to field customer complaints, or broader concepts like how teams collaborate to maintain and grow accounts.

Once the work friction point is identified, the next step will be to iterate potential changes and then, identify whether the changes ultimately improve employees’ experiences at work. And because changes are made incrementally, they’re easier to adopt within employees’ current flow of work and more likely to stick for the long haul.

Friction Fighter Teams Work for Better Business 

Data-supported friction fighter teams are a must for any organization that values the benefits of building better employee experiences. They’re simply good business.

Ready to mop up work friction throughout your organization? FOUNT can help. Let’s be in touch.

This article, authored by Christophe Martel, originally appeared in the November issue of Call Center Times (view the PDF).

There’s no doubt: call centers were hit hard by the seismic shifts in workplace norms that began during the pandemic. First, the Great Resignation defined the new normal. Then came the advent of Quiet Quitting. The ongoing effects on employee turnover are difficult to overstate.

Data suggests the landscape remains rocky. In fact, the average turnover rate was recently indexed at 38 percent – a key reason leaders today are likely to identify employee turnover as their call center’s most important KPI.

To address this reality head on, it’s important for executives to recognize and root out work friction. If that concept sounds new to you, you’re not alone. And if it sounds like a variation on the organizational friction you’ve spent a career resolving, you might be surprised. Reducing work friction requires a different approach.

Here, I’ll introduce the fundamentals of work friction. Then dive into how it impacts call centers, why methods for addressing organizational friction fall short of solving the problem, and how a data-first approach can help.

What Is Work Friction?

Resilience is a quality often championed in the workplace. Small challenges – say, a malfunctioning headset – are an everyday reality of work. As these challenges accumulate and compound, they take an obvious toll on productivity, but have a possibly more damaging impact on burnout and disengagement. While conversations generally focus on how to overcome them, a more productive, long-term solution is to eliminate the obstacles at the root of work friction. 

What is work friction? Simply put: Work friction is employee energy (and time) wasted on unnecessary obstacles that get in the way and make work harder than it needs to be.

As such, work friction is a unique concept in the workplace. Consider the traditional focus on resilience, for example. When leaders promote resilient teams, the thinking goes, it reduces organizational paint points.

Work friction, on the other hand, puts the emphasis on minimizing unnecessary employee efforts to maximize employee energy. The benefits are easy to see. The more you dive into employees’ experiences, the more likely you are to cut out challenges at the source. At call centers, such challenges can include…

• Unpredictable or inflexible shift schedules
• Infrequent or inadequate breaks from work
• Personal equipment, such as headsets, that frequently malfunctions
• Multi-step approval processes for each support task
• Workflows made inefficient by non-integrated platforms

The key here is that every employee’s experience is different. Individual call center agents, for example, are each likely to encounter different combinations of work friction triggers such as those outlined above. And that’s why call centers that focus on organizational friction by optimizing structures, processes, and tools typically underestimate (or miss entirely) the work friction created when these points of resistance combine in the real day-to-day work of agents.

Fatigued agents, for example, may choose to defer simple troubleshooting and refer customers to an in-person technician. This can delay service and even overcomplicate a support experience customers expect to receive over the phone. The result: negative customer experiences in addition to employee turnover.

What’s more: the effects of work friction often extend to employees’ lives beyond the call center. Exhausted, frustrated agents may lack the energy needed to fully live their lives outside of work. And while few employees take jobs planning to soon leave them, a high-friction work environment that makes it harder to complete coursework or take care of loved ones can quickly force their hand.

As long as work friction persists throughout the organization, its effects will be felt by all stakeholders – including agents, customers, supervisors, and leadership. And with employee turnover telling such a clear story, it’s critical to take steps that change the reality of employees’ lived experiences.

Some “Solutions” Mask Rather Than Solve Work Friction

Even if call center leaders don’t yet connect employees’ disengagement with work friction, the symptoms are often readily apparent. Absenteeism rises. Productivity suffers. So a manager’s first instinct, naturally, might be to address the symptoms.

It’s tempting, after all, to take a carrot and stick approach. To reward high productivity, for example, with a cash bonus. Or nip absenteeism in the bud with tight rules about time off.

But as anyone with allergies knows, treating a symptom (like a stuffy nose) doesn’t have the same impact as addressing the cause (say, cat dander or ragweed). The only lasting solution is to identify and remove the allergen from the environment. Treat only the symptoms and your problems are likely to persist. They might even become more complicated.

As an example, let’s consider a call center that employs remote agents. To support efficient communication among distributed staff, they’ve adopted Slack. It’s great because agents can develop a community, ask each other questions, and work together to solve problems. But there’s a wrinkle: the notifications in Slack can seem unending. With a constant ping of messages that all appear urgent, it’s often unclear which to tackle first.

To make matters even more complicated, it turns out Slack doesn’t sync with the call center’s special task management software. So now, agents have to manually slot manager requests into their daily to-do lists. What was meant as a solution has instead added an unintended layer of complexity for the employee to navigate.

Changes like these are usually made with the best intentions. Leaders want to proactively solve problems, like making it easier for agents to consult with a manager before a customer’s request needs to be escalated. But when the solution to one issue ends up creating additional work friction, it’s likely to result in burnout or more turnover.

The right data, however, can help call center leaders implement solutions that reduce work friction without creating more frustration for their employees. Next, let’s dive into what this can look like.

Moment-Centric Data Helps Employers Smooth Out Work Friction

Because frontline workers in call centers deal with a multitude of processes, tools and people day in and day out, they know exactly: 

• When work friction impacts their daily tasks.
• When work friction most directly impacts productivity and motivation.
• How to fix the root cause of work friction.

The upshot? The best way to identify, understand, and reduce work friction is to ask people about the moments when they face the most resistance in their day-to-day work. This results in moment-centric work friction data that is directly connected to the touchpoints that may be creating varying levels of resistance for employees. Once you can see where the friction exists, it becomes clear what action to take to resolve it. 

To get started, consider using short and to-the-point surveys. You don’t need to survey everyone in the company – the idea is to reach out to a representative group. Then, empowered by work friction data, make improvements step by step.

Say, for instance, you send a survey to a selection of recently hired employees. The survey helps you learn about their job experiences through specific details like how they handle customer complaints, or broader concepts like short-term and long-term career goals.

Importantly, this approach helps you locate exactly where work friction occurs. And by staying tuned in to employee experiences, you can identify whether the changes you ultimately implement actually help your employees.

Fight Work Friction to Deepen Employee Engagement

The true trouble with work friction is, unchecked, it becomes a nearly all-consuming force. That’s why employers who fail to address it risk persistent, ever-increasing turnover.

Call centers that recognize and excise work friction today, however, have the opportunity to retain and recruit employees into a work environment that fits their unique circumstances. The result: more productive agents who have a longer-lasting sense of connection to their workplace.

To learn more about how FOUNT can help address call center attrition and “quick quits,” book a demo of our work friction management solution.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 01, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - FOUNT, a platform that helps companies identify and reduce work friction, today released research from its 2023 Work Friction Survey. The findings reveal a massive gap between how business leaders and employees perceive work friction. When asked how work friction has changed over time, nearly half of employees said it’s gotten worse. This is in stark contrast to business leaders, three-quarters of whom thought work friction had not changed or had even improved.

Work friction is perceived by employees as energy they shouldn’t have to expend at work. It can range from faulty systems to unavailable managers and erratic work schedules. Because work friction can only be seen by employees as their daily workflow is disrupted, it is often overlooked leading to frustration, burnout and misdirected investment on the wrong solutions. According to Gartner, employees waste two hours per day trying to work around work friction. For a Fortune 1000 company with 10,000 employees, that amounts to 3.1 million wasted hours per year and an annual $78.4 million lost.

“While most leaders believe they are well-informed about the work friction their employees experience, this research clearly indicates a stark divide,” said Christophe Martel, Cofounder and CEO of FOUNT. “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 – costing Fortune 500 companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The only way to understand what employees experience is either to play undercover boss or get work friction data. Absent this, it’s guesswork.”

FOUNT’s research also found that:

1. Work friction is a likely contributor to absenteeism and attrition
95% of employees said work friction makes them feel bad about their job, with 37% of employees saying work friction makes them feel so bad they want to quit or take days off. In short, work friction likely plays a significant role in absenteeism and attrition.

2. Work friction is perceived to stifle personal productivity and quality customer service
68% of employees reported work friction has a negative impact on their personal productivity and their ability to provide strong customer service.

3. Work friction overwhelmingly occurs in employee experiences owned by business leaders
80% of work friction occurs in employees’ day-to-day work vs HR managed services (e.g. career advancement, training, taking leave).

“Work friction symptoms are usually apparent, like absenteeism and low productivity. A business leader might first try to address those symptoms with a cash bonus for high performers or strict time-off rules,” added Martel. “But like allergy sufferers, treating a stuffy nose with medication isn’t the same as addressing the root cause, such as pet dander. Treating only the symptoms means problems will persist or could even get more complicated.”

FOUNT’s 2023 Work Friction survey suggests the problem is likely getting worse at most companies. Although 91% of leader respondents said work friction reduction is a priority for their organizations, only 42% have so far taken action to reduce it, and less than 20% are tackling work friction in employees’ day-to-day work, where it most often occurs.

To learn more about work friction and why it matters, download FOUNT’s Work Friction whitepaper.

About 2023 Work Friction Survey
FOUNT Global Inc.’s 2023 Work Friction Surveys were fielded in August 2023 in collaboration with our panel survey partner, RepData. A total of 706 panelists were sourced from across North America, Europe, and ANZ using multimodal collection: 506 employees completed an 11-question survey online; 200 HR, business, and C-suite leaders completed a 4-question survey in telephone interviews. Both surveys included closed- and open-ended questions; the latter were coded to generate quantifiable results for comparison with closed-ended responses.

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 HR, IT and business leaders 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.

Media Contact: Jack McHugh, jack@propllr.com

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In this episode of Bringing the Human back to Human Resources, Traci Chernoff speaks with FOUNT’s CEO, Christophe Martel, about the essence of work friction, how it affects both employees and employers, and the substantial cost it incurs in terms of productivity and engagement.

Christophe delves into the complexity of the issues, highlighting that work friction is subjective and varies across generations. He explains how FOUNT uses data-driven insights to identify and prioritize areas of friction, providing a roadmap for organizations to make targeted improvements.

“Work friction is in the eye of the beholder… It’s becoming more and more acute with every generation.”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uQ7m8tTfqqE?start=1930&feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://getfount.com

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bringing-the-human-back-to-human-resources/id1537889926?i=1000633174799

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

Transcript

TC:
Alright, so this week, we’re going to talk about something that actually has not really been brought up a ton on this podcast, and that is work friction. And we’re gonna dive into what that means. But I’m not doing it alone. I have Christophe Martel with me, who is the co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global Inc., a SaaS company that helps global organizations reduce work friction and improve employee experiences. FOUNT helps companies identify what’s at the root cause of employee dissatisfaction and prioritize what to fix in their environment. Previously, Christophe was CHRO of CEB, a global research and advisory company acquired by Gartner in 2017. So, Christophe, I’m sure you’re gonna have a ton of research information for us. But welcome to the podcast. So happy to have you here.

CM:
Thank you, excited to be here.

TC:
Yeah, of course. Well, maybe we have to start at the top, can you walk us through what work friction is and how you kind of became like this expert in solving this problem.

CM:
So, what it is? Well, it has two phases, it’s the same phenomenon. But for employees, it’s anything that gets in the way of them doing what they’re trying to do at work. And what they’re trying to do at work can be their job. So, a nurse trying to provide care to a patient. But also, what they’re trying to do at work is use the company’s services to employees such as figuring out their career, taking a long leave for health reasons, changing their shift or any other aspect of their life at work, that the company plays an important role in. And the fact is that when individuals do this, and it’s actually the larger the company that they work for, the truer it gets, they experience a ton of friction means that there’s a ton of stuff getting in that way that shouldn’t. From an employee’s perspective, it’s stuff that, you know, makes me spend energy that just shouldn’t be there – that’s the employee view. 

From an employer’s perspective, it’s essentially a super costly headwind. And the term headwind is this kind of invisible, “slower downer” that kind of slows the business down. Gartner actually did research on this and found that it takes on average, two hours of work away from employees every day, right? So, if you say two out of eight hours, that’s a pretty significant portion of everyone’s work in a hundred-thousand people company that is wasted every day and that is very costly from a pure productivity perspective, right? So, there’s essentially a 25% productivity opportunity for companies to recapture by removing work friction.

The second impact that work friction has is for individuals having to overcome obstacles that shouldn’t be there is a very frustrating exercise, right? As a human, it’s just not a good way to spend one’s time. You know, you’re asking me to do a job, and you make it difficult for me to go do it, it’s hard enough as it is that you don’t need to add to it. And that is where, you know, individuals essentially start burning out or getting disengaged with a company when the essentially their friction meter starts going over their tolerance limit. And for that – from an economic perspective for employers – represents the cost of burnout and disengagement are really high. If you look at attrition rates in North America, that are going down, right, so this is still a very tight talent market, it’s hard to find people hard to keep them. And in this case, friction is a self-inflicted wound by organizations. And that’s also an opportunity to tackle. So that is work friction.

TC:
Yeah, thank you for describing that for us. And or defining that for us. And, you know, my immediate thought when I think of work friction is sometimes this cross-functional element that, you know, maybe within your own team, or you know, department within an organization, you’re working like a well-oiled machine. But then when you require something from another department, or you need to work cross-functionally, we always reference like these friction points that can happen just because, you know, departments might work differently, or people might work differently, even just outside of their own team. So that’s like the first thing that I think of, because of the challenges that are just present when it comes to cross-functional work. But at the same time, or on the other hand, I also think about to your point, businesses that don’t keep the easy things easy, and make unnecessary difficulties out of something that otherwise could be quite simple. Like a perfect example is the US government and these I-9 changes. Like we know, the large majority of workforces have gone remote. And yet, they didn’t update the I-9 process to meet employees and employers where they are. And so, they created this huge burden, operational burden for HR teams and employers. And then now just this week, they’re like, actually, we’re gonna change it, because we heard everyone complaining, you know, we’re gonna make a change. And so, these are, these are just some examples that I think of when I think of work friction.

CM:
That’s a good one, the latter one. I’m French, so I don’t want to comment on the US government, but on the French government as long as you’d like. In this case, you could argue that the work friction introduced by new federal regulation – or actually absence thereof in this case – is introducing work friction. But the question is, what is it that employees hold their employer accountable for? So, work friction is a very subjective thing. If you think about process friction, for example, it may be a very inefficient process. By definition, something that has too many steps in it may or may not create work friction, actually. A process can be really inefficient, and from a user perspective, it can still work. Say, the payroll process may be super inefficient as long as I get it at the end of the month, I don’t really care. The two are connected. But work friction is the subjective opinion that an individual has of how difficult you’re making something that shouldn’t be.

In the case of the I-9, employees may very well say, well, the government is the one to blame, rather than my employer. And now, it’s still extracted some economic costs, because it slows down productivity. However, you don’t get the other side of it, which is, do I really want to work for this company that is making my life difficult on purpose, right? Actually I can see this in FOUNT as a company that we’re, we’re not very big, right? You can see that work friction exists in a really small company, but seems to be detected and figured out almost on the fly because everyone is within reach, to do just that. Things get difficult when companies start hitting 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 people where now you have to set up a bureaucracy to operate the system. And the nature of that bureaucracy is to create rules and processes and swim lanes and decision rights and all the rest of it. Often, these things are not designed with the user in mind – the user being the employee. They’re actually designed with, what is it that the business needs, right?

So, extreme case in any financial institution that serves consumers, there’s a lot of regulations, there’s a lot of security guardrails all over the bank, that essentially makes the life of call center agents more complex and sometimes it becomes so complex that they can’t do their job, because there’s just too much in their way and that gets in their way as employees and also gets in the way of the customer experience on the other end. The question for companies is how to navigate on one hand, the pressures of the process integrity and the structure that you need to maintain in a big organization, but also let enough leeway for employees to do the work in the way that it’s supposed to be done. Often, in large organizations, the former imperative is the one that drives rather than the latter and one of the ways that we help our customers is to help them understand where work friction is occurring, almost like with a heat map that says, “this is causing more friction, or that is causing working friction, here’s when it does and what you can potentially do to fix it.”

TC:
Got it. That was going to be my question for you actually, is how FOUNT is identifying these areas where work friction is caused and then the other side of this too is that I was reflecting on what you said about large organizations and the level of work friction that they run into because of the need to manage the process, create more process, create more barriers, right? But then I was also thinking about how there’s still even in companies that are much smaller the work friction is there; it just looks different. And, you know, when I think about that it’s really agnostic based on – agnostic to the size of the company, but that the actual type of friction, or where the friction comes up is probably what changes, right?

CM:
True, the thing about a small company is that work friction is most of the time acceptable to employees. So, remember, it’s a subjective assessment, from a worker to say, when you work at a startup, you don’t expect that you’re going to have super well-oiled processes everywhere. Actually, is kind of even part of the expectation that is not going to be like that. And sometimes it creates friction, because I don’t know, you know, your 401k management may not be as smooth as it would otherwise be in a big company. But because that’s expected, you don’t run into that frustration, even though you do take a hit on productivity. And it’s a little bit similar. If you think about decision rights in startups, right? They’re not very well defined. You don’t have very well-established rules. But people just found their way around that ambiguity and make it work because that is expected.

If you work for a really large company, and you find that there’s ambiguity in decision-making, in a really large matrix, that creates all kinds of tensions that are political, and otherwise, that become really painful for, for now, not just a few people, but hundreds or thousands. Maybe the last thing to say and then I’ll respond to your question is that work friction is, as I mentioned, is kind of in the eye of the beholder. I was born in the 60s in France, and I went through all kinds of experiences. I have a pretty high tolerance to friction, right? I mean, I learned to program in Fortran a long time ago so that talks about friction. My son, who is 22, has very low tolerance for work friction because the expectation is that everything runs like the apps and the environment that he operates in. My expectation is different, right? This friction problem is becoming more and more acute with every generation. So, between Millennials and Gen Z, who are going to be just the bulk of the working population very shortly, their expectation for friction, are, was very low, like don’t mess with me basically, make it easy for me to do what I need to do.

How do we do that, you know, with that kind of subjective aspect in mind is the only ones who know work fiction are the ones doing the work, by definition, right? So, we see this with our customers, whenever we ask executives, “where do you guys think work friction occurs?” 99% of the time they get it wrong because their image of where friction occurs is usually based on what their managers tell them, or what anecdotes told them when they did, a ride along somewhere or whatever. When you actually get real employee voice around the parts of the environment in which they work that create friction, you suddenly discover an ocean of opportunities to go and tackle. We do this through surveys and various other means of text analytics and the like to understand which parts of the environment – and that means digital things such as digital tools, processes, policies, decision rights, structures, workflows, so anything that essentially organizes the work – which of these things are working (because some of these things are) and which of these things are not. Sometimes which combinations of things are not working.

That’s the one thing that we’ve realized is that friction occurs in human experiences, right? It’s when people try to do something. Let’s say if I’m in a customer service role and I try to solve a customer problem, I’m going to have digital touchpoints everywhere (software, calling equipment and various other things) I’m gonna have policies which regulate, like what I can do and not do with this customer, and where are the boundaries. And so, all of that is defined by the business, I’m going to have human interactions with the customer, or maybe with my supervisor, and whoever else. It’s a very complex ecosystem that an individual performs their job in. And the solution is never just to fix one thing, it’s usually to find two, three or four things that, in combination, are creating friction for these individuals. And when you do find them, you actually can make really quick improvements, and see the results in and through data. That’s our approach. It is essentially data based. It essentially captures the voice of these employees about their environment, and we have an entire what we call work model that encapsulates how work works in the complex environment and that spits out essentially those heat maps that people use to go fix things.

TC:
Perfect, thank you for explaining that. It’s really interesting, because I’m sure that then you’re getting this data, you’re seeing where these friction points are and businesses are like, okay, this is really clear, this makes sense, let’s improve these friction points and that ultimately, directly impacts the employees engagement, especially considering your point around it being subjective, that if there’s this like critical mass that is saying this is a friction point for all of us, or 80% of us, then to be able to improve the experience for 80% of employees is pretty impactful. Otherwise, you don’t really have that type of opportunity and other types of situations within business.

CM:
Good point. A couple of things there. Number one, what really matters is that businesses are able to have data to quantify and prioritize the amount of friction people experience and we prioritize that using two axes. One is performance – which of these activities in which activities do they incur the most friction? For example, solve a customer problem. And second is importance – which is how important is it to them? And how frustrating is it to them when it’s not working? One of the most – like across the board – one of the most frustrating things for employees is when they tried to get a new internal job in a big company, it tends to be so complex that no one follows up on application. No one gives them feedback, and so on, so forth. That’s very frustrating for them. And that’s actually one of those that come to the top of both importance and also bottom of the performance barrel. Thing one that’s important is prioritizing because everything has friction, it’s just a question of going after where there’s most and where it matters most.

The second thing is to be able to see the difference. When you go take action on a friction point, you can actually measure whether it’s getting better or not. And that’s kind of the beauty of it, which is hard to come by in HR is to be able to measure the before and after to see if the action that we’re taking is making a difference. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, right like the only ones who know again, are the ones who are doing the work. It is a way to approach even HR investments and HR initiatives with a much more continuous improvement, incremental improvement spirit than the spirit of, we’re gonna go create a perfect process that is going to make it great for everyone and then we’ll never talk about it again. Because that’s not how it really works in real life. It is kind of pushing HR discipline, if you will, in a direction that is almost similar to the way customer-facing teams have moved, which is to have really hard-edge data that tells them where to focus, what to focus on, go try a quick sprint to fix things, make things better, measure the result. And when you start showing results that are going up, everyone will give you budget to continue what you do. You no longer have to find these hypothetical big transformation dollars to power things forward.

TC:
Right, there is a power and data and the quantitative piece to that really helps HR professionals and other business leaders get their points across and get their budgets approved and it makes me think too about like, what you would say the biggest areas of opportunity to improve? Like, you know, whether it’s business and employee performance in this area or this arena. And, you know, especially considering the way that work environments have changed, like we have remote, we have hybrid, we have in person, we have people who are worried about AI taking over their jobs, right, like there’s so much coming down this, you know, this pipeline, so to speak, in the ever-changing work environment. So, what are the biggest areas of opportunity?

CM:
There still is a very big stream of central investments to try to lift up all boats in terms of experience. So, digitizing a bunch of stuff that is right now manual, you know, overtime does help do that. And that’s run centrally with COEs and HR strategy and et cetera. But where we see a lot of opportunity actually is more in business units for these large companies, where you have P&L owners, who have, I don’t know, a billion-dollar business unit with, let’s say, 10-15,000 employees, and where attrition really bites, right? So, attrition and productivity are basically these folks, you know, and that’s a make or break. From their perspective, there’s really no good solution that HR has come up with to resolve these things. But it’s been very, there’s been a lot of effort, right? So, it’s not for lack of effort or lack of trying, but things haven’t really moved about it. You look at quit rates in North America have kept increasing for the past 10 years, right, and engagement that kept decreasing. In a way, what is it that in the business – not at the corporate strategic strategy level – but in the business, what is it that they can do differently? And what we find with our customers is, essentially, the activities that are the most fraught with friction are a combination of “HR things” like finding a career path in the company, but also, “Business-driven things” like my workflow, the things I do, when I try to, I don’t know, resolve a customer issue, I don’t have the information I need, I can’t get the approval fast enough to solve the problem for my customer. These kinds of things are actually owned by the business.

If you want to reduce friction for employees that are at the coalface customer facing, and that are really driving the business, you have to be able to solve at the HR and at the business level. And usually, business units are the best place to do that. So, there’s actually huge opportunity there to make an impact and for some of our customers, there’s been a tremendous uptick in retention rates, and also in productivity and, overall, like just health of the business by removing things that no one knew were broken. But then when you uncover them, and it kind of like frees people’s ability to just do that work, which is kind of what they all want. 

TC:
Right, at the end of the day that’s you know, it’s your point, it’s already hard enough let’s just keep everything else as easy as possible. And, this example that you’ve used around like the internal mobility and promotion opportunities it’s such a good example because it is, I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company that has gotten it a 100% right or should say nor have I seen a company not have this issues because you know it’s like I don’t what it is, I don’t know if it’s a mentality thing or if it’s just you know we forget the value that we place on positions like I think about when a company has an open role and they have hundreds and hundreds of employees and maybe five people say hey I’m really interested in this role and then we make it more difficult for our internal employees than we do for an external candidate. And it comes down to this like almost this notion of how do companies set up their processes in recruitment so that they are prioritizing internal candidates before external candidates, you know, it’s such a great example.

CM:
There’s a backdrop to that. First of all, every company out there – every large company – says you should come and work for me. I’m big, and I’m gonna offer you great growth opportunities, right? That’s the EVP statement which makes sense. You’re big, therefore it’s gonna be, maybe it’s gonna be more bureaucratic, maybe it’s not gonna be quite as fun as a smaller one but I’m going to have plenty of places to go and then you show up there and no one talks to you about your career for the next three years. Now, I mentioned about my son like you know people don’t have that kind of patience they are like well this was just a promise that was not kept.

The reason why companies struggle with it is  because it’s really complex when you really think about the both the experience of an individual in a big company thinking about their next role right just thinking about it is already an activity in itself and then evaluating what could be the things I could do and what things do I need to learn to be able to go do it and who should I talk to about it, and what my manager is going to say about it, and what was the career framework at the company suggest I should be doing, and where I can go and then the career portal that shows me available jobs, and then the talent acquisition team that I need to go and interact with. As a former CHRO looking into these kinds of things from the top, you don’t know where it breaks, you can only see the result which is that people are not unhappy with it but which part of all these things and all these services essentially breaking down.  

That is what FOUNT actually does which is to essentially illuminate, it’s almost like an x-ray of in all the systems that provide these experiences, here’s where the friction occurs so you can root it out.  That is perhaps one of the most acute examples that frustrates employees and that employers again are aware of the problem, but actually are not really sure how to address it. And buying another talent platform may help, but who knows? Until you know what problem you solve, you’re still you know guessing.

TC:
It’s so true and like anything else there are leaders who are better at focusing on talent development and career development than others and so there are teams that probably do a really great job of this and really focus on having those questions in every discussion, what you know how are you feeling in your career what do you see for yourself what areas of development do you have and then there’s that like that micro-element there where it’s the employee and their manager and then there’s the macro which is the company’s strategy around talent development and so it is an acute example and it’s great one.

CM:
I’m happy to move town if you’d like, but like if you think about this example, you’re touching on a really important thing which is the role of managers and all this. Managers end up being a friction absorber. In other words, they’re the ones that take an environment that makes it difficult for people to pursue a new job. It’s not them doing it on purpose – its inadvertently making it difficult – and managers are compensating for that by being extra good at doing what you described. But that’s only unicorn managers, that’s the 20% of managers we all wish we had everywhere, but the 80% doesn’t do that. The real issue is how do we make the system work for people without having managers having to be heroic at all times in work. That’s a great example where all the wires that I described earlier plus more can be designed and optimized to provide support to someone who wants to figure out a career, you just have to know what to fix and how to build it.

TC:
Right. I guess to wrap us up here because you’ve shared so many wonderful insights and really it’s a great topic for everyone to think about how we reduce work friction and those opportunities, what would you say for those who are in HR or other areas of the business leadership who are listening, what would you say should be you know or what would you advise should be their first focus to reduce work friction? What are some actions items or steps they can take today?

CM:
I was a business leader for many, many years before I became CHRO. There is real tension between HR and the business of whose fault is it. And just acknowledging that the fault is shared and actually you know we have 5 million data points that show us that it is shared accountability between the things that the business owns and the things that HR own. Therefore, the only solution is going to be a collaborative one. In other words, both the business and HR putting their heads together to solve the most important friction points for employees – That’s thing one.

Thing two is work friction is one of the rare things that can rally both chief financial officers and CEOs but people who care about productivity and people who care about employees’ well-being. Employees themselves hate work friction. CFOs hate two hours of work wasted a day so. How often is there a common cause like that you can rally around to go and tackle together with employees? That’s thing two.

Thing three is the best way to understand work friction is from employees. It means that acknowledge that HR teams even those that are close to the frontline usually don’t quite know where exactly is it and they certainly can’t quantify it. And if you can’t quantify anything, it’s very hard to get the organization focused on resolving it. I think that would be the last thing is get essentially friction data that shows the rest of the organization the opportunity that resides in some of these friction points so that you can galvanize action and measure results. Maybe the final message on it is it’s not an unsolvable problem, it’s one of these things that’s been around for ages that’s becoming more and more pressing. Right now everyone is just saying, “well you know it’s kind of the lay of the land, we have attrition rates at 30 plus percent in our frontline teams, it’s been that way for the past five years…” Actually, that can be curved if tackling work friction so it no longer is an unsolvable problem.

TC:
Right, which provides a lot of hope for organizations right?

CM:
Exactly, that’s right.

TC:
It’s something that we can we can solve, it might not be easy but it can it can be solved with the right data and I love this concept of you know this aligning mission and something that unites the various areas of the business on one common ground so that’s amazing and  Christophe, I really appreciate you joining the podcast and sharing all of your wise words and wisdom and insights with us, where can the listeners connect with you and learn more about FOUNT?

CM:
So, on our website, LinkedIn with me, I don’t know, write to me about anything but I think the website is perhaps the best path.

TC:
Perfect and for everyone listening we have all the links linked in the show notes so you can get connected to Christophe and to learn more about FOUNT just click the link to the website and have a great time learning more about what it is that they do. Christophe, thank you so much again and really appreciate your time.

CM:
Thank you, Traci, great to be here.

About Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources

People are at the center of every business–or at least they should be. “Bringing the Human back to Human Resources” is a podcast hosted by Traci Chernoff, a Senior Director of Employee Engagement, who has spent 10 years in critical HR leadership roles. Traci explores the delicate balance between people and business and destigmatizes what it means to be in “Human Resources”.

Every organization struggles with work friction. It is both ubiquitous and perceived as insurmountable. For large companies with many thousands of employees, the challenge grows exponentially.

Work friction is tied not just to productivity and profit, but to many of their drivers, like employee satisfaction, engagement, well-being, burnout, retention, attraction, likelihood to recommend, and a host of other individual and business outcomes. This white paper offers a clear and comprehensive definition of work friction, broken down into its individual components.

You will learn:

• What work friction is and why it matters
• The difference and relationship between work and organizational friction
• The Top 5 questions people ask about work friction

Are you ready to reduce friction and get work flowing at your organization? Contact us to learn more or book a demo.

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