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In a recent article for CEO Forum magazine, Assurant COO Francesca Luthi made the case that today’s COO’s have a complex, multi-dimensional mandate that includes driving digital transformation, cultural engagement, and improved customer and employee experiences, all while maintaining operational excellence and hitting growth targets.

The piece emphasizes that the COO role is complex in part because COOs are responsible for technology, talent, and transformation – that is, because “operations” includes virtually every aspect of an organization.

What we really like about it is Luthi’s inclusion of employee experience as a key component of overall operational excellence. Often, organizations emphasize customer experience but ignore or gloss over that of employees – a huge oversight, as far as we’re concerned. After all, organizational productivity is directly tied to individual effectiveness. And individual effectiveness is a function of overall employee experience.

In this piece, we’ll explain how multi-dimensional COOs can support organizational excellence by incorporating strategic, analytics-powered listening practices.

“What You Should Do” vs. “What Should I Do?”

In many organizations, COOs are tasked with improving organizational productivity. To achieve that, many assume the role of superior, telling employees what they should do: to be more productive, we’re going to use this new software. Or: to increase productivity, everyone will get certified in X skill.

This approach assumes that the leader knows what will work for every employee and that policy and process decisions should come from the top down.

Progressive leaders take a markedly different approach. Instead of mandating what their employees should do, they ask employees what they as leaders can do to help boost productivity.

Instead of assuming the leader has some special knowledge, this approach acknowledges the reality that workers in any given role are the ones with the most visibility into their daily tasks – and therefore into the barriers preventing them from doing those tasks efficiently. Put differently, this approach recognizes that workers are the ones best equipped to highlight sources of work friction.

Once you hear it, it sounds intuitive, right? Ask employees what’s not working, then fix those things and individual effectiveness and organizational productivity improve. But in practice, of course, that’s not easy to do. COOs can’t realistically ask thousands of employees what’s blocking them and then fix every single thing that comes up.

So let’s take a look at how to implement this strategy across a large, complex organization.

Analyzing Answer Data to Create Actionable Steps

When COOs listen to what their employees need and then address those needs, it improves productivity – but it also demonstrates that the COO cares about their workers. FOUNT offers a systematic way to demonstrate that care.

Our system starts with talking to leadership to get a sense of the problem they’re trying to solve. When we have a problem statement (“increase productivity,” “reduce input waste,” “use less energy,” etc.), we then examine the organizational structure to understand who does what.

From there, we conduct brief surveys with targeted employees. We take their answers and, using proprietary algorithms fueled by more than seven million data points about work friction, we identify solutions and rank them by potential impact.

Leaders walk away with not only objective data about where the biggest problems exist for their teams but also a data-backed guide to prioritizing solutions based on their expected ROI.

A Scalable Way to Address Inefficiencies

To understand why this approach to complex organizational problems works so well, it helps to contrast it to the default approach in many organizations. In addition to being top-down, the solutions behind many digital transformations tend to be additive: additional software, new processes, extra meetings.

This tendency is so common, in fact, there’s a name for it: addition sickness. If your organization is guilty of forever adding new things, don’t beat yourself up: when we’re presented with problems, we as a species are wired to think first of solutions that involve adding new things.

In many cases, though, problems can be solved by eliminating rather than adding.

When you approach problems from the ground floor, by asking the people most directly involved with those problems what’s causing them, you flip the script on the traditional approach. You also open yourself to solutions you may not have otherwise considered.

The impact on both productivity and ROI can be significant. When every employee is empowered to be more effective, the organization as a whole becomes more productive. And when you’re confident that you’re enacting the most impactful changes, you reach your expected ROI more quickly.

Organizational Excellence Can’t Ignore Employees

As the COO becomes responsible for ever more facets of an organization, prioritizing employee experience becomes essential: digital transformation can’t happen if employees aren’t willing to embrace new products; cultural engagement won’t happen if employees don’t feel that their insights and opinions matter; customers won’t have good experiences if they’re engaging with distressed front-line workers or using products built by an ever-rotating cast of back-end developers; growth targets are impossible to reach unless every employee can perform at the top of their ability.

In other words, employees are an essential component of organizational excellence. COOs who recognize that and find ways to not only gather data on employee experience but also turn that data into actionable insights to move the organization forward will be the ones with the greatest success in their complex, multi-dimensional roles.

Ready to start listening to your employees systematically? Get in touch. We’d love to help you take the next step.

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.

If you’ve shepherded your org through a digital transformation, there’s a good chance you’ve come up against a common roadblock: change resistance.

Whether it’s a new IT policy, a different benefits provider, or even a lineup switch in the breakroom vending machine, employees tend to get comfortable with what they know. And they often bristle at the notion of anything that might threaten that familiarity. 

There’s a reason change resistance is so common – after all, it’s rooted in simple human nature. But this phenomenon can be absolutely fatal for digital transformation projects, which don’t just have “change” in the definition, but also rely heavily on employee buy-in. 

That said, resistance to change doesn’t need to be a death knell for your digital transformation projects. With a proactive approach, you can better understand why employees push back and find ways to address concerns before they threaten a project’s success. Here are three common sources of change resistance to keep an eye out for – and a few ideas on how to manage them.

1. A Conservative Business Mindset 

A cautious organizational culture has its advantages when navigating, say, a thicket of regulations or an economic downturn. But it tends to have drawbacks when trying to usher in major internal changes – especially when the goal is to improve productivity, efficiency, and employee satisfaction. 

In fact, a conservative business mindset among employees is probably one of the more difficult sources of change resistance to overcome. That’s because it’s not necessarily something you want to eliminate across the board; you want your team to be cautious when necessary but also have an open mind about experimenting with new digital tools.

You don’t have to convince employees to throw caution to the wind, though, to get buy-in for a digital transformation. The more effective move: show them how each change will impact their day-to-day work experience. That means communicating…

• The everyday problems you’re trying to solve.
• How new digital tools will make their lives easier.
• What to expect at every stage of your digital transformation.

When employees can picture how they stand to benefit from a digital transformation, they’ll be more likely (and perhaps even eager) to embrace new tech.

2. Change = Uncertainty

Comfort is an underrated aspect of employee satisfaction, and uncertainty tends to be the enemy of comfort. It’s no wonder, then, why digital transformations spark resistance: disrupting the status quo is uncomfortable, and there’s no foolproof way to predict how things will turn out.For employees, a transformation gone wrong is a particularly scary prospect. It could mean… 

• Frustrating workarounds (or even more actual work) if a new tool doesn’t meet their needs.
• Disruptive processes that can be difficult to adjust to.
• A threat to their job security if they take too long to adapt.

These are all valid concerns – and it’s important to uncover them early on instead of letting them fester in the dark. Our recommendation? Find out where employees experience work friction and where they’re worried it will crop up. This way, you can tailor your digital transformation to employees’ most serious problems. As you implement new tools and processes, make sure to gather employee feedback so you can keep a pulse on what is and isn’t working.

Although the way forward might not be set in stone, this collaborative approach can help your team feel more confident in the direction of your digital transformation. Over time, you’ll likely drum up interest and excitement in the changes to come. 

3. A Lack of Preparation and Training

Employees tend to resist digital transformations when they feel blindsided by a change or have to scramble to adjust to new ways of working. If they don’t have enough time to learn new processes and tools, then transformation is almost certain to create more work friction, not less. Employees might resort to time-consuming workarounds in order to get work done. Or worse, they’ll abandon the tools you’ve invested in altogether.

That’s why it’s important to build in enough time for adequate training and education. .

To prepare your employees for the changes coming their way, make sure to…

• Set defined training guideposts along the digital transformation journey.
• Provide tools to aid their transition (from training videos to wikis and FAQs).
• Allow enough runway to adapt their way of working.

The likely result: a digital transformation that’s better poised to actually improve the employee experience.

The Common Denominator: Communication

While the sources of change resistance above each come with their own unique challenges, they all share a common solution: great communication.

Clear, honest, and frequent communication creates a sense of transparency. And transparency keeps employees from thinking you’re holding back information, being deliberately opaque, or dancing around uncomfortable topics – all surefire ways to create pushback.

But effective communication is a two-way street. Engage in a dialogue with employees by…

• Pinpointing sources of work friction in their day-to-day work.
• Listening to their concerns via targeted surveys.
• Explaining the reasoning behind each new process or tool.
• Clarifying changes to your transformation roadmap.

Effective communication will help maximize the chances of success for your digital transformation project. After all, if a major change was going to impact customers or clients, you’d want to give them all the details up front and continuously gather feedback. You should strive to do the same, then, for your employees – who are, after all, the backbone of your organization. 

You may not always have the answers your employees want. But your willingness to include them in your digital transformation strategy will go a long way toward inspiring openness instead of resistance.

Clear Your Path to Digital Transformation

Digital transformations are hard enough to get right. But change resistance doesn’t have to stand in the way of success. With the right tools, you can uncover the biggest drivers of resistance at your organization and tailor your digital transformation strategy to overcome those barriers.

Start that journey with FOUNT’s work friction software. If you’re ready to clear your path forward, get in touch.

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

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

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

What Even Is Work Friction?

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

Examples of work friction include:

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

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

What Causes Work Friction?

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

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

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

Some specific causes of work friction include:

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

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

How Work Friction Creates Inefficiencies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Spot Work Friction

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

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

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

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

Indicators of work friction include:

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

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

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

What Is Work Friction Intelligence?

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

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

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

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

Incremental Steps to Take to Smooth Out Work Friction

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

Here’s how you can resolve workplace friction.

Identify Areas Where Friction Occurs

The first step to solving any problem is identifying it.

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

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

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

Collect and Analyze Employee Feedback

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

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

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

Create and Implement Solutions

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

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

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

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

Measuring The Impact Of Your Efforts

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting Work Friction Before It Becomes a Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Started With A Free Demo Today

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

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

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

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

Podcast Transcript in English

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nils: Can you elaborate on how your platform works? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the Podcast in German:

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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.

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.

In many industries, leaders measure employees’ success by productivity – i.e., how much work they output on a daily basis. But in office-type jobs, productivity may not be the best metric to track. After all, a developer could produce code 10 times faster than their peers, but what if they’re building a feature that nobody ends up using? They’re productive, but not effective.

In this piece, we’ll explain how leaders can measure and improve effectiveness by looking first at work friction. From there, we’ll explain how understanding friction and its impact on effectiveness can make it much easier to make high-stakes digital transformation decisions.

Effectiveness vs. Productivity: When to Measure Each

If you’re confident that everyone at your organization is producing the exact right outputs, then tracking productivity makes sense. Boost productivity, and you’ll grow revenue. But outside of manufacturing contexts, it’s often difficult to know whether a given employee’s “outputs” are the most effective for your big-picture organizational goals.

Take call center employees, for example. Call center leaders typically measure things like average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR). The implication is that agents who can handle calls more quickly – i.e., the ones who are most productive – are doing the best work.

But what if there’s a more effective way to handle customer questions? Banks figured this out years ago with the introduction of online self-service portals. Today, it’s rare for a banking customer to have to call a human agent at all – most everyday transactions can be handled online.

To close the loop: even the most productive agent in the world couldn’t help customers as quickly – or as effectively – as customers can help themselves via an online portal. This example seems obvious in hindsight, but it’s less clear how other industries might enjoy similar gains in effectiveness via digital transformation. Could every call center benefit from a customer service portal? Probably not.

The best way to get clarity on how to make a team more effective at any given organization is to look at work friction data.

How to Measure Effectiveness via Work Friction Data

Let’s return to that call center. You’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your agents. To do that, you can measure work friction. This starts by asking agents about their daily tasks: where do things flow well? Where do things tend to get blocked?

Work friction can come from any person, process, or technology that prevents workers from doing their jobs.

Maybe, for example, you work for a telecommunications company and your agents are often troubleshooting customers’ internet setups. Your workers say that their biggest challenge is that customers don’t know what things are called, so they can’t accurately describe their problems and agents can’t be confident that customers are troubleshooting correctly.

In that scenario, one solution might be a video call function that lets agents see what customers see instantly, mark up the screen, and verify that customers are troubleshooting correctly. This would let them be more judicious about sending repair crews, which could save your organization the cost of excess truck rolls.

Or maybe you work for a retail giant and your technology systems are top-of-the-line, but you still have high turnover on your call center team. When you talk to agents, you discover that many are frustrated that their managers aren’t equipped to discuss internal career paths with them – they joined your organization with the hopes of rising through the ranks.

When they realize you have no formal path for career advancement, agents become discouraged and seek that trajectory elsewhere.

In that case, the digital transformation that would let your agents be more effective might be a formalized policy for discussing career goals with a manager and training for different paths within the organization. This, after all, would improve retention, which would mean fewer rookie agents at any given time.

Remove Work Friction, Boost Effectiveness

The key difference between productivity and effectiveness is that productivity measures output but not whether that output is the right output to achieve larger organizational goals. Effectiveness is a bigger-picture measure. 

Another way to think about it: productivity focuses on how individuals are performing, while effectiveness considers the environment they’re working in.

Let’s return to the telecoms call center agent who’s struggling to communicate with customers about their Wi-Fi setup. After the introduction of video call features, calls are resolved more quickly and more accurately, which makes customers happier (faster resolutions, shorter wait times, better outcomes).

In facilitating customer resolutions, the technology reduces agent stress and prevents burnout and turnover. The new call format reduces the number of technicians your organization has to send out, which saves money and time and lightens the workload of your current techs, which, again, prevents burnout and turnover.

These benefits mean your organization as a whole has to spend less on recruitment and training, which means you have more money to make other improvements.

Similarly, the retail agents who now have regular career conversations stay with your organization longer. They move through it internally, which reduces recruitment and training costs while also bringing valuable internal perspectives to different departments. You earn a reputation of investing in your people and promoting from within, which makes it easier to recruit people for entry-level roles. Again, the organization as a whole benefit.

To Be Effective, Employees Need Supportive Environments

The model of employee experience that held sway a few years ago focused almost entirely on the employee: what can we do to make this person happier and more engaged so they can be more productive?

There’s some value there, of course, but focusing on people without also looking at their environment can lead to investing in the wrong things.

By zooming out to consider effectiveness – not only whether the employee is producing at the top of their capacity but also that you have structured their work (including the technology, processes, and people involved in that work) to deliver as much value as possible to your organization as a whole – you can create a much stronger, more resilient organization.

Curious about how to measure the work friction preventing your employees from being effective? Get in touch. We’d love to help you assess.

In the first part of this series, we explored how missing data can cause teams to waste hours creating workarounds. Now, we’re taking a look at another common source of work friction: the company reorg.

Why do company reorgs so often cause work friction? Because they tend to focus on top-level needs: easier communication, greater efficiency, a simpler hierarchy, etc. They happen in response to how the business as an entity has evolved over time – but they rarely take into account how the big-picture changes will impact daily life for employees.

That can cause problems when changes roll out. One large enterprise (which we’ll call Company Z) experienced this firsthand following a major HR reorg: in trying to simplify HR operations with new digital tools, they inadvertently created a whole category of new headaches for workers. The good news: by digging into work friction data, they were able to identify the root cause of the problem and confidently take steps to address it.

Let’s take a look at Company Z’s story.

The Moment of Friction: Navigating a New HR App

At the heart of Company Z’s reorg was a push toward digital transformation. The company knew it could use emerging AI software to automate some of HR’s simpler tasks. With the extra bandwidth, HR employees could dedicate more time to employees’ most complex problems, meaning the department overall could be more productive.

So, Company Z rolled out a self-service app that functioned as the first point of contact for every HR need. In theory, the plan made perfect sense and mimicked the model that we’ve all become familiar with as consumers.

In practice, though, the app fell short of expectations. When it didn’t have an answer, it would sometimes direct employees to email addresses – but when employees contacted those addresses, they sometimes got messages indicating they were no longer monitored.

To complicate matters further, the HR reorg also involved changing the HR team’s operational structure. Instead of working on specific HR functions (like talent acquisition or learning and development), employees were assigned to individual business units. So, it wasn’t always clear who in the company employees should contact when the app wasn’t helpful.

As a result, employees ended up going to their managers with their unresolved HR questions, thus creating a lot of extra work for those managers.

The Cost: A Productivity Crisis

Shortly after the app rolled out, Company Z realized it had a productivity crisis on its hands. To understand why, let’s look at one example of what the app’s shortcomings might lead to.

Imagine an employee whose paycheck is incorrect – they’ve been underpaid for hours worked. They share their problem with the self-service chatbot, which points them to a payroll email which they contact. The email is unmonitored. They then email their manager, who agrees to escalate the problem – only the manager is also unclear who to bring it to.

Now the employee has lost time trying to resolve the issue and the manager is going to lose additional time. The employee, meanwhile, is likely not focused on their current work – and likely won’t be until they have a satisfactory answer.

Luckily, Company Z’s leaders were familiar with the concept of work friction. When evidence of the productivity crisis emerged, they knew they could dig into work friction data to get answers. So, they launched targeted surveys to assess where work friction was showing up for employees.

Their goal: to determine whether the problem was the app itself (i.e., it wasn’t doing what it needed to do) or the rollout (i.e., they hadn’t prepared everyone adequately for the new app-first processes).

The Findings: The App (Not Its Rollout) Was to Blame

The surveys’ work friction data revealed that the app was the main cause of lost productivity.

Because workers weren’t getting what they needed from the app, managers wound up fielding dozens of HR-related questions and concerns. That took time away from their actual day-to-day duties, compounding the productivity crisis. And the data showed that managers were least likely to recommend the HR app to a colleague.

That provided a clear mandate for Company Z: get to work improving the app’s functionality and clarifying chains of communication for questions the app cannot answer.

Of course, looking at this story through a work friction lens, it’s tempting to ask what might have happened if Company Z had used work friction data to guide their reorg from the start? 

Perhaps leaders could have rolled out their app to a small group of workers and asked them about their biggest friction points. Or maybe they could have asked HR employees if the new model created any communication gaps – and used that data to tweak operations.

In either case, the company could have saved time, effort, and money, making for a much more cost-effective reorg overall.

Don’t Ignore Your Employees’ Needs

Company reorganizations, of course, can be powerful. But ignore how large structural reorganizations impact individual employees, and you’re bound to run into problems. Expensive, lingering problems.

The next time you undergo a reorg, consider looping employees into the process early on. Test solutions with small groups. Gather feedback. Act on it. And repeat, repeat, repeat, at every phase of implementation.

With this approach, it’s a lot easier to get what you want out of a reorg. And your employees will waste less work in the process.

If you’re not sure how to get started, FOUNT can help. Let’s start a conversation – we’d love to hear from you.