Resources

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”.

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

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

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

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

Preventive vs Urgent Care

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

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

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

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

Employers Believe Employees Are Primarily Responsible for Their Own Wellness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The relationship between work friction and wellness

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

Financial and material stability

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

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

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

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

Mental Health

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

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

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

Physical Health

“Employees are getting hurt on the job.”

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

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

Formation and maintenance of close social relationships

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

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

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

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

Minimize Work Friction or Maximize the Wellness Program

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES:

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

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.

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 the form below.

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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.

This article, Arbeitsfriktion ist schlecht fürs Geschäft (Work Friction is Bad for Business), by Volker Jacobs, originally appeared in German on The Future of HR website.

It’s a paradox: teams tasked to create better employee experiences still tend to prioritize the organization over the employees they’re meant to support. The reason? A pain point business leaders have until now overlooked: work friction. The reality is that work friction is bad for business because it creates poor employee experiences – and remains a hurdle all leaders must overcome.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, human resources (HR) managers, like all people, have wrestled with what we’ve come to accept as the “new normal.” One part of this reality: employees pay increasing attention to how, where, and when they work. As a result, many businesses have rebranded their HR function to focus on employee experiences (EX). 

While that rebrand hasn’t entirely refocused the traditional HR mandate “to do more with less,” it has redefined the terms. Better experiences, the idea goes, deepen employees’ investment in their workplace and elevate organizational performance. So the trend to prioritize EX – and in turn, create better experiences for less money – certainly sounds like a good idea.

But look a bit closer and it’s easy to see an ever-widening gap between this new strategy and demonstrable results. Teams tasked to create better employee experiences still tend to prioritize the organization first and foremost. The fact is, this top-down focus occurs at the expense of the organization’s employees.

The reason? A pain point that impacts almost all employees (and organizations): work friction.

If the concept is new to you, you’re not alone. But once you know how to identify work friction, you’ll understand why it’s so consequential and be better positioned to address it. In this piece, I’ll introduce work friction – and highlight how anything that makes an employee’s job harder is bad for business.

What is Work Friction?

If you’re familiar with Lean, Six Sigma, or Agile methodologies, you’re likely wondering: what leader doesn’t already focus on how to minimize friction? And there’s no doubt about it: most executives already work to identify and eliminate points of resistance in order to optimize productivity throughout their organization.

But even those most successful at addressing organizational friction regularly miss opportunities to eliminate work friction. In fact, chances are they’re unaware of the misstep.

Work friction – defined as the energy an employee expends to overcome resistance they feel disrupts their pursuit of a goal – is unique in its focus on employees’ efforts and energy rather than on organizational pain points.

Put simply, work friction is any task that makes an employee’s job harder. Consider an employee tasked to write an internal company newsletter. In spite of their goals, they may spend their work day:

• Triaging emails or Slack messages that don’t specifically require their response.
• Contacting payroll about a recurring error in their biweekly paycheck.
• Reaching out to a colleague to interview them about their individual role in the organization without receiving a reply.

Each example above is an instance of work friction. Each requires the employee to expend unnecessary energy on a task (e.g., emailing) that doesn’t apply to their goal (drafting the newsletter) and prevents them from efficiently completing their work. 

Naturally, any impact to employee productivity has a corresponding impact on organizational output. When companies take steps to identify and eliminate work friction for individual employees, they improve the experiences for all stakeholders throughout the organization, from customers to senior leadership. This is what the fundamentals of EX get right. 

But today’s EX teams tend to miss a simple truth: if employee experiences are paramount, it’s simply good business to identify and eliminate elements that hinder individual employee productivity. Next, let’s look at how to identify work friction in your organization.

To Identify Work Friction, Focus on Employees’ Personal Stories

In order to identify work friction, learn about the moments in your employees’ days that prevent them from completing their goals. To be sure: don’t assume your aptitude for identifying organizational friction means you’ll efficiently root out work friction. One efficient way to dive into the differences? Listen to employees’ stories about their experiences at work. Then, use what you’ve learned from these stories to make these work experiences better.

Say that your company finds it difficult to retain recent hires. To determine why, you develop a hypothesis that your onboarding service is the issue. However, looked at from the new joiner’s perspective, it is not only the onboarding service that is important for them in their first months with the company. It is the new job they’ve signed up for as well. So onboarding becomes “begin to work” and encompasses the company’s onboarding services and the job itself. 

Once you’ve developed your hypothesis, the next step is to test it. You might, for example, start with a targeted survey to (some of the) employees who were recently hired. This gathers information relevant to testing your hypothesis (i.e., that there is an element of friction in the “begin to work” that impacts employee retention). And it prevents additional work friction (that is, requiring employees to respond to surveys that are not relevant to them.

To test your hypothesis and determine the exact source of work friction, ask employees about:

• Their goals. 
• What they feel disrupts their pursuit of their goals. 
• What steps they take (i.e., what energy they expend) to overcome disruptions.

The goals, disruptions, and efforts employees take to overcome disruptions are the heart of work friction – and the key for how to address it. Next, let’s look at how to minimize or remove work friction after you have identified it.

Prioritize Individual Points of Disruption

So you’ve tested your hypothesis. You’ve solicited and listened to your employees’ stories. And you’ve identified disruptions. Your next step should be to surgically remove work friction, right?  Truthfully, the answer isn’t so easy. Your employees are people, after all, and so what works for one may not work well for another. 

The way this looks differs across different industries, too. Solutions for the knowledge worker’s work friction outlined earlier in this article, for example, might not be helpful for entry-level employees in a call center. Remember, disruption is any element that makes it harder for an employee to do their work. Individual employees’ work is always key to addressing work friction. 

For the next step to turn work friction insights into action – and develop correspondingly targeted solutions – continue to work with your employees. For example, if you work in a call center, you could invite six call center agents and two of their team leaders to participate in two focus group sessions. In this case, one group would focus on validating the findings from the survey. The other would focus on ideating solutions that actually work for them.

Recently hired agents who work remotely, for instance, might say that a limited capacity of subject matter experts to help with resolving customer issues makes it tough for them to feel supported in their new roles. As a result, you might increase the allocated time of experts to support entry level agents. Then, you can follow up with those agents a few months later to see whether that improved their experiences in the workplace.

Work Friction Fighters Demonstrate Success with Data 

As with any new process, it’s understandable that HR and EX teams aren’t yet set up to fight work friction on their own. Rather, they need expertise and resources from other areas such as IT, work planning, facilities management and, of course, leadership. And that means they need a tech solution that connects improvement processes across teams.

There’s no “secret sauce” that can eliminate all work friction. But a deft approach to gathering, analyzing, and discussing employee data can help organizations identify, avoid, and remove many points of disruption. To develop the best strategy, assemble a x-functional friction fighter team and…

• Identify and prioritize work friction employees experience.
• Equip friction fighter teams with meaningful insights to reduce work friction.
• Measure the impact that friction removal has on business outcomes.

The right technology, of course, can help demonstrate that friction has actually been reduced. What’s more: it can demonstrate the impact that reduction has on metrics including productivity, customer experience, and attrition to sustain successes across the organization.

Even though work friction is bad for business, it doesn’t have to be bad for your business. Request a demo of FOUNT and learn how to get started quickly.

If you’ve been following FOUNT, you already know our employees are full of moxie. Earlier this year, we were fortunate to be named a 2023 Moxie Award Finalist. We are listed alongside an impressive list of organizations including Clutch, Montgomery County Green Bank, AttainX, The Motley Fool Foundation, and many more.

The Moxie Award program celebrates boldness in business by honoring the accomplishments and achievements of growing businesses, nonprofits and associations in the DC metro community. Earlier this year, Co-founder and CEO, Christophe Martel, met with the finalist committee including TJ Wilkinson, Ian Joseph, and Ron Kosmahl. They summarized:

FOUNT is on a mission to tackle this challenge head-on. It offers innovative SaaS solutions that help companies identify and eliminate workplace friction, making work smoother and more enjoyable. Unmanaged friction costs companies millions annually through attrition, burnout, and wasted productivity.

Applicants were evaluated on innovation, growth, industry leadership, community service and local achievements in a multi-step process:

• Applications were reviewed by the finalist committee
• Finalists will be visited by members of the finalist committee for a 30-60 minute in-person interview.
• The official applications and feedback from the finalist committee interviews will be provided to the judges for evaluation.

FOUNT was named a Moxie Award finalist in the Technology (< 50 employees) category and we’re up against stiff competition! Other companies in our category include Business Engineering, Calypso AI, Enabled Intelligence, SC Solutions, Inc. dba “SpaceChain”, SHIFT, Summit Space Corporation, vTech Solution, Inc. and Walacor Corp.

Judges are part of the Washington, D.C. community and are selected for their business acumen and success in their respective industries. They are looking for companies that are bold, innovative and show Moxie! Obviously, we believe we ooze moxie. After all, what is bolder than trying to make work better for millions of people? Work friction is something every working person has experienced and we’re dedicated to reducing frustration, burnout and stalled productivity.

Winners will be revealed at the Awards Ceremony and Dinner at the Ritz-Carlton Tysons on October 25, 2023. FOUNT’s Chief Experience Officer, Anne Eidelman, and Solutions Analyst, Britnie Smith, are Puttin’ on the Ritz and representing FOUNT at this event. We’re beyond thrilled to be a finalist and a participant. We are also looking forward to meeting the other finalists, judges and sponsors. Please wish us luck! 🤞

Want to see our moxie in action? Book a demo of FOUNT!

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.

The FOUNT team will be dusting off their white blazers and sunglasses in preparation for next week’s Business Transformation Exchange in Miami. Unlike vice cops Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, Ian and Christophe won’t be working undercover. Instead, they will be introducing senior business leaders to innovative ways to uncover work friction at their organizations.

Work friction is perceived as energy an employee shouldn’t have to spend to do their work. Even with the best intentions to make work easy for employees, large organizations may inadvertently contribute more work friction to the environment. Outdated processes, faulty tools and misaligned workflows slow people down. These things are invisible to senior leaders but experienced in moments as individuals go about their day-to-day work (e.g. solving a customer issue, setting goals, pursuing a new internal role).

Gartner estimates that employees spend nearly 2 hours a day hacking work to get around work friction. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort. When the work environment makes it difficult to complete everyday work things, employees get frustrated, disengage and eventually burn out. This enormous productivity loss is preventable.

Done well, business transformation leads to more efficient ways of working and a more productive workforce. Even though business transformation projects are typically large scale, real transformation can begin with a small project focused on the most important things your employees care about and want you to fix. Before you consider embarking on a transformational project, book a demo to learn how friction management can get work flowing at your organization.

The Business Transformation Exchange is an invite-only event features speakers from Centene, US Bank and Manulife. The program will cover a range of topics including how to:

• Put effective strategy and structure in place before delving into large transformation projects
• Demonstrate ROI to gain C-suite support and buy-in
• Manage people within the company, and adopt a change culture throughout the whole business
• Balance technology options and maximize their potential in the digital transformation age, including discussions on Generative AI

The product takes a novel approach to addressing the two sides of poor business and employee performance resulting from wasted work

WASHINGTON D.C.—September 19, 2023—FOUNT Global, Inc. (https://getfount.com) today announced the release of its namesake SaaS platform, the first-ever work friction management solution that identifies solvable points of friction in everyday work moments and helps prioritize the most impactful fixes. FOUNT helps organizations surface and resolve misaligned jobs, policies, technologies, and processes that generate the most resistance for individuals in their day-to-day work.

Employees experience work friction when accomplishing a goal takes more energy than they feel it should. Gartner estimates two-thirds of employees waste up to 2 hours per day working around unnecessary friction. Work friction is a major driver of stalled productivity and a quit rate that has more than doubled in the last decade despite increasing investment in HR and process improvement tools. 

“Work dysfunction is a phenomenon that both pre-dates and persists after the pandemic, and it’s getting worse, particularly for large organizations,” said Christophe Martel, Co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc. “Two hours of wasted work per employee per day costs the average Fortune 500 business $359 million a year, and also leads to frustration, burnout and eventual attrition, which compounds the negative effect on business performance and customer experience. FOUNT is filling a gap in the broader landscape of work technology by focusing on the root cause of impediments to performance and progress.”

“Unmanaged friction costs €158 million per 10k employees, through attrition, burnout, and wasted productivity,” said FOUNT Co-founder Volker Jacobs. “Work culture, values, policies and legislation vary across Europe which means causes of friction also vary. FOUNT is unique in its ability to help large organizations solve for these differences at all levels.”  

Because work friction is typically only visible to those doing the work, FOUNT’s approach is centered on what people do every day and when the work environment supports or hinders them. High-fidelity visualizations and configurable dashboards prioritize where companies can make meaningful and measurable improvements across functional silos in IT, HR and the business.

“Work friction, an ever-present challenge for large organizations, has been overlooked and underrepresented by data until now,” said David Green, Co-Author of Excellence in People Analytics, Managing Partner at Insight222 and host of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. “FOUNT has developed a novel approach and powerful platform that should appeal to a cross-section of leaders focused on making work better for employees and the bottom line.”

Key capabilities and benefits include: 

• Moment-centric work friction data: Comprehensive data set of human, physical and digital touchpoints individuals encounter in the context of the specific work activities they perform.
• Benchmarking: Nearly 5 million work friction data points enable companies to measure progress against peers and within their own organizations. This dataset will become a qualitative AI training ground for insights, reporting, and other features to come. 
• Prioritization: Friction exists everywhere and resources are limited. FOUNT prioritizes which solutions will have the biggest impact on reducing work friction, enabling companies to address issues with focus and precision which saves time and money.
• Solve for one or all: Start small by focusing on a specific theme of importance to all employees (e.g. career mobility, wellness, etc.) or on the day-to-day work of key talent segments (e.g. frontline workers, call center employees, nurses, etc.).
• Proven workflows and templates: Tested and configurable templates of hundreds of different work moments so companies don’t reinvent the wheel. 
• Strong customer support: FOUNT’s staff works closely with companies throughout the process to help them understand and take action on their work friction data. 
• Fast implementation: Receive recommendations in as little as 6 weeks. 

The company is also announcing a new corporate website and domain. FOUNT will be exhibiting at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas from October 10-13 and the HR Data Summit in Munich on November 28th. To schedule a demonstration, visit https://getfount.com

About FOUNT Global, Inc.

FOUNT believes work should be frictionless for employees and employers. The company offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that identify what’s at the root of productivity and attrition challenges. By helping organizations prioritize and fix causes of friction in employees’ work environment, organizations can measurably improve performance and employee experiences. FOUNT’s customer base represents some of the world’s leading organizations including adidas, Siemens, Baloise, Northwell Health, TÜV SÜD 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.

Contact:
press@getfount.com