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This article first appeared in CSM, the magazine for Customer Service Managers and Professionals. It was authored by FOUNT Co-founder and CEO, Christophe Martel.

Last year, call centers averaged a 38 percent agent turnover rate – 12 percentage points higher than in 2020. That turnover has a steep cost. Christophe Martel, cofounder and CEO of FOUNT, investigates work friction in call centers.

Analysts have blamed everything from competitor poaching to general dissatisfaction. But the reality is that many call centers see high turnover because their environment creates a lot of work friction: the kind of everyday obstacles that make it harder than necessary for agents to do their jobs.

To reduce agent turnover, leaders first need to reduce work friction. That starts with understanding the nature of the problem at hand. In this piece, I’ll explain what work friction is, how it impacts call centers, why current problem solving isn’t cutting it, and how leaders can reverse course with a data-first approach.

Work Friction Hurts Agents, Customers, Managers, and Leaders

Work friction is anything (from technology to processes to people) that makes an employee’s job harder. At call centers, it might look like…

• Headsets that frequently malfunction
• Separate platforms agents have to juggle for each part of the support workflow
• Multi-step approval processes for each support task
• Unpredictable or inflexible shift schedules
• Minimal time for breaks

Agents often experience a combination of these friction points (and many more), sometimes at the same time. The cumulative impact is serious: heightened stress, slower work, low morale, and burnout.

Over time, work friction starts to impact life outside the call center as well. Workers may find themselves without the time and energy to finish their coursework or pick the kids up from school. And while most agents don’t dream of quitting in their first six months, a high-friction environment can all but force that choice.

Work friction can directly impact customers as well. Maybe an agent sounds exhausted over the phone. Or punts their device issue to an in-person technician without even pausing to help troubleshoot. No matter the scenario, work friction prevents workers from creating a satisfying support experience – and customers take note.

At scale, work friction can devastate a call center’s bottom line. Apart from the cost of agent turnover itself, there’s the cost of…

• Low productivity
• Low efficiency
• Spotty performance

As long as work friction remains pervasive, everyone – from agents to customers to managers and leaders – will continue to feel the impact. And it’s clear that folks have already reached their breaking point.

Some “Solutions” Create More Work Friction

Most call center leaders can tell when workers are disengaged. But they don’t necessarily understand how work friction causes disengagement. So they try to treat the symptoms of disengagement (low motivation, productivity, etc.) without addressing the friction at the root of the problem.

This approach is often ineffective at best – and it can even make work friction worse.

Consider, for instance, a large call center that’s adopted Slack to enable faster communication on the floor. Agents might be able to ask questions and receive guidance asynchronously. But they’ll also have a new stream of constant, urgent-feeling pings – and there may not be an established norm for triaging Slack messages.

What’s more, the platform might not integrate with the call center’s custom task management software. So agents now have to manually add manager requests to their daily task lists – which creates additional work friction.

Environmental changes like this are often well intentioned. But in the process of solving one problem (e.g., difficulty reaching a manager on a busy call center floor), they can easily create new work friction that exacerbates agent turnover. And for call centers, any efficiency gains will prove marginal compared to the cost of high turnover.

So how can you identify the points of work friction impacting your agents? Ask workers. In the next section, I’ll explain how a ground-up, data-driven approach can help leaders solve the work friction problem.

Frontline Data Can Uncover Friction Points and Monitor Solutions

Frontline workers live with work friction every day and know it best. They’re the only authoritative – yet untapped – resource for learning…

• When work friction occurs in their daily work
• When work friction does the most damage to their productivity and engagement
• Potential ways to resolve causes of friction

One of the more common methods to learn from your workers is through short, targeted surveys. You don’t have to survey every employee, of course. The goal is to gain insights from a representative sample and incrementally apply what you learn across the board.

For example, you might issue a survey to new hires to understand what it’s like to do their job. Questions might cover specific activities (like handling an abusive caller) or broad topics (like career planning and taking leave).

From here, you can identify specific friction points and measure the impact of each change.

For instance, a few agents might say that limited breaks make it tough for them to focus during long shifts. As a result, you might change the number of breaks allowed per shift. Then, you can follow up with those agents a few months later to see whether that improved their workplace satisfaction.

Data that surfaces what gets in agents’ way is essential to solving the work friction problem. It’s like having a radar in heavy fog: you get a clear line of sight to the issues workers experience day to day. Once you have the right data, you realize you can fix practically any work friction problem – and, in turn, solve the agent turnover crisis.

Waste Less Work, Keep More Workers

At its core, work friction wastes workers’ time, energy, and effort. And as long as call centers create unnecessary hurdles for agents, there will continue to be a revolving door.

It’s time to focus on eliminating sources of workplace friction. This way, you can make it easy for agents to do their jobs well – and help them feel engaged enough to stick around.

To learn how FOUNT can help you reduce agent turnover, read more on our Solutions page or book a demo.

HR may need to adjust its preferred ways of working to get the partners it needs to fertilize the soil for learning and development.

Have you ever trained and trained and trained… and nothing changed? I once spent a year as Head of L&D at a consulting firm, trying to convince the C-suite that our organizational culture and incentive structures were smothering our skill development efforts like seeds in rotten soil. It was a long year.

Now, as Head of Research at FOUNT Global, I work in much more fertile soil. One of our favorite sayings here is, “Change the environment, not the flower.” It comes from a story one of our clients told us years ago, about how she used to use training, motivational workshops, leadership events, and communication campaigns to try to “change the flowers”—until she realized that the flowers weren’t the problem. Their environment was the problem.

What If It’s Not the Flowers?

Train all you want, if your organization is riddled with bureaucracy, burdensome process, broken systems, unhelpful relationships, and all kinds of other friction, your people will still not be able to do the thing you want them to do at the end of the day. HR must get that stuff out of their way.

Because friction fouls up the soil employees grow in, eliminating friction in your organization could dramatically improve your training outcomes. And in many ways, learning and development professionals are ideally positioned to spot friction: Every request for training is an attempt to solve a problem—and an opportunity to root-cause that problem. Why do employees need a training? Why aren’t they behaving as the organization desires? What’s getting in their way? If the answer to these questions isn’t “there’s a knowledge/skill deficit in the flowers,” you’ve probably got some friction to eliminate in the growing environment.

Unfortunately, the State of EX 2022 report suggests most HR teams aren’t currently well equipped to do that.

Nobody Wants to Garden with Us

Learning and development activities are relatively siloed in HR. Sure, we need input and some measure of collaboration from the target training populations and maybe IT to build an appropriate intervention, but for the most part, we build the intervention, because we’re the experts. That makes solving knowledge/skill deficit problems relatively simple. (Emphasis on “relatively”!)

In contrast, 76 percent of respondents to the State of EX survey said the top influencer of employee experience (EX) isn’t HR at all, but business unit leaders and managers. Which means much of the friction that prevents employees from achieving training outcomes isn’t owned by HR. It’s owned by other corporate functions, business units, frontline managers, and other people HR doesn’t control. And 79 percent of survey respondents said they struggle to coordinate EX improvement work across these owners.

Where does this struggle come from? There might be a tendency for business leaders and managers to consider all people work “HR’s job”—i.e., not their job. Indeed, 76 percent of survey participants said their organizations assign primary accountability for EX to HR, not organization-wide, which would seem to encourage non-HR colleagues to shrug off the influence they have on EX and shirk their role in improving it, even if they own the friction.

We see evidence of this attitude in some of the data. For example, of the EX professionals who took the survey:

• 72 percent said their EX/HR team usually owns or leads EX improvement projects, rather than supports or enables them
• 82 percent said the data they use to improve EX is managed by the EX/HR team, rather than the business
• 90 percent said EX improvement projects are most often initiated by the EX/HR team, rather than the business

Similarly, when we asked EX professionals who their most important partners are, they said business leaders, hands-down. But when we asked who their most helpful and frequent partners are, they bumped everyone in HR (including People Analytics, the COEs, and HRBPs) up above business leaders.

Maybe It’s a Little Bit of Us

However, we have reason to believe that the business has very good reasons for not wanting to cooperate with us. When we compare business leaders’ survey responses to those of EX and HR professionals, they look really different on some dimensions. For example, business leaders were much more likely than EX and HR professionals to say that:

• Their organizations’ EX data is inadequate for their needs
• Their most valuable EX data comes from targeted employee listening, rather than enterprise-wide employee listening
• Financial (as opposed to HR or people) outcomes are most important when improving EX
• They communicate specific EX priorities to employees themselves, not just HR and other leaders/managers

These differences seem to paint a picture of business leaders and managers who want more targeted data to solve pressing people-related business problems. They want to be able to tie the impact of solutions to their bottom line. And they want employees to be informed of what’s going on.

In contrast, the responses of EX and HR survey participants suggest they want to solve big, enterprise-wide problems at scale (training, anyone?), and their current listening tools are indeed more appropriate for this than for targeted solutioning. They probably also want to tie the impact of solutions to the business’ bottom line, but they haven’t figured out how to do it. And they’re less concerned about letting employees know what’s going on than they are about keeping senior leaders informed.

There’s a disconnect here. The business needs small, local solutions that show up quickly on the balance sheet. Meanwhile, HR is focused on big, broad solutions, which tend to take a long time to bear fruit. All of this makes perfect sense given each party’s organizational position and sphere of responsibility. But if business leaders and managers are the real EX-influencers in the organization—as survey respondents agreed they are—HR may need to adjust its preferred ways of working to get the partners it needs to eliminate friction and fertilize the soil for learning and development.

Gardening Together, Inside HR and Out

HR’s need to coordinate across friction owners highlights the increasing interconnectedness of all parts of modern organizations. How much more does that interconnectedness apply across HR divisions themselves. It’s faster and easier for L&D professionals to simply fulfill a request for training. That’s their mandate. Someone else does EX. Someone else does friction. But that “it’s someone else’s job” attitude isn’t solving problems, outside or inside of HR. Real solutions begin at your door, when you tell a business leader who asked for a training, “We’ve identified a small environmental change we could quickly make together to fix this problem without training. Would you like HR to help with that?”

This article was authored by Jennifer E. Sigler, Head of Research at FOUNT. It was originally published in Training magazine.

Years after the pandemic, this war has officially gone cold, but every week it still seems to flare up on a front somewhere. In 2023, dozens of household names from Amazon to Zoom have made announcements requiring some or all of their workers to come back to the office. To enforce it, companies are tracking attendance, mapping the distance between employees’ homes and the office, throttling career progression, requiring resignations, issuing dismissal warnings, and even making vague, Mafia-esque threats. In response, employees have circulated petitions and open letters, walked out in protest, and of course, quit.

Speculation about the “real reasons” for the mandates runs wild behind the lines: It’s about real estate investments, managers’ inability to supervise remote workers, saving money on layoff severance packages, and even retaliation for unionization. All the while, surveys keep showing that the vast majority of employees want at least some flexibility in their work location, candidates disproportionately apply to remote job openings, and CEOs secretly know they’ll lose in the long run.

We’ve got another survey to tell you about—but we promise this one will shed a very different light on the RTO cold war.

Flowers and Their Environment

In August 2023, FOUNT asked 200 organizational leaders in HR, the business, and the C-suite what steps (if any) their organizations are taking to reduce work friction. It was an open-ended question. To analyze it, we coded the data into a two-tier, 16-category schema. Initially, the top tier captured a couple of opposing strategies we’ve talked about before: One tries to reduce work friction by changing employees, the other by changing employees’ environment.

We derived these opposing strategies from a flowery analogy one of our customers related to us years ago: She used to use training, motivational workshops, leadership events, and communication campaigns to try to “change the flowers”—until she realized that the flowers weren’t the problem. Their environment was the problem.

This analogy has stuck with us, because it perfectly encapsulates the essences of the two primary mindsets we see played out again and again in efforts to improve organizational effectiveness. Leaders who recognize that employees are merely one organism in a broader ecosystem often find that problems manifest through employees, but their roots actually lie elsewhere. After all, processes, policies, and tools can’t complain, but people can. Leaders who can’t see the bigger picture assume complaining employees are the problem, and try to change them.

Beneath each of these top-tier categories, we coded the strategies our 200 respondents said they’re using to reduce work friction. Environment-changers are working on things like process improvements, automation, workload reduction, digitization, equipment updates, and so on. People-changers are running trainings, team-building exercises, and fun events, as well as trying to improve things like performance management, career pathing, and total rewards.

This two-category top tier worked great to code the data, until…

Flexwork Blew Up Our Coding Schema

Remote work, hybrid work, flextime, flexwork—whatever you wanna call it—just kept coming up. And for awhile, we coded it as organizations trying to change the environment, because what is home vs office if not “environment”? But that nagged at us, because flexwork is also a policy, and policies are intended to guide people’s behavior, and all the other policies were getting coded “change people”. Then we realized many respondents are talking about flexwork in the context of employee wellness, and all of our other wellness-related offerings were sitting under “change people”, so at that point, we confidently recoded all of the flexwork responses from “environment” to “people”.

But we still didn’t have inner peace (which, in case you’re not aware, is one of the top signs you’ve got a good coding schema), because caving to employees’ flexwork demands is the exact opposite of the spirit behind “changing the flowers”, and of everything else that sat under our “change people” code.

So we had a dilemma: Dump this coding schema? Restart with totally open coding, allowing categories to emerge organically from the data? Classify flexwork as “Other”? Put it back in “change environment”?

As we talked out why this was happening and what to do about it, we gained deeper insight into the fight over flexwork than we’d ever had before.

Flexwork Is Really Just One Battle in a Much Larger War

The flower–environment analogy seems employee-empowering on its surface, but it really takes a top-down, leader-centric view. Leaders make the choice to change people or environment (or both), and leaders take the action. Employees are just flowers—inanimate objects. They have no view. They have no agency. They’re acted upon, rather than acting themselves.

In pulling back to objectively examine this favorite analogy (and the coding schema we’d based on it), this inherent bias shone through to us for the first time. And that shed new light on flexwork, work environments, and behavior change:

Flexwork is a case of employers and employees fighting over a change of work environment. Employees want the change. Employers don’t, so they’re trying to make the people change.

That explains why flexwork seems to fit under both “change people” and “change environment”.

It also explains why flexwork is such a contentious issue: This war is actually just one battle in a much larger conflict between the “change people” and “change environment” mindsets. Traditionally, leaders have held the former, because they view people as more malleable and easier to change than fixed infrastructure and equipment costs and byzantine labyrinths of policy and process. “We need to become more agile!”, “Let’s all embrace this change!”, said every company townhall ever.

But change is precisely what employees embraced when they went to work at home during the pandemic. And then the Great Resignation, and the tight labor market still riding in its wake, gave them negotiating power unprecedented in our lifetimes. If they’re still flowers at all, they’re more like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors than anything else.

So now when employers try to solve an environmental problem by changing their employees, they’re firing a shot that’s heard—and returned—around the world.

Peace Out

In case you need to know for your own inner peace: We kept our “change people” and “change environment” codes and simply gave “flexwork” its own category. Of those respondents who are doing anything at all to reduce work friction, 62% are traditionalists who’re trying to reduce work friction by changing their people. Fewer than 30% are treating their organizations like the ecosystems they are and trying to change employees’ environments. 8% are considering raising a white flexwork flag—whether they ultimately do or not… will surely be in the news.

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“Companies that win will be the ones that can provide to their workers—all of them, not just a few—an environment and a job in which people can get into that state of flow.”

Christophe Martel, co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc.

FOUNT Cofounder and CEO, Christophe Martel, recently sat down with Adam Mendler, a nationally-recognized authority on leadership, to discuss the future of work. You can read the full interview here. Select excerpts are featured below.

Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know it was worth pursuing? And then what advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?

Christophe: First, I’ve always really liked and needed data to make decisions and to generally think about stuff. In my role as a business leader, I spent a lot of time looking at customer data to figure out what to do better, how to grow the business, how to operate, etc. And there’s a lot of data available to guide that kind of decision-making.

Moving to HR, I found myself pretty much data-less when it came to understanding what in HR was working or not working. It’s very difficult in HR to know if you’re doing a good job because, really, the only way to know is if people stay longer at the company and whether they are more productive. It’s honestly very difficult to attribute these things to any one particular action that HR took to try and make that happen. So, as a business leader, I actually felt this question was a kind of black box of talent and leadership where you have to have good leadership, and – if you do – then people will stay longer or work harder. But it always felt like a very cryptic thing.

And then there was the world of productivity and how much time do people spend on what tasks etc., which really represents the heart of the business in a way, but felt very incomplete. I thought that by moving to HR, I would be able to figure out a way to bring these things together. How is it that people actually decide to stay at a company, work harder, perform better, etc.? I felt like there was no visibility into things I could do to improve any of these outcomes. From a business or an HR perspective, the tools were missing to give visibility into what gets in the way of people trying to be successful at work. That felt like an opportunity.

The idea for FOUNT was very much based on my own lived experience as an executive on both sides of the fence–business and then HR–and also my experience as an employee at different large companies for a fair amount of my career. The impetus was knowing what kind of potential nonsense you may be subjected to as an employee—and usually unbeknownst to the leadership in the company to try and put these things together.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to emerging leaders and to senior leaders?

Christophe: 

1. In general, the famous book from Marshall Goldsmith, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” is very true. In other words, whatever you know, you can lean on, but as an emerging leader (e.g. a frontline manager becoming a leader, an individual contributor becoming a frontline manager), if you’ve never done it before, what you know from your experience being an individual contributor may actually go counter to becoming a good manager or leader. Just being aware of that is a really important step. 
2. The second one is that teams actually begin with individuals. Within really large teams, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that everyone is a person who has their way of doing things—their aspirations, their moods, whatever. And even though it can be sometimes daunting because if you have a really large team, it’s hard to keep track. But actually, that’s the job. You have to have at least some understanding of who these people are and how they’re coming together, which is easily lost as you become more senior. 
3. The third one is that leaders are not made, they’re elected. In general, good leaders are those who are elected by their teams to go and have bigger teams. Therefore, the most powerful person in the room is not your boss. It’s actually the people who work for you.

Adam: What do you believe is the future of work?

Christophe: I don’t know how distant this future is, but the future of work is flow. Companies that win will be the ones that can provide to their workers—all of them, not just a few—an environment and a job in which people can get into that state of flow where their higher self is engaged and where they’re self-realizing through their work. I think that’s what individuals aspire to and eventually, they’ll get their way because companies are competing for people. The more that the system of companies and workers matures, the more workers will dictate the terms of the deal, which is essentially, “I’ll work for you if you can offer me that.” This is something we believe at FOUNT. Individuals aspire to high performance most of the time, and if you can provide a place where they can do that, and feel great about themselves when they come back home, that would be the future of work.

This article is part of a series called EXposed: EX practices uncovered. It was co-authored by Stephanie Denino and Timo Tischer from TI People. It originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Why does this matter?

For teams focused on improving employee’s experiences, there are three key questions they must be able to answer to ensure they drive measurable impact:

• Which experiences should we improve?
• What about those experiences can we improve?
• Did our efforts improve the experience?

Every step of the way, those driving this work need data to help inform their answers. So, they are going out looking for data. On one hand, they hear: “surely we have enough data!”, as organizations are overflowing with data. On the other hand, these practitioners often feel that they don’t quite have what they need.

In fact, this later perspective was confirmed in the State of EX 2022: although over 90% of respondents run employee surveys at least once a year, 70% say the employee data they collect is inadequate for their needs. More on this below:

“It’s not the amount of EX data that’s the problem for organizations. It’s the kind of data. EX and HR professionals must look at the big picture of the organization, so naturally they collect employee sentiment from the entire organization. But then they suffer what we call ‘big paralysis’ trying to turn that overwhelming mass of surface-level data into actions they can take to improve specific experiences.”

EX leaders and practitioners are determined and resourceful; they will do their very best to make the most of what they have, and when they still do not have what they need, they will go out and get it.

But what should they go get? First, let’s lay out the core types of data that are relevant to answering the three key questions:

• Moment and touchpoint data captures people’s feedback about specific experiences at work (e.g. your experience in specific moments like learning to perform your role, resolving a customer issue, taking leave or pursuing a new role, as people interact with human, physical, digital touchpoints)
• Aggregate sentiment data captures people’s feelings about their cumulative experience at work (e.g. as a result of your experience across many moments, you feel engaged, included, a sense of purpose, etc.)
• Behavioral data captures people’s actions at work (e.g. attrition/retention, individual productivity, absences, leave requests)

With this context, we can turn our attention to which type of data is most relevant to answer each of the three key questions.

What are we seeing?

Let’s look through the lens of a recent experience improvement project with a US-headquartered financial services institution of roughly 60,000 people.

Which experiences should we improve?

The team driving this work first considered behavioral data, noticing patterns in attrition data, but realized they couldn’t quite pinpoint why this was.

They then naturally looked to aggregate sentiment data, in this case data from their yearly survey and quarterly pulses and found that a key pillar of their EVP focused on ‘growth’ was showing a noticeable dip in scores. Even with tens of thousands of open-ended comments at the end of their survey asking, “what can we do better?”, the data did not help clarify which of the many growth-related challenges that people raised were most important to go address.

This led them to trigger the collection of moment and touchpoint data using the FOUNT product to understand, across 4 key talent segments (e.g. digital roles, call center agent roles), which moments were both most highly important (based on their correlation with overall engagement and likelihood to recommend working at the company) and not meeting their people’s satisfaction threshold.

One moment stood out as highly important across talent segments, based on thousands of responses: the act of pursuing a new role internally. The moment’s 60% CSAT suggested that 40% of those having experienced this moment were not satisfied. Without creating the possibility of internal mobility and access to new opportunities, it was difficult for people in this organization to feel as though they truly could grow the way they would hope to. (Note: we know a role change/promotion is not the only way for employees to grow, but it certainly revealed itself as highly important to employees in this organization)

What about this experience can we improve?

Within this moment of pursuing a new role, it was necessary to uncover the critical pain points.

In the past, the team explored experience challenges with research methods such as interviews and observation. However, conducting interviews was time-consuming, which often required limiting their number. And though they would uncover many issues through their exploration, it was hard to understand what the biggest pain points were, given the limited volume of data and its unstructured nature. This often led the team and their leaders to wonder: are we solving the right problem?

This time, thanks to the collection of moment and touchpoint data it was possible to identify which touchpoints were highly problematic. For example, job postings received a 34% CSAT and confirmed that this part of the experience needed attention, more so than other higher scoring touchpoints.

Because free text data tied to that specific moment was also collected, they learned through its analysis that job postings were too generic and unclear, making the work of finding a new role very confusing and overwhelming.

The project team then engaged employees in deep dive sessions to better understand what felt generic and unclear, and worked with employees as well as internal recruiters, to find ways to improve the job postings.

This is just one example of many specific changes made to improve the experience of pursuing a new role. 

Did our efforts improve the experience?

Once changes and interventions are implemented, all the same data is relevant, but in reverse. First, re-measurement of moment and touchpoint data allows the organization to see if the touchpoint performance has improved and whether the overall moment score has also improved.

Over time, the team will look to aggregate sentiment data via items in their quarterly pulse and yearly survey to monitor higher-level improvement (e.g. increases in ‘growth’ related items such as “Do you feel you have good career opportunities?”). They will also monitor behavioral data – more specifically internal role application data and attrition data – to observe trends (e.g. are we seeing declining attrition from people who have signaled they are open to new roles and/or who have applied to internal roles?).

What do we recommend?

Given the sea of data that exists, it is difficult to know what type of data is most relevant to experience improvement efforts. Teams get the best insights from moment and touchpoint data because it provides what we call middle signals: data that is not too high-level or too low-level, which not only confirms that there is a problem requiring focus, but also indicates what to do about it.

However, we commonly see people spend too much time trying to make sense of macro signals or micro signals. Macro signals, like aggregate sentiment data, behavioral data and social listening data, offer high-level findings that can indicate a moment needs fixing, but are often not specific enough to show what needs fixing it.

Micro signals, like system usage data or process metrics, suggest the possibility of a problem, but often lack the broader context needed to interpret whether to act and how. Indeed, we have not spoken about micro signals to date in this article because it is not a core type of data that is immediately insightful without context.

See below a summary of macro, middle, and micro signal data:

As organizations mature in their collection, integration, and use of different types of data to improve people’s experiences, macro, middle and micro signals might all play a role. But to begin, middle signals provided by the collection of moment and touchpoint data are most valuable.

When collected in quantitative ways to begin, this type of data allows organizations to:

• Focus improvement efforts on the most highly important and highly broken moments. In this case, improving the moment ‘pursue new role’ was a higher priority according to people’s feedback than ‘learn in my role’, which might also be related to the organization’s growth pillar)
• Understand which touchpoints within the moments require most attention. While there were other areas to improve, the team needed to start somewhere, and this helped with prioritization. It then becomes relevant to involve employees in making deeper sense of the specific findings and co-create solutions to address the pain points
• Re-measure to quantify the impact of the work. In this case, pre-intervention CSAT was 60%; post-intervention(s) CSAT jumped to 78%. With this kind of data in hand, teams can undeniably describe the impact of their work.

If your company’s budget isn’t quite ready for handing out bonuses, there are still plenty of ways you can show your team they’re appreciated. FOUNT’s Chief Experience Officer, Anne Eidelman, contributes to this article featured on the American Express website.

Read the full article.

While many employees would opt for compensation if given the choice, there are many ways to recognize and reward individuals for a job well done that don’t cost a thing. In this article, Anne Eidelman shares how FOUNT make kudos part of our natural flow of work. Excerpts from the article showcase how the company gives positive feedback and gift cards.

“It may seem obvious, but many managers underestimate the value of giving positive feedback to their team members. This no-cost approach can be very affirming and motivating for employees at any level,” says Anne Eidelman, Chief Experience Officer at FOUNT Global, Inc, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company focused on reducing work friction. (FOUNT Global is a subsidiary of TI People.)

Eidelman says that the positive feedback strategy is part of FOUNT Global’s corporate culture. “When we gather for all-hands video calls, we’ve instituted time for informal shout outs where team members can recognize each other and share stories that surprise and delight everyone,” Eidelman says. “Employees have remarked that it’s become the best part of their week and they could really feel the love and energy across time zones.”

Hand out $25 in cash, and employees are may think, “Really? That’s it?” But a $25 gift card to a favorite coffeehouse or retailer can feel generous. 

Eidelman says that FOUNT’s managers will some times give employees $25 gift cards for meal or grocery delivery, usually after someone finishes a big project. She says that they’ll generally include a note that reads something like, “Thanks! Please let FOUNT buy you dinner for a job well done.”

“These gestures help employees feel seen and appreciated,” Eidelman says.“And managers have even received pictures of the person’s delicious meal.”

As a remote-first, global company, FOUNT also ticks the box under the suggestion, “Let your employees work from home.” We are proud to have employees working all over the world including Iceland, Houston, Nigeria, Hamburg, Ireland and Long Island, just to name a few!

FOUNT’s Chief Experience Officer, Anne Eidelman, contributes the following insights to an article on the ChurnZero company blog. Read the full article.

Chief customer officer vs. chief experience officer

Some companies modify the title and responsibilities to better suit their needs. Anne Eidelman sets a good example. She’s the chief experience officer for FOUNT Global, Inc., a SaaS business focused on reducing work friction.

It’s not just the title that’s different, but the report structure. She has customer-facing teams reporting to her and that includes the product team. The company has determined, for their organization, that product experience goes hand-in-hand with the customer experience.

“Our company is helping to improve the experiences of employees because we’re working to reduce friction in their day-to-day work. For us, the word ‘experience’ has a really important meaning.”

Anne Eidelman, Chief Experience Officer at FOUNT Global, Inc.

Even though her role is somewhat different, the motivation behind it is similar. SaaS companies that want to grow “have to really pay attention” to their customer base. That requires having a single executive responsible for pulling together insights from the different teams to get a broad perspective of customers’ needs.

“At that top level, I’m making sure that we are coherent around what we are trying to solve for our customers and what kind of experience we’re trying to provide.”

There’s also an implicit message to customers in her title. What the company’s leadership is trying to do with a chief experience officer is demonstrate “there’s a broader mandate across our customer-facing teams and frankly even more broadly to center on customers and their needs.”

It’s worth noting that Anne comes from a non-traditional background. She’s a trained scientist accustomed to using the scientific method for discovering the root cause of problems. She also served as the CEO of an education non-profit for several years before taking on this role.

In this episode, Marie-Line Germain, Ph.D. speaks with Christophe about the impact of work friction on Employee Experience: He also discusses how COVID has changed Employee Experience, and what HR and organizations can do to improve it.

On the heels of last year’s State of EX, Christophe sat down with Dr. Marie-Line Germain, a professor of Human Resources and Leadership at Western Carolina University (a campus of the University of North Carolina), to discuss research findings and insights about creating better employee experiences.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1451614330&show_artwork=true&maxheight=1000&maxwidth=1080

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

CM: There are an infinite number of opportunities that are all valid opportunities to go and change something in the experience that people have at work, and it can start with the coffee machine or it can be the tools they use at work. It could be their benefits coverage. There are just huge amounts of opportunity that you could go and have an impact on. The question that everyone needs to ask themselves is, what is it that matters most to employees and what is it that is currently presenting the most friction for that?

MLG: That’s Christophe Martel, co-founder and CEO of FOUNT, a company that focuses on improving employee experiences by removing friction from work. You’re listening to Dear Human Resources. I’m your host, Marie-Line Germain.

In this episode, Christophe will talk about some aspects of employee experience, what it is how COVID has changed employee experience and what HR and organizations can do to improve it. Christophe Martel also talks about a recent report that reveals that about 90% of employers run employee surveys at least once a year, but 70% lack adequate employee experience data that digs deeper into what causes friction for employees.

According to a Gallup poll disengaged employees cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, which is the equivalent of 11% of the global GDP. With this increased disengagement the talks about quiet quitting and the rising attrition rates. The spotlight has been cast on improving the employee experience. So welcome to our show, Christophe.

CM: Thank you. Good to be here.

MLG: The topic of employee experience sometimes referred to as EX has been an increasingly important topic in the HR realm. Can you explain what employee experience is and why it’s become so important for organizations?

CM: Absolutely. So, I may start with the second part of the question, why is it so important? And you alluded to it just now, if you look at the quit rate in North America for the past 10 years, you’ll see that the voluntary separations, that quit rate has literally doubled from 18% to something like 35%. As of 2022. That’s a very consistent increase in the past 10 years. And everyone pins that on the great resignation, COVID, etc. But actually, that’s a very consistent phenomenon that’s been happening for much longer.

What companies are starting to realize is number one – whilst it’s feasible to deal with attrition level, or quit levels in the 10 to 20%, it gets much harder when you start to break through 30% and over. Then it becomes a real business problem and that means that CEOs, business unit leaders just come to HR to say, “Look, I’m having these terrible attrition problems, what can you do to help?” And that’s when employee experience comes in. Because the next question is, well, why are these people leaving? What is prompting it?

We all know that engagement is a predictor of attrition, so low engagement means that people are getting ready to leave and essentially what that transcribes is how people feel about their work at the company. Now, what does the connection between employee experience and this notion of employee engagement? Well, actually at a certain level, they’re kind of identical. If you ask for a definition of employee experience, that’s actually pretty similar to a potential definition for engagement which is, how do I feel about the some of my experiences with the company so far? Since the moment when I first got in touch with the company as a candidate, joined, started working and been there for five years? How do I feel right at this moment, about my relationship with the company? You could call that my employee experience.

Now, where it gets a little complicated is that if you wanted to get under this high-level definition, because telling you that somebody is engaged or not very engaged is not very helpful when it comes to getting to the root cause of it. So getting under the covers of employee experience, you have to zoom down into not employee experience as an aggregate but employee experiences, meaning, the various experiences that people have during their life at work, and there’s millions of them. That includes their experience of doing their work, let’s say, if they’re in a customer facing role, it means solving customer problems, escalating to their manager when they’re out of answers. There’s everything that’s about what they’re doing, asking for help from SMEs, all kinds of things about doing a job and that’s where people spend most of their time.

The question is, how are these experiences? In fact, what we find through the work we do with customers, is that the friction they encounter in the doing of the work is one of the big reasons why their engagement could be declining. So in other words, I spend my time trying to do a good job but the company is putting unnecessary obstacles in my way. That’s a very frustrating thing to observe. And that typically drives employees to look for alternative employment.

The experiences on the job is a very important part in this kind of the lion’s share of where people spend their time. But there’s another side to their experience, which is their experience with consuming the services that the company provides to them as an employer and that includes, getting paid, creating a career path, learning and doing all kinds of things that HR is typically very involved in. And for that, again, they rate their experience based on how good a service do they get from the company. How easy is it to go on parental leave? How easy is it to come back? How easy is it to navigate the benefits portal and so on. There again, friction is in processes or policies or misalignment between different silos ends up creating poor experiences that over time will result in their disengagement and eventual attrition.

MLG: So we think that the tech industry tends to be a little further ahead in terms of employee experience, is it true?

CM: They’re typically further ahead in terms of the baseline of transactional experiences that need to be provided to an employee, mostly because they’ve invested almost natively in it. Most tech companies are relatively new to world and they have pretty modern platforms when it comes to doing HR things. So that helps. However, you see many tech companies having surprisingly high attrition level in key talent segments and losing great talent, but they actually don’t know how to keep them at some level. When you look at Glassdoor ratings, it’s typically reflecting what you said. However, when you dig into these worlds, you see that important segments like salespeople, or developers, etc., there’s still much higher levels of voluntary attrition than they wish they had.

MLG: So before this podcast recording, Christophe, you made reference to a report about employee experience. That report is titled The Big Bad State of EX, findings from the State of EX 2022. Do you know how that was conducted? And how many respondents were in that study? And what the findings were?

CM: Yep, so first of all, it was conducted at the end of last year, and I don’t have the accurate count in mind, but by the end of the project was a few 100 respondents across HR executives, and business leaders essentially. There were essentially two tracks to the questions that we asked. Because employee experience as I described it, just like attrition, which is the consequence of better poor employee experience is a shared problem between HR and the business, which is why business leaders were included in the research effort.

The report was published in late November, early December. What we found and hence, the name The Big Bad State of EX, is that most organizations that invest in employee experience tend to do so in thinking about having an impact on all employees of the company. And whilst that’s a smart idea, what turns out in practice is that impacts that actually scale to all employees in the company tend to be technology investments because that’s the quickest way to have that kind of impact. In fact, many of the technology investments that were made as a result of that approach ended up not having a tremendous amount of impact on the experience of people in the frontline. Think about Workday which is a great system for managing HR data. When you really think about how much it transforms the experience of work for individuals in the company – it sure transforms the experience of work for the HR team, and makes it a lot easier to do the HR work. But for employees, it doesn’t really change that much. And one of the reasons is that they spend most of their time working rather than most of their time doing HR things.

What we found in the report is that all these efforts where we thought that big investments across the board would be the ones that would drive experience gains… well, that didn’t realize. What did happen, however, was that companies that started small – and what that means is focused on specific talent segments… that in particular talent segments with crucial importance to the business. So if you’re in a healthcare company, and nurses and doctors are critical talent segment, like everything in the company is there to support the work they do.

It’s a little bit similar to companies that are in the financial services industry where anything that is customer facing (e.g. service centers, etc.) is hugely important because CX ends up driving business outcomes. So, companies that actually started in specific talent segments and focused on smaller improvement initiatives (e.g. Improving part of the work somewhere, improving specific workflows, and so on so forth), those are the initiatives that really moved the dial. And what that did was to give these EX leaders the confidence that the approach of trying to create better experiences for people actually could work and had visible results and therefore was worthy of investing more into. So the Big Bad State of EX was to say, “watch out if you want to make progress in that field. Don’t start too big because you may just get lost in the noise,” essentially, which is one of the things that happened to many of them.

Now, a few things that we measured as part of the report, were essentially trying to assess the level of effectiveness of these organizations on a few dimensions that included a humancentricity scale. So in other words, the ability that these companies and these executives had to think in the employees’ shoes right so in other words, to put themselves in the employees shoes to see the world from their perspective, which is kind of necessary if you’re gonna go and improve the right thing. So understand what are the points of friction that they encountered? And honestly, most self-reported data showed that there was a lot of progress to make there. It’s actually not that easy to go do that. Second was the degree of dispersal which means the the amount to which employee experience initiatives were driven with the business in the front lines, or were much more corporate initiatives driven by the center for the center almost.

Again, we saw that hence the Big Bad State of EX, a lot of efforts tended to be done at the corporate level which explains why there was not that much impact on the frontline. A third component that we measured actually was agility, which was the ability for companies when they detected once a friction for employees to be able to go and act on it quickly. And you’ll be familiar with the great skills that most HR professionals have when designing fantastic processes. But in the world of experience, it’s a kind of a fail fast / fail early type of approach to improvement initiatives rather than big, broad and perfect process design. On these three dimensions, it looks like there’s a lot of progress for companies to make, to have the ability to go after these experience problems and become agile enough to to make progress there.

MLG: And how do you think COVID the pandemic has affected employee experience overall?

CM: I would say, first of all, COVID got a bad name. Honestly, for The Great Resignation as a trigger… as I mentioned earlier, that whole trend of increased quit rate has been going on for much longer than that. So I think it’s easy to blame the pandemic for that, but it’s a little bit unfair. The second thing that COVID did is that it provided more clarity for leaders – business leaders, in particular – to the fact that their employees have a choice of where to work. The whole debate between working remotely or hybrid, etc. was not really a debate before and it became front and center for two years.

Through these discussions, there’s been the realization by some leaders that employees have a choice of where they work. And just like we have a choice of what product we buy on Amazon or what hotel we stay at when we look at TripAdvisor. The transparency of the job market is such that they can’t really hold their employees as tightly as they were able to do before. And we’ve seen a major shift in the interest from business leaders to figure out, “How do I reduce friction in the day-to-day work of my employees?” Because they care about it a great deal, right? They don’t want to spend time working that they feel is time poorly spent. The phenomenon of burnout and quiet quitting, etc. – these are all manifestations of the work we’re asking them to do is just not working for them. So they want to make an impact on that.

And by the way, these business leaders are themselves concerned with the productivity of their company. And so in other words, you see you have a strange dynamic where a CEO like the CEO of Google would say at the same time, “we want employees to go work harder.” And when employees are pretty much tapped out, trying to do everything that they’re supposed to do but dealing with unnecessary friction in their workflow, and saying, “Well, yeah, I’d be happy to do whatever you want, but stop putting things in my way as I’m trying to do my job.” And actually, you see some businesses just embracing that, to just try to reduce the level of bureaucracy and complexity that exists in the organization. And that’s a common cause actually, for both business leaders and employees. So for once, they kind of share a common objective and a common opinion on how to go about it. I think the pandemic was a great trigger for business leaders and HR leaders to think about things differently, and kind of opened up a bigger passage for companies to embark on an employee experience initiative based on everything that they realized through the pandemic.

MLG: Good point. So what advice do you have for business leaders, as you mentioned, but also for HR professionals who would like to put more emphasis on employee experience, but they don’t really know where to start?

CM: So the big challenge that organizations face – and I was a business leader before and I was a CHRO before and I faced that every day – is the question of where to start. There is an infinite number of opportunities that are all valid opportunities to go and change something in the experience that people have at work and it can start with the coffee machine or it can be the tools they use at work, it could be their benefits coverage. It’s just a huge amount of opportunity that you could go and have an impact on.

The question that everyone needs to ask themselves is, “What is it that matters most to employees? And what is it that is currently presenting the most friction for them? So, in other words, what’s most broken and what’s most important to employees? And for that, that was one of the findings from The State of EX. You need a specific kind of data that points to the things that create friction in the organization for specific talent segments.

The best advice I would give is to try to zero into a really important talent segment for the business – people that create a lot of value for the company, where attrition has a very high cost to the business. And in there understand what are the one, two, or three experiences – not the overall experience, that’s way too high level – but the one two or three discrete experiences like pursuing an internal role or solving a customer problem or things of that nature. What are these things that are every day creating bad experiences for people, which result in disengagement and attrition over time. And then focus on these things using agile methods. So, small sprints and quick iterative results. And that’s the best way to start because you can have visible impact that business leaders will be excited by that becomes a much more kind of an organic way of starting a different way of working, that starts with people’s experiences, and then works back up from there, rather than starting from big processes and working down from there.

MLG: Christophe, you’re the co-founder and CEO of the company FOUNT. I’m curious, what does FOUNT stand for?

CM: Our motto at FOUNT is experiences count because it’s the root word for fountain and essentially we believe that everything that’s good about a company springs from great employee experiences. When I say everything that’s good, it’s actually employee happiness at the company and their desire to work harder and for a longer period of time with the company because they enjoy what they’re doing. That stems from an intentional approach to make these experiences work for them. And by the way, when that happens, the business results follow. Everything that’s good in the company is not only just good for the people, but also good for the business. So that’s where where it stemmed from.

There’s a second, connected message that the opposite of friction is flow, right? If you think about a fountain and what flows out of it, by removing friction in the organization, you’ll have more employees that are in a state of flow, and essentially not dealing with unproductive friction and needless obstacles that we all know are there because they’ve always been there. We also know that they don’t need to be there and that they’re costing us time and frustration every day at work.

MLG: Thanks, Christophe, for your insights on employee experience and what HR professionals can do to enhance it.

CM: My pleasure.

Support for this show comes from Western Carolina University, a campus of the University of North Carolina’s system with the technical assistance of Kelly Minnis.

Christophe Martel, CEO and Founder of FOUNT was invited back on Paychex PULSE, an HR Podcast, to talk more about work friction and employee experiences (be sure to catch his first episode, Employee Experiences: One Size Doesn’t Fit All).

Hear as he and host, Rob Parsons talks about friction management – what it is and how it can positively impact employee experiences at your company. Watch it here or listen to the podcast using any of the links below. A full transcript is pasted below.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zNLnpFk5s0A?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://getfount.com

Podcast available at:

• Paychex
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube
• iHeart

Topics include:

• 00:00 – Welcome, Christophe Martel
• 00:52 – What is employee experience (EX)
• 02:51 – Why is EX important?
• 03:59 – The cost of work friction
• 06:20 – How friction lowers productivity
• 07:44 – The impact on turnover rates
• 08:32 – Hyper-focused friction management
• 11:36 – The role of the HR pro
• 12:09 – How data and technology tools can help
• 14:44 – The little things matter
• 17:05 – How HR teams are thinking differently
• 22:50 – Wrap up

Rob Parsons  Welcome to season four of Paychex PULSE, an HR podcast, where HR professionals can find great insights on today’s top issues and be inspired to build and lead effective teams in a healthier workplace.

Rob Parsons  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Paychex Pulse podcast. Rob Parsons here. We’re joined again by Christophe Martel, CEO and Founder of FOUNT, an organization that focuses on helping companies improve employee experience. Huge topic, we all know. Today we’re going to dig into hyper-focused friction management and the positive impact that can have on your organization.

Rob Parsons  Christophe, welcome back to the podcast.

Christophe Martel Good morning. Good morning, Rob and thanks for having me.

Rob Parsons  Oh, it’s a pleasure. We had a great conversation a few months back about employee experience, just in general, a very high-level view. We were talking about your research report, some of the things I saw at HR Tech. To level set, for those that didn’t catch that episode, what does it mean when you talk about EX, when you talk about employee experience?

Christophe Martel So, experience is really just the employee perspective on their life at work, just like the human experience is our own perspective on our life in general. And it turns out that life at work is really complex. Lots of things happening, lots of activities in the space of an eight-hour window and often more, and just very complex environments for people to interact with. So if you think about typical customer experiences that we know of like, I don’t know, buying a pizza from the pizza shop next door, it is not that complicated and it is a pretty linear experience.

Christophe Martel If you contrast that to what happens in a whole day of work for, let’s say, a nurse or a call center agent or just a developer, you end up interacting with hundreds if not thousands of touch points that are either physical, digital, or human across a day. And that complexity is what makes employee experience difficult to understand. It’s a lot easier to understand what happens between you and your pizza than between you and your work. So, that is employee experience. It is important because when people have a good experience at work, two things happen. Number one, they perform better simply because there’s just less friction in their day-to-day work, and also they stay longer, and that means that turnover goes down, which is a good thing for companies.

Christophe Martel  So, that’s the topic for the day, and it is a problem that company have problem. It is a field that companies are discovering and realize that traditional approaches to human resources management end up missing the mark somewhat on how to manage employee experience, in particular understanding and improving these hundreds, thousands of interactions that people have at work. How do you do that with all that complexity of stuff happening? And that’s the game.

Rob Parsons And when we talked last time, it really was eyeopening to me. It’s not an experience, it’s the combination of hundreds of thousands of discrete experiences and they add up, and all it takes is a couple bad ones to wreck the whole show. And I loved how you used the word friction to describe those hurdles, describe those points that are troublesome like gears that aren’t clicking together correctly. Tell me more about friction and what is it really costing companies.

Christophe Martel Good. The term employee experience, and I think we went into this last time, tends to describe the aggregate experience that people have with their company overall for the amount of time that they’ve worked with that company. And that’s a useful thing to understand, but where that experience is created is actually in almost the crucible of day-to-day interactions. And in these interactions, all kinds of things happen. They’re very rich. So if you think about, for example, an individual trying to find a new internal role at the company, the interaction is likely to encompass things that have to do with the manager, with the career framework, with the internal recruitment process and all kinds of things. And the question there is, what gets in my way?

Christophe Martel  So, when I try to go and find that new internal role, all of these things are supposed to work, but often they don’t. And often when you combine them, they really don’t. So friction is really, in particular, what we call work friction. Like for example, process friction that exists in companies when processes are not efficient is one thing. Work friction is actually the friction that employees experience. So when I do X, what gets in my way that shouldn’t be there?

Christophe Martel  So, work friction really has two economic impacts on companies. The first one is that it makes people less productive. And actually, there was a study from Gartner that calculated that work friction costs on average about two hours a day to an average employee at a company today in the United States. Two hours a day, if you calculate that for an average Fortune 500 company is about 500 million a year of wasted… It’s essentially wasted work.

Christophe Martel  If I’m a shareholder, I’m paying employees to work and wasting 500 million because they’re dealing with nonsense. That feels like low-hanging fruit, to be honest, to go after. So, that is the first very immediate impact. If you are able to reduce work friction, it can never go away entirely, but if you can reduce it, you immediately make people more productive, they perform better. And guess what? Most individuals actually aspire to performance, so ….

Rob Parsons  Yeah. I don’t wake up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do a bad job at work today.”

Christophe Martel  Exactly. So, most people show up saying, “I’m going to trying to do my best. If only you stop getting in my way, that would be helpful.” And so, the second financial impact is on turnover rates. And so on average, and it’s hard to attribute it a hundred percent to friction, but it’s anywhere from two to 500 million a year in annual turnover reduction, in financial value of that turnover reduction, for an average F 500. And for some companies that have very high attrition rates or some businesses within companies that have very high attrition rates, that figure can be much higher.

Rob Parsons  So, I want to get practical here, if you don’t mind. Dig in a little bit. You didn’t just call it friction management. You call it hyper-focused friction management. What do you mean by that and how do I put that in place? It’s nice to talk about. How do I make that happen? What are you talking about there?

Christophe Martel  Yeah, so actually one of our customers described work friction as that huge bear or elephant that is just sitting in the living room that no one knows how to deal with, and so everyone just leaves it there. And so that big problem, because everyone knows it’s a big problem, no one knows how to approach it. And I would hate to do that to a bear or to an elephant, but how you approach that kind of thing is by breaking it down. And to break it down, you essentially need data to be able to identify what are the most important causes of friction for our employees? What is it that they see that is really getting in their way? What is causing it? And there’s hundreds of culprits, and in smaller companies, it may be dozens of culprits. And just start with the first two or three and go and have an impact on them.

Christophe Martel  And so, what’s beautiful about this approach is that it is not about solving it, because as I mentioned earlier, friction can never entirely go away. It’s just like entropy. It never really goes away, but you can really reduce it and manage it, and reducing friction for one particular activity that people do. One example we had from one of our customers was in a warehouse where there was just not enough flight for people to be able to do their job right. There’s an example of, well, actually make the light work better so that people can see what they’re doing. Now, it’s not perfect, it doesn’t solve it all, but it makes things better.

Christophe Martel  The second example, if the way shifts are managed in a retail environment is really a problem for employees, it’s not working for them based on what they have to do in their life, again, make that simpler, fair. And these are things that actually are owned, of course, by the business, but also by HR. And HR has a role to particularly HR business partners or people that are aligned with the business to be the voice of employees for these things. But what HR business partners don’t have is data that tells everyone and puts everyone on the same page as to those things that are creating friction for everyone and how important these things are.

Rob Parsons  You got to what my next question was, and you you’d been touching on it. How can an HR pro really, and a business partner, help with this? I’ve got a lot going through my mind right now. One is that it’s so interesting, just like you talked about the experience, is hundreds of tiny things altogether. You don’t just fix experience. You’ve got to think about all of the things. You’ve also made it very clear that friction is the same way. It’s not just I fix friction. You’ve got to determine these things. And I want to touch on that HR role a couple ways.

Rob Parsons  First, let’s start with this idea of data with understanding where I can get the most bang for my buck, as it were. We talk a lot about employee communications, survey instruments, feedback mechanisms, technology tools to help with that. That really is the domain of HR, isn’t it? And you talked about it, being the advocate for the employee and bringing that back to the business. Here’s where you can really make a difference if you can do A, B, and C. You don’t have to do the entire alphabet right now, but if we could just do A, B and C, we can really have an impact.

Christophe Martel That’s right. So, I spent most of my career as a business leader before moving to HR. And as a business leader, all I wanted to know was what do I need to fix to help my people perform better and stay longer? Just tell me HR, please. Often the message is a little bit muddled because most tools out there are very good at telling HR and the business how people feel, and that’s actually quite useful because then you can address those feelings and try to essentially make people feel better about their employment of the company.

Christophe Martel  The data they need to manage friction is not data about people, it’s actually data about the environment in which they work and how that environment constrains their work or works for them or not. So HR as a world is actually very, rightfully so, focused on people but actually needs to build that capability to not only understand people, but understand the environment in which they operate. And that environment is that very complex ecosystem of human, physical, and digital things that they interact with constantly.

Christophe Martel Friction comes from contact between an employee and a thing in the company. When that contact is smooth and frictionless, then great, but often it’s not. And once you get a map of what are the main offenders and the things that really matter, just like the light or the shift or whatever, all these things, then you can actually act on it and maybe not solve it forever, but make it feel a little bit better, even 10% better.

Christophe Martel  So, there’s a notion of iterating your way into a continuous improvement group to make the environment in which people operate better. And you can start with just one thing, and that’s the beauty of it, that you don’t have to try to fix everything all at once forever with a perfectly elegant solution. It’s just lots of small things that actually will improve friction over time.

Rob Parsons  And these can be meaningful, tangible things employees can see that you’re making the effort.

Christophe Martel  Absolutely.

Rob Parsons  You’re not just talking.

Christophe Martel  You see this in our data. What’s interesting is that when you approach the question in that way, this whole notion of survey fatigue is people don’t like to tell a company how they feel about it, but once you’ve been asked, it’s like, “Okay, just back off already.” However, if you tell them that you want them to point to things that are getting in their way at work, they’re usually very happy to respond to surveys because they…

Christophe Martel  As long as the company holds its part of the bargain, which is to go do something about that feedback, which actually turns out that they can do because it’s not about doing something about the employee, it’s about doing something about the things that they control, processes, policies, tools, et cetera, then it’s actually a good bargain for both employees and employers to say, “Yeah, we’re together. We’re going to make this environment better.” And this term that we’re using internally of friction fighters, whether it’s people in HR or business leaders, IT, whoever contributes to that environment, working together with employees who are involved in this effort to reduce work friction, that’s what we call friction fighters. And it’s actually a common cause for both the shareholders and employees, which is rare enough to be mentioned.

Rob Parsons Yes, for certain.

Rob Parsons  The second point I want to touch on with HR, it was something you mentioned earlier, and it isn’t just doing my job, but it’s being at work, looking for that promotion, looking for a training, looking for whatever it may be. HR is a whole another layer that I’m interacting with at the company. And HR can, by accident, create its own friction, which isn’t necessarily how I’m doing my job, but how I am experiencing your company. I’m experiencing my life at your company.

Rob Parsons Tell me a little bit about HR teams and some of the things they’re doing and how they have to maybe think about it a little differently. Not just a bolt on, but think about what they’re doing to be a part of the employee experience. Well, they are. What they’re doing to make it better or worse.

Christophe Martel  Yeah. Maybe the best example I could think about for to highlight, to illustrate this, is an HR very senior executive in a very large, very successful famous company in the United States told me, “I designed the parental leave process and it was perfect, and then I had two kids and it was horrible.” So that’s it. HR is typically expert at designing flawless processes that actually, seen from the top, work perfectly well. However, when individuals consume these processes that usually are not single processes, you always consume processes and policies and all kinds of things all at the same time, that cocktail is really what doesn’t necessarily work for people.

Christophe Martel  How HR can pivot essentially is to try to understand what creates friction for employees. And by the way, when you ask employees what creates for friction for them, the answer that you get is always very different than what HR thinks the answer is, and simply because HR doesn’t experience these things, and to be able to see the friction, you need to experience it. So as we say at FOUNT, “People who do the work are in the best place to know work friction and to identify it.” So that’s the first thing that HR can do, is to spend more time understanding that perspective, rather than perfecting their process design skills.

Christophe Martel  The second thing is actually when resolving these points of friction that you identify is to, again, not use the traditional tools that HR typically use, which is, okay, now we understand there’s a problem there, we are going to redesign the process and we’re going to go on top of the mountain, think about the perfect solution, and then come back down and it will rain back down on our people and it’ll work, and then we’ll get feedback on how it works. Actually, things need to be, unless they’re really very basic fixes, need to be co-created. And what that means is that employees should be part of building the solution with HR as an orchestrator or facilitator.

Christophe Martel  And one example that I want to give from actually a small company was new hire attrition happening because these new hires had a hard time doing the work that had been designed by people that had been in the company for 10 years. So people that knew perfectly how to do the work created the workflow, and you had these new hires coming in and saying, “I can’t do this. It’s too hard for me, and therefore I can’t perform, therefore I’m going to leave.” And this was actually a logistics company.

Christophe Martel  And to fix that, what the company and the HR team asked employees to do was to take new hires that had been there for two months and said, “Okay, so to navigate this warehouse, how would you want it to be? How should it work? How should the warehouse be?” And they all came up with a solution that made it a lot more simple for them to navigate it. And actually, even the guys that had been there for 10 years were like, “You know what? It actually makes sense.” Because over time, they’d built DNA to accommodate complexity, essentially.

Christophe Martel  So, the notion of co-creation is really important, is that if you want to fix problems that people see, you actually have to involve them in the solving of those problems to get to the best possible outcomes. That truth is valid for small or big companies. And when you get employees in that place where they can not only contribute to identifying what gets in their way and pointing to it and giving you data about it, and number two, to be a part of the solution, that’s a very virtuous circle to get things better and to make their work just easier, faster, which is what everyone wants.

Rob Parsons  I love it. That’s a great way to close this out, Christophe. Thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Christophe Martel  Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure. Good to see you.

Rob Parsons  It was great. And I just love hearing that real practical advice about improving the employee experience, just get the right perspective and co-create the solution. It sounds simple, and it probably is once you dig into bite-size pieces that you can actually tackle.

Christophe Martel  Absolutely. Thank you.

Rob Parsons  Fantastic. Thank you again, Christophe.

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