To improve workplace productivity, own your work friction: 3 ways to identify, eliminate it

From front-line workers to C-suite executives, employees throughout organizations share an all-too-common experience. Routine work is increasingly complex. And it tends to take an unnecessary amount of effort to complete.

Of course, wasting effort wastes time. And unnecessary work wastes a lot of time. According to Gartner, employees spend nearly two hours per day on tasks they ideally wouldn’t wrestle with in the first place.

It’s a pervasive problem made all the more complicated by the fact that no one seems to own it.

But that’s a consequence of perception that’s easily fixed. From Human Resources to Marketing to Customer Experience to Finance, teams that learn to recognize work friction are able to own it and root it out. The result: more consistent individual experiences and cross-functional success.

Here, I’ll define exactly what work friction is, then dive into three ways productivity-minded teams can identify and eliminate it.

What is work friction?

Work friction is any employee energy (and time) wasted on unnecessary obstacles that get in the way and make work harder than it needs to be. And the bigger your company is, the harder it is to identify the moments of work friction that impact individual employee experiences.

Better individual employee experiences tend to support a better workplace overall. And healthier workplaces make for better bottom lines. So how can businesses make it easier for all employees to reach their individual goals?

The key, it turns out, is data. By gathering targeted data through surveys and interviews, businesses can identify employee pain points and deploy solutions to fix them.

Teams must:

1. Identify moments of work friction using surveys and interviews to accurately quantify the employee experiences that prevent them from completing their goals.
2. Equip friction-fighter teams with moment-centric, data-based approaches to reduce it.
3. Measure the impact to support continuous improvement of employee and business outcomes.

Below, we’ll take a deeper look at how teams that own work friction are able to fight the phenomena and measure the impact of their efforts. But first, let’s look at how to accurately identify work friction.

Illuminate work friction moments

The path to work friction is paved with best intentions. It’s not hard to see why. Leaders tend to trust their experience of what’s worked for them before. And it’s human to lean into what you want to work.

But such ego-centric approaches are likely to cause more friction than they fix – and even lead you to misidentify the issue at hand. Specific moments of work friction aren’t, after all, identified by previous experience. They’re not solved by working toward broader business objectives. They reflect only what employees experience as they each work toward their goals.

Simply put: data is the antidote to ego. That’s why data-based views into employee experiences are so important. By soliciting targeted, data-backed insights you offer employees the individualized support to identify and overcome work friction.

Say, for example, your team wants to reduce time spent from product ideation to launch. To support this, the project manager decides to adopt a new project management suite, which they’re confident will help the team more efficiently deliver their product to market.

The problem? Adoption of the new tool coincides with the start of the product’s development, training is rushed, and employees don’t receive adequate hands-on practice before being asked to fully incorporate the tool into their workflow. What’s more, it’s unclear who employees should reach out to for troubleshooting or support.

As a result, employees have to expend additional effort to attempt – and at times fail – to navigate the software efficiently. And so what was meant to be helpful created entirely new moments of difficulty for employees across the product team, ultimately reducing their productivity.

Without a team dedicated to rooting out and fighting work friction, however, management may see the forest, to turn a phrase, but fail to identify the trees. That’s why data-backed views into employee-specific moments of work friction are crucial to enhancing workplace productivity.

Next, let’s look at how data-based documentation of employee experiences helps make work better.

Use data to equip cross-functional teams

Recognizing work friction is just the beginning. True, the right data helps organizations determine the specific dilemmas that make it difficult for employees to work. But the next step is to use that data and equip teams to remove obstacles in the work environment in order to help employees achieve their goals.

In other words, don’t assume the work friction you identify will work itself out. And don’t expect another team or department to smooth out work friction for their colleagues. Rather, use data to own – and eventually address – the work friction you recognize.

Think of the data like a neutral arbiter that offers you clarity about where specific moments of work friction come from – and empowers your efforts to resolve them. Crucially, it’s not necessary to gather data from your organization’s entire workforce. More useful than company-wide datasets, in fact, are targeted surveys that illuminate specific moments detrimental to work.

To explore this further, let’s return to the project management example discussed above. Surveying the organization as a whole is a time-consuming process and will create an unnecessary amount of noise. But ask the project manager and their developers about the moments when work is more effortful than necessary, and you’ll receive actionable information.

For example, a targeted survey of team members might find that their current project management tool isn’t the issue at all. Rather, the platform offers efficiency-driving capabilities that the team hasn’t yet adopted. Instead of onboarding a new tool, therefore, a refresh of the team’s understanding of their current software offers a more applicable solution.

When it comes to reducing work friction, there’s no need to go at it unguided. In fact, the same data-first approach that equips teams to reduce individual moments of work friction empowers them to continuously take in and evaluate feedback to reduce work friction over the long term.

Next, let’s look more into how a sense of focus supports process improvement.

Use data to support workers daily

As you refine how to identify work friction and equip teams to address it, there’s one last step you can take to help bolster team success for the long run. Measure the results of your friction-fighting efforts to improve the processes, tools, and structures that support workers every day.

When done right, this last step turns datasets into ongoing strategic assets.

Continually reviewing the data – including checking in with employees and managers – is paramount. Root causes of frustration change. What once made it easier for employees to access their paychecks (say, direct deposit) might be worth refining (to earned-wage access, for example). Or say your project management software continued to work wonders. Until it didn’t.

No matter the issue or solution, the only way to ensure you’re taking accurate action is to go to the source, reach out to employees, and learn how they actually experience work. Then, recognize this ia framework for continuous process improvements – not just a one-off solution to an idiosyncratic issue.

Offer consistent employee experiences

You may be familiar with the customer experience mantra, “consistently good, strategically amazing.” If you’re not, the idea is that offering customers consistently good service is what promotes stickiness. “Wow” moments matter, of course. But without consistently good food, you’re unlikely to return to a restaurant no matter how many free desserts they send out.

Employee experiences work the same way. Employees need to know that they can expect smooth workflows. They need to be confident that management will listen to them when work is unnecessarily difficult. And they need to clearly see who takes ownership of all aspects of work.

Otherwise, they may not even stick around for that year-end bonus.