FOUNT’s SaaS Platform Fights Workplace Friction

The Futurum Group is a global technology research and advisory firm for high-tech. Senior analyst, Sherril Hanson, recently sat down with FOUNT’s cofounders to learn more about work friction, our latest research, and results from one of our customers. Read the full article here.

Analyst Take: Friction is a favorite term among experience focused practitioners and researchers, and for good reason. It is often these everyday points of irritation and inefficiency that add up to lower employee engagement scores and potential employee attrition. However, often these work friction points remain undiscovered, even with employee feedback or voice of the employee programs in place.

FOUNT was founded in 2022 as a spinout of the employee experience consultancy TI People. The company has headquarters in Washington, DC, and offices in London and Hamburg. The company is backed by Lavrock Ventures, Osage Venture Partners, and Grotech Ventures and has a host of customers such as Adidas, Pfizer, Pepsi, and UnitedHealth Group.

Both cofounders have personal background in human resources (HR) transformation, and the genesis of FOUNT came from the goal of wanting to provide more value and measurability to employee experience (EX) and bring visibility to HR leaders into what was going well and what was not.

I was recently able to chat with FOUNT Cofounder and CEO Christophe Martel and Cofounder Volker Jacobs and to learn more about the FOUNT platform and the push/pull between employees who want a great work experience and companies who want productivity and growth.

“Work friction, especially in large organization is everywhere. We view friction as something that is in between two worlds that are sometimes disconnected. So, in the world of employees, people want to have a great experience at work. They may want a larger voice in issues such as how they work and from where. For companies, they are constantly on the search for new productivity gains and they often don’t have a great view into the way employees perceive their experience, across their work moments. Perhaps they can pick up on an issue, but they can’t really get to the root cause. That’s the areas we are focusing in on, really giving visibility into where friction sits, how big of a problem is it and how can it be influenced and impacted.”

Volker Jacobs, FOUNT cofounder