The board is asking you to increase productivity. Shareholders are clamoring for reduced costs. As a leader, you know you have to find ways to impact these and other high-level KPIs in your organization. But what you might not realize is how closely tied they are to the day-to-day work your employees are doing.
The key to better understanding that connection lies in better understanding the underlying work. More specifically, it’s about uncovering the various points of work friction that prevent employees from performing their best.
By finding ways to reduce that friction and make things easier for employees – whether through improved processes, technology solutions, or better communication – you’ll kick-start the kind of measurable bottom-line improvements that can help uplift the entire organization. Read on to find out how to do it.
Use Worker-Focused Data to Help Remove Obstacles to Improvement
What do your employees do all day? It seems like a simple question, but in reality most organizations don’t have a great handle on the answer. Because of this, they don’t really know what’s working and what’s not. And not knowing what doesn’t work is what tends to lead to things like excess expenses and lost productivity.
This is work friction. By focusing more intently on how employees spend their time and where they encounter day-to-day pain points, it’s easier to figure out how to make them more efficient and more productive.
What does this micro focus on employees and their challenges have to do with the potential macro effects on an organization as a whole? Not only does eliminating that kind of work friction help reduce waste and free up resources that could be better deployed elsewhere, it also helps broader improvement efforts across the organization stand a far better chance of success.
Make Understanding Your Employees’ Work a Key Part of Your Strategy
Work friction data can impact an organization in a number of ways. For example, we recently worked with a financial services firm that was looking to ramp up productivity on its software development team by introducing several generative AI tools that would help speed up manual tasks and free up employees for higher-value work.
Despite a significant investment, however, the rollout of these chatbots and code assistants was tepid at best, with muted enthusiasm and low usage among the developers. As a result, the project stalled with little measurable progress or meaningful ROI insight.
The problem? The AI tools didn’t address the highest-friction pain points in employees’ day-to-day work. The developers reported wasting significant time due to the AI chatbot’s inability to access necessary data. They faced challenges with the AI code assistant’s quality checks, leading to time-consuming manual reviews.
This is a common theme in digital transformations generally, and AI rollouts in particular. The company can see adoption data, but not what’s driving those numbers – or what to change to increase adoption. In this case, with a better understanding of work friction prior to the rollout, the company could have made adjustments that would have better facilitated these employees’ work, leading to more widespread usage and a better chance of achieving the expected productivity increases.
Improve Bottom-line Performance by Reducing Work Friction
By focusing on work friction and making adjustments prior to its next experiment, the financial services firm ended up seeing much more robust adoption of its AI tools and, as hoped for, significant improvement in developer productivity.
The organization implemented several phased friction-reducing measures targeted at specific work moments and touchpoints between workers and the chatbots and code assistants. The result was an annual savings of more than 120,000 work hours, which translated into roughly $5.4 million in cost savings.
And that was just one project in one functional area. McKinsey research estimates that employee disengagement and attrition – two things that can be directly tied to work friction – can cost a mid-sized S&P 500 enterprise between $228 and $355 million a year.
That’s why reducing work friction is so important beyond just the prospects of department-level processes and projects. These smaller victories, spread across the entire organization, are what add up to enterprise-wide success.
Focus on the Worker to Understand the Bigger Picture
Worker-focused KPIs are the building blocks of organizational progress. By making improvements at the employee level – through better understanding of and attention to the everyday pain points they’re dealing with – companies can make the kinds of changes that lead to substantial bottom-line results.
Whether you’re looking to reduce operating costs or introduce more efficient workflows, the key is to recognize work friction at a granular level so you can be sure you’re addressing real problems with the right solutions. We can help you get started.
