WHITEPAPER: Work Friction

When we analyzed how 25 leading organizations—including BASF, Deutsche Bahn, Novartis, thyssenkrupp—actually implement AI in HR, a clear pattern emerged: It wasn't about the technology. It wasn't about the budget. It was about execution.

The difference between organizations shipping measurable value and those stuck presenting endless slides comes down to a single, replicable value creation pattern.

The Research Foundation: What Data Revealed

Our comprehensive study, validated by 151 HR and AI professionals across leading organizations, uncovered something remarkable. While most HR teams focus on identifying AI opportunities, the successful ones focus on something entirely different: translating insights into shipped products that people actually use.

The data tells a compelling story. Companies achieve:

• 50% productivity gains in HR Operations roles, first impact within 90 days
• 32% faster time-to-hire (from 38 to 26 days) by treating talent acquisition as a product
• 96% user adoption of AI-powered tools in just three weeks
• €1.4M annual cost savings potential per HR Operations Specialist role alone (30,000 employees company)

But here's what surprised us most: The technology wasn't the differentiator. The value creation model was.

Beyond Efficiency: The New HR Value Creation Model

The winning HR organizations discovered that AI creates value in ways traditional ROI calculations miss entirely. Yes, there are impressive efficiency gains—our research shows AI can free up 32% capacity in analytics roles and 50% in operations roles. But the real transformation happens when that freed capacity enables entirely new services.

Let’s take the example of a global engineering firm that didn't just automate tasks—they redesigned their entire talent acquisition experience. By treating hiring managers and candidates as customers, not administrative burdens, they reduced time-to-hire by a third while dramatically improving the candidate experience. The secret? They applied product management principles, not just process optimization. And they used AI as automator, augmenter, and assistant.

Extrapolating the talent acquisition example, the company envisions an AI-enabled, product-oriented  HR model that looks like this (anonymized):

The Value Creation System That Actually Works

After studying successful and stalled implementations of versions of such an AI-powered HR model, we identified the four-module system that consistently delivers results:

• Module 1: Research - Moving beyond pain points to understand actual user needs. One company discovered their "time-consuming administrative work" wasn't about automation—it was about fragmented systems creating unnecessary handoffs.
• Module 2: Product Management - Treating HR services as products with clear value propositions, user-focused metrics, and two-week iteration cycles. This isn't HR speak—its proven methodology borrowed from technology companies that scale successfully.
• Module 3: Hackathon Sprint - Instead of 18 months of committee meetings, successful organizations compress decision-making into 48 hours. A manufacturing company in Germany used this approach to design, test, and approve an enterprise-wide chatbot, including compliance clearance and ROI validation. The result? A ‘go’-decision scaling the solution to cover all topics, all populations by 2027, with break-even projected within 12 months.
• Module 4: Change & Scale - Coaching 1-2 model teams to full adoption while meticulously tracking usage, cycle times, and user sentiment. The key insight: adoption is everything. Without it, even the most sophisticated AI is worthless.

The 48-Hour Decision Engine

The Hackathon Sprint deserves special attention because it solves HR's biggest AI challenge: alignment paralysis. Traditional approaches get bogged down in stakeholder management, compliance reviews, and technical feasibility studies that stretch for months.

Smart organizations flip this script. They bring HR, IT, legal, security, and business leaders into one room with actual users and working prototypes. In 48 hours, cross-functional teams build, test, validate compliance, estimate ROI, and make go/no-go decisions.

The results speak for themselves: Organizations using this approach report 95% faster time-to-implementation compared to traditional approaches. More importantly, they build momentum that carries forward into full-scale implementation. And very simply put, they learn how to deal with AI.

Success Factors That Keep the System Running

Three enablers separate sustained success from one-time wins:

Start Role-Specific - Don't try to transform everything at once. Begin where AI can move a visible needle—typically HR Operations or Talent Acquisition—then expand systematically.

Obsess Over Adoption - One organization reached 96% hiring manager adoption of their AI scheduler in three weeks. Their secret? They optimized relentlessly for user experience, not technical features.

Measure What Matters - Track adoption rates, and its biggest driver: The removal of work friction for managers and employees. Remember: a perfect AI tool that nobody uses creates zero value.

In  90 Days From Assessment to Action

The pattern is clear, and it's replicable. The question isn't whether AI will transform HR—it's whether your organization will lead or follow.

1. If you lack clarity on where to start: Begin with Module 1 (Research) to prioritize by user need and quantified value potential. Our AI Impact Assessment can provide role-specific insights for your organization in just 48 hours.
2. If product orientation hasn’t found its way into HR: Module 2 (Product Management) will set up the foundations, with focus on just one, AI-enabled HR product platform, and with a product manager to own it.
3. If you have identified opportunities but lack momentum: Run Module 3 (Hackathon Sprint) on your top two use cases. The intensive, cross-functional format breaks through alignment barriers that stall traditional approaches.
4. If you have working prototypes but low adoption: Focus on Module 4 (Change & Scale) with clear adoption metrics and user-centered optimization.

The Bottom Line

The organizations winning with AI in HR aren't just automating existing processes—they're fundamentally reimagining how HR creates value. They start small, move fast, and scale what proves valuable to actual users. A very realistic, conservative, staggered business (parameters: 30,000-employee organization, focus on two HR roles, positive ROI in year 1) can look like this:

The methodology exists. The case studies are proven. The remaining question is: Which approach will define your organization's AI journey—systematic, staggered execution or hopeful experimentation?

What's your organization's biggest barrier to moving from AI assessment to AI results? I'd be interested in your perspective.

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WASHINGTON, Nov. 01, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - FOUNT, a platform that helps companies identify and reduce work friction, today released research from its 2023 Work Friction Survey. The findings reveal a massive gap between how business leaders and employees perceive work friction. When asked how work friction has changed over time, nearly half of employees said it’s gotten worse. This is in stark contrast to business leaders, three-quarters of whom thought work friction had not changed or had even improved.

Work friction is perceived by employees as energy they shouldn’t have to expend at work. It can range from faulty systems to unavailable managers and erratic work schedules. Because work friction can only be seen by employees as their daily workflow is disrupted, it is often overlooked leading to frustration, burnout and misdirected investment on the wrong solutions. According to Gartner, employees waste two hours per day trying to work around work friction. For a Fortune 1000 company with 10,000 employees, that amounts to 3.1 million wasted hours per year and an annual $78.4 million lost.

“While most leaders believe they are well-informed about the work friction their employees experience, this research clearly indicates a stark divide,” said Christophe Martel, Cofounder and CEO of FOUNT. “Despite record investment in learning and development, staffing, and technology to make work better, employee quit rates have more than doubled in the last decade – costing Fortune 500 companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The only way to understand what employees experience is either to play undercover boss or get work friction data. Absent this, it’s guesswork.”

FOUNT’s research also found that:

1. Work friction is a likely contributor to absenteeism and attrition
95% of employees said work friction makes them feel bad about their job, with 37% of employees saying work friction makes them feel so bad they want to quit or take days off. In short, work friction likely plays a significant role in absenteeism and attrition.

2. Work friction is perceived to stifle personal productivity and quality customer service
68% of employees reported work friction has a negative impact on their personal productivity and their ability to provide strong customer service.

3. Work friction overwhelmingly occurs in employee experiences owned by business leaders
80% of work friction occurs in employees’ day-to-day work vs HR managed services (e.g. career advancement, training, taking leave).

“Work friction symptoms are usually apparent, like absenteeism and low productivity. A business leader might first try to address those symptoms with a cash bonus for high performers or strict time-off rules,” added Martel. “But like allergy sufferers, treating a stuffy nose with medication isn’t the same as addressing the root cause, such as pet dander. Treating only the symptoms means problems will persist or could even get more complicated.”

FOUNT’s 2023 Work Friction survey suggests the problem is likely getting worse at most companies. Although 91% of leader respondents said work friction reduction is a priority for their organizations, only 42% have so far taken action to reduce it, and less than 20% are tackling work friction in employees’ day-to-day work, where it most often occurs.

To learn more about work friction and why it matters, download FOUNT’s Work Friction whitepaper.

About 2023 Work Friction Survey
FOUNT Global Inc.’s 2023 Work Friction Surveys were fielded in August 2023 in collaboration with our panel survey partner, RepData. A total of 706 panelists were sourced from across North America, Europe, and ANZ using multimodal collection: 506 employees completed an 11-question survey online; 200 HR, business, and C-suite leaders completed a 4-question survey in telephone interviews. Both surveys included closed- and open-ended questions; the latter were coded to generate quantifiable results for comparison with closed-ended responses.

About FOUNT
FOUNT believes work should be frictionless for employees and employers. The company offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that identify what’s at the root of productivity and attrition challenges. By helping HR, IT and business leaders prioritize and fix causes of friction in employees’ work environment, organizations can measurably improve performance and employee experiences. FOUNT’s customer base represents some of the world’s leading organizations including adidas, Siemens, Baloise, Northwell Health and TEKsystems. Founded in 2022 as a spinout of the employee experience consultancy, TI People, FOUNT is headquartered in Washington, D.C. with offices in London and Hamburg. Visit https://getfount.com for more information.

Media Contact: Jack McHugh, jack@propllr.com

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More and more these days, AI is the undisputed future of HR.

Just as it has in other critical business areas, however, AI has brought to HR not only the promise of increased productivity and efficiency, but a fair amount of disruption as well. That’s to be expected with transformative technology. But what does it mean going forward?

For HR leaders, the goal should be to deliver more value for internal customers at lower cost while leveraging the full potential of AI. And that means reducing friction in three key areas:

• HR's internal Customers Workflows
• Employees Workflows
• People Leaders and Business Leaders Workflows

Use AI to remove the barriers that keep people from doing their work efficiently and effectively, and you’ll unlock new value and opportunity. But you can’t reduce friction if you can’t see it. That’s why reliable friction data is such a key piece of the AI puzzle for HR leaders.

The bottom line: AI’s impact on HR can be immense. For example, research from FOUNT Global, Inc. partner TI People found the potential for 29% average efficiency across all HR roles using AI. For some organizations, it could be much higher.

If you’d like to learn how to thoroughly examine the impact of AI on your HR role in just 48 hours, TI People’s AI Impact Assessment can help.

Number of the Month: Confronting Tech Friction

Thinking about AI? Then you’d better be thinking about friction, too.

Article of the month:

Reducing friction and giving time back to people leaders ($$$)

Stephanie Denino is bringing numbers to a question HR and People Experience leaders often wrestle with: How do you prove the business value of a better employee experience?

She shows that even modest friction improvements can translate into staggering returns. In one modeled enterprise, simply cutting wasted time in people leader workflows by 15% freed up nearly $16 million worth of hours for leaders to spend on higher-value activities. That’s the kind of data-backed story every HR leader can take to their CFO - clear evidence that fighting friction isn’t just about employee satisfaction, it’s about unlocking measurable business value.

Read full article here

What we are reading:

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📖Beyond the Buzz: Why a “Careful Pace” on AI Adoption Can Scale HR’s Impact

Most conversations about AI tend to focus on job disruption and operational efficiency. But HR’s role in this rollout should be both more expansive and more careful – namely, to champion AI’s potential to transform business and workforce outcomes positively and sustainably.

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📖 Employees Are Avoiding AI – HR Can Help Them Embrace It

Looking to boost AI enthusiasm in your organization? HR can help by providing not only education, but also clarity and transparency around how the technology fits into the company’s strategy.

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📖Report: Most AI Business Investments Fail

New research from MIT shows that 95% of enterprise AI investments aren't ROI-positive. One bright spot? Back-office projects (like HR), which tend to be among the best-performing use cases.

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📖 Which Missing Skills are Holding Back AI Adoption?

Deficits in areas such as cognitive skills, AI responsibility, self-management skills, and communication may be hindering the adoption of AI tools in the workplace according to researchers.

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Until next time,

The FOUNT Team

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