Organizational friction is the cumulative effect of clunky technology, needless communications, unproductive meetings, bureaucratic processes, and emotionally exhausting interactions. It’s depleting people’s time and energy, sucking their souls, and costing organizations well over $3 trillion each year. It’s not doing organizations any favours in the retention department either.
Queen Bey nailed it in her Great Resignation battle cry Break my Soul. I guarantee, no one has ever said “I love the soul-sucking friction I experience at work”. Yet, it continues to be an expensive and exhausting attribute of our work experience. Today’s workforce is particularly allergic to organizational friction because they’ve grown up in a world designed to be as personalized and as user-friendly as possible.
Which of the top 3 sources of friction is your organization most guilty of?
1. Outdated, Clunky and Disparate Technology and Tools
In our hyper- personalized, easy-to-use, on-demand world of Amazon, Netflix, and Apple, why does it feel like it’s 1995 inside our organizations? This is key to attracting and retaining millennials and Gen Z employees (35% of which said they would leave an organization if the technology was terrible). Remember, they haven’t had the experience of older generations who gradually moved from primitive tools to what’s available now. We can’t blame them for thinking it’s non-negotiable to step back in time to go to work. Does your organization use disparate tools and platforms that don’t talk to each other? How can you integrate them more seamlessly, and utilize single sign-on and autofill to minimize entering redundant information? Default to giving employees more access to technology and tools not less.
2. Bureaucracy and Arduous Processes that Should be Streamlined, Automated, or Digitized
How much extra work do you need to get things done in your organization? Are there excessive hierarchies, miles of approvals, and analysis paralysis when it comes to making decisions? Try providing guardrails or guiding principles but push decision-making as low as possible in the organization to increase speed and agility. Have you leveraged technology to automate the mundane and elevate the strategic, more humane work? This is especially important for managers. Now, more than ever, they are being asked to play a more empathic, connective role with their people. All things considered, they can’t do that if they are buried in robotic, low-value, administrative tasks.
3. Not Operating Strategically
Prioritize and Communicate
To avoid the ‘flavour of the month’ inertia that often comes when launching (yet another) new initiative, leaders need to prioritize and communicate the top strategic priorities ruthlessly and say no to any project or initiative that isn’t directly linked to those priorities. Then it’s key to communicate that and ensure it’s obvious to employees how all the initiatives and programs fit together, what pain points they solve, who they impact, and what is in it for them.
Focus on the signal, not the noise.
We’ve all seen departments like HR (sorry HR) operating as order takers, spending their time putting out fires and building bolt-on programs to reactively address business problems. Accordingly, This gives them a bad name and creates tons of wasteful, unimpactful work. However, when these teams work proactively with the business to understand and address the root causes of their pain points, magic happens.
Optimize your Meetings
Meetings. Period. Organizations spend roughly 15% of their time on meetings, with 71% of those meetings considered unproductive, from which they lose an estimation of $37 billion per year to this. Ask yourself, are your meetings short, strategic, and few in number? Or are people in meetings all day (that could have been an email or asynchronous document) unable to actually get work done until after hours? Hello, burnout!
Also, stop making meetings the default. A great way to vet whether you actually need a meeting and ensure you’re getting the optimal impact of it is Keith Ferrazzi’s practice of utilizing an asynchronous collaboration prior to the meeting. Before the meeting share a Google doc so people can weigh in on that topic. Then, you decide from the feedback if you even need a meeting (often you do not) and if so, who are the very few people you need in the meeting. Then the meeting is a more strategically focused and streamlined time to get it over the finish line.
Be Brief
Get more targeted and brief in your communications. Do the upfront work to put yourself in the audience’s shoes and figure out what they need to know, why they should care, what’s in it for them, and what they need to do. As mentioned before, you should structure your communications to save the recipient from the mental gymnastics of decoding your brain dump of an email. Go a step further and ask yourself, does it need to be an email? Email overload is stressful and costs $1,641 per employee each year. Next time you’re about to hit send, ask yourself, could this be a Slack, recorded voice memo, or agenda item for the next 1:1?
Reducing Organizational Friction
Generally, think of your organization as a product for your people and ask yourself these questions to reduce organizational friction:
- Do they know how to use it?
- Is it simple?
- Is it obvious how it works?
- Are there pain points or ‘bugs’?
- How does it make people feel? Is it relevant?
- What do they get out of it?
- What are the barriers to entry?
Asking questions like this can help organizations streamline, automate and kill off their friction darlings so people can focus on the actual work.
Further Reading:
Employee to Employer Relations
How to Praise Someone Professionally
Change Management Books
Gratitude Wall: Best Ideas
