Employees who face frequent friction points throughout their workday are more likely to underperform and even leave the organisation. Here’s how HR can address these challenges and foster a more productive and engaged workforce.

Imagine this: an employee arrives at work only to find they can’t get in because the security code has been changed – and no one told them.

They pull out their phone to message a colleague for help, but a recent software update has logged them out of the system. Now, they have to go through two-step authentication and re-download their email app to their personal phone.

Finally, at their desk, they receive an urgent message from Jenny asking for a file. Twenty minutes later, they’re still searching for it. Then, a ping from their internal communications channel: the CEO wants everyone to download a new time-tracking app – the third one trialled this year. Another ping from HR reminds them to complete the mandatory training module by the end of the day – if only they could remember how to access the learning portal.

It’s not even 9am and they already feel overwhelmed and flustered. This isn’t the ’employee experience’ they had been promised.

According to Qualtric’s sixth Employee Experience Trends report, which has drawn sentiment from 35,000 employees across the globe – 2000+ of which were from Australia – one of the most impactful ways employers can enhance the employee experience is to make work feel less chaotic.

“Over the past few years, workers in Australia and across the globe have been dealing with relentless change. It’s no surprise many have reached their breaking point,” says Dr Cecelia Herbert, Principal Behavioural Scientist at Qualtrics.

“Work has somehow become even more chaotic since the pandemic as employers pursue short-term wins and try to adapt ways of working for modern realities. Yet, for a number of years now, the best employee experiences [have been] about how and why work gets done. These two aspects are the most impactful pathways to sustainable productivity and positive people outcomes.”

Friction leads to poor performance and low engagement

Speaking at Gartner’s ReImagine HR Conference in Sydney last week, Kamil Donaldson, Senior Principal HR Advisory at Gartner, presented the audience with some stark data on the cost of unchecked workplace friction.

According to a survey of over 3500 employees, those who experience friction have:

• 51 per cent lower intent to stay with an organisation
• 38 per cent lower mental wellbeing
• 31 per cent lower engagement rates
• 21 per cent lower performance
• 10 per cent lower discretionary effort.

“These effects are not minor,” said Donaldson. “They can have a huge impact in our organisations. We’re seeing that 97 per cent of employees have experienced some form of work friction.”

While the presence of work friction is nothing new, Donaldson says there’s something different about the friction that’s taking place today.

“It’s the rapid pace of change within our organisations that’s driving these frictions. Consider what employees have faced recently: return to office, strategy and policy updates, new technology, cultural shifts. These constant changes are putting employees in a state of flux.

“While [CEOs] are focusing on growth and efficiency, employees are constantly battling changes and frictions.”

Remove complexity

Dr Herbert says there are some consistent themes that have emerged from the six years’ worth of Qualtrics reports into the employee experience.

“Those are around things like, ‘I have support to get my job done’ or ‘I am supported to meet my stakeholders’ needs.’ The other thing is around systems and processes that employees need. 

“These might not sound like the most dynamic or exciting solutions – it’s not like a training program that might give you a quick fix. These are slow-moving things; these are your cultures of continuous improvement,” she says.

“When employees are involved in change plans, they are 3.5 times more likely to be high performers.” – Kamil Donaldson, Senior Principal HR Advisory, Gartner

Employees are showing up at work and adapting to the new demands, systems and ways of working, but this isn’t necessarily sustainable.

“Human beings are remarkable at being able to be very resourceful in the moment to get the job done. But then, over time, we’re starting to see that the systems and processes aren’t adapting as quickly as people.”

This means employees are often dealing with unclear, cumbersome and/or inefficient ways of working.

“Simple things like filling in a timesheet, getting rostered on, raising an invoice or getting approval for a travel expense are becoming way more difficult than they actually need to be.”

These friction points can result in a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ scenario, where relatively minor collections of Band-Aid solutions result in a complex layer of unmanageable work.

“When we go to solve problems… what we tend to do is add new processes, new solutions,  new fixes. So what you’ve got in organisations dealing with immediate challenges are layers and layers of things that were once temporary solutions that have become long-term fixes.”

Instead, consider where and how you can remove complexity.

“What can we do to take the burden off [employees] and save time, energy and effort to get the basics done so they’re able to move through their work in a frictionless way?”

Some ways to do this, according to Donaldson, include:

• Empowering employees to flag low-value meetings to reduce meeting overload.
• Asking people to justify keeping legacy work processes to align strategy and processes.
• Engaging employees in change implementation to prevent unforeseen obstacles. Gartner’s open-source change model is a great starting point for this (see graphic below).

Sometimes the solutions are really simple, such as ensuring employees receive formal guidance on how to adapt when organisational priorities change (which only 27 percent of employees say they receive, according to Gartner), and ensuring employees are given the chance to provide feedback on change plans (only one in three say they are).

“When employees are involved in change plans, they are 3.5 times more likely to be high performers, five times more likely to be more engaged, and 3.2 times more likely to have high discretionary effort,” said Donaldson.

“Involving employees in discussions to consider their preferences doesn’t mean you can’t implement the change plans that leaders want. What this means is that we’re just involving them to help support us in the journey.”

Remove productivity pressures

Another factor leading to employees’ sense of chaos at work is the immense productivity pressures many are facing.

Qualtrics’ research found that 40 per cent of Australian employees felt pressure from their employers to increase productivity. 

“Everyone’s looking at ways to boost employee efficiency and productivity. That’s one of the reasons why AI is such a huge topic,” says Dr Herbert.

“Human beings are remarkable at being able to be very resourceful in the moment to get the job done. But then, over time, we’re starting to see that the systems and processes aren’t adapting as quickly as people.” – Dr Cecelia Herbert, Principal Behavioural Scientist, Qualtrics.

But this has to be a two-way agreement, she adds.

“If there’s an expectation for employees to [increase productivity], there’s got to be some reciprocity there. There needs to be a psychological contract that says: ‘As my employer, you will provide me with the tools, processes and systems that I need to be able to do that.’

“If it’s only one-way, it indicates that [employers] don’t care as much about the employee experience and it erodes trust,” she says.

When asked where the productivity pressures were stemming from, most respondents said it was due to the pace of change, says Dr Herbert.

“It’s the constant strategic, internal and external change,” she says.

For this reason, Dr Herbert suggests “getting back to basics” with the employee experience.

“We don’t predict that the pace of change or the level of chaos is going to slow down in 2025. But we know that employers that embrace employee-centric ways of managing change will be the ones that thrive under those conditions.”

A crucial part of a strong employee experience is ensuring effective leadership practices and long-term vision. Unfortunately, Qualtrics data suggests this could be a challenge for some Australian businesses.

It found that less than half (47 per cent) of Australian employees believed their leaders would choose employee wellbeing over short-term business gains.

“When there are these negative experiences of decreased morale and increased criticism, and it feels like an ‘us-and-them’ situation evolving, the consequence of that is that it’s really hard to build and even maintain your previous levels of trust,” says Dr Herbert. 

“I have a lot of empathy for leaders right now. It’s really difficult because they’ve got to make really quick decisions, and they are short-term in a lot of these cases because they’re under pressure to turn things around in the short term from the people they’re accountable to.

“However, what I find interesting is that when leaders are speaking to the HR business partners, they’ll raise concerns like increased criticism of their behaviours, negative sentiment and [low] morale. They’ll talk about employees being resistant to new policies being rolled out, or this quietening effect where people aren’t answering feedback surveys. That’s [a lack of] trust.”

With increasing business complexity going into 2025, trust remains an essential element that cannot be overlooked.

“Trust means that employees are open to listening to your vision and ideas. It means they’re going to be more strategically aligned. It’s going to make the entire process of achieving your organisational and individual goals smoother and easier. It definitely has a downstream and long-term impact, particularly on organisational performance.”

For this reason, Dr Herbert suggests that HR teams need to start considering how to treat trust as an important metric to measure alongside operational and financial metrics.

“The same way your CFO gives a CEO financial data to inform their decisions, your CHRO data should be used to inform those same decisions. It’s the only way leaders are going to be able to make good decisions.

“And these aren’t nice-to-have metrics – they’re not even ‘HR metrics’. These are hard business metrics that every leader should have access to so they know how they’re tracking.”

Learn how to facilitate role clarity, effective collaboration and positive cultures with AHRI’s Organisational Design corporate training program for teams or individual short course.