The Friction Economy: Why Good People Struggle in Bad Systems
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Introduction
An organization can have talented people, experienced managers, competitive salaries, modern technology, and a culture built around collaboration and trust—and still make work unnecessarily difficult.
Employees wait for approvals that seem to add little value. Managers spend hours coordinating decisions they do not have the authority to make. Teams attend meetings to clarify information that should already be accessible. Responsibilities overlap, priorities conflict, and processes designed to create consistency gradually become obstacles to getting things done.
None of these problems necessarily appears in an employee engagement survey. Yet they shape how people experience their workplace every day.
This is the paradox behind what we can call the Friction Economy: organizations invest heavily in improving the employee experience while overlooking the organizational conditions that make everyday work harder than it needs to be.
For years, workplace discussions have focused on engagement, leadership, employee satisfaction, and organizational culture. These remain important. But they do not tell the whole story.
A person can feel connected to their team and believe in the organization's mission while becoming increasingly frustrated by the systems surrounding their work. A capable manager can support employees, encourage collaboration, and provide meaningful feedback while being unable to resolve conflicting priorities or unnecessary approval processes.
The problem is not always a lack of motivation, commitment, or managerial capability. Sometimes, the organization itself creates the conditions that prevent people from doing their best work.
This calls for a broader understanding of employee experience.
Employee experience is not only about how people feel. It is also about how the organization makes work happen.
For HR and People leaders, this distinction matters. Improving employee experience cannot depend exclusively on engagement initiatives, leadership training, or better communication. It also requires examining the structures, processes, technologies, and decision-making systems employees interact with every day.
The challenge is to move beyond asking whether employees are engaged and start asking a more fundamental question:
Does our organization make it easy for people to do meaningful, effective work?
That is where the real opportunity begins.
Summary
Organizational friction is the accumulated effort employees must spend navigating unnecessary complexity, inefficient processes, unclear responsibilities, slow decisions, excessive meetings, and fragmented communication.
It often exists in organizations that appear successful on the surface. Good managers, competitive compensation, modern tools, and positive workplace values cannot fully compensate for systems that make work unnecessarily complicated.
This article explores why organizational friction matters, how it shapes employee experience, and what HR and business leaders can do to reduce it.
Eight major sources of friction are examined, alongside their consequences for employees and organizational performance.
The central argument is that improving employee experience requires more than increasing engagement. It requires designing organizations in which people can access information, make decisions, collaborate, and accomplish their work without unnecessary obstacles.
For People & Leadership Managers, this means shifting part of the conversation from individual behavior to organizational design.
The objective is not to eliminate every process, approval, or coordination mechanism. It is to distinguish the controls that genuinely support the organization from the complexity that simply makes work harder.
Explore: Workplace culture
Table of Contents
The Friction Economy: Understanding the Hidden Problem
Employee Experience Is More Than Engagement
The Eight Sources of Organizational Friction
The Hidden Cost of Friction on People and Performance
Why Good Managers Cannot Compensate for Broken Systems
Who Owns the Employee Experience?
Measuring Organizational Friction: From Perception to Evidence
How to Build an Organization That Makes Work Easier
Conclusion
1. The Friction Economy: Understanding the Hidden Problem
When good organizations make work unnecessarily difficult
Organizational friction rarely begins with a major failure.
More often, it develops through small decisions that appear reasonable when considered individually.
A new approval is introduced to reduce risk. Another reporting requirement is added to improve visibility. A meeting is scheduled to ensure alignment between departments. A process is created to standardize an activity across teams.
Each decision may have a legitimate purpose.
Over time, however, these mechanisms accumulate. Employees must navigate more steps, consult more stakeholders, complete more administrative tasks, and spend more time coordinating their work.
The organization becomes increasingly difficult to operate, even when everyone involved is trying to do the right thing.
This is the defining characteristic of organizational friction: the gap between the work people need to accomplish and the effort the organization requires them to expend to accomplish it.
Consider a relatively simple example.
An employee identifies a problem that requires a decision from another department. Instead of contacting the relevant decision-maker directly, the request must pass through a manager, a department head, and an approval committee.
The process is followed correctly. Everyone respects the established rules.
But what should have been a straightforward decision takes several days.
Multiply this situation across departments, projects, and thousands of employees, and the cumulative impact becomes significant.
The organization is not necessarily lacking talent or commitment. It is making productive work more difficult than necessary.
Understanding friction as an organizational problem
It is useful to distinguish organizational friction from ordinary workplace challenges.
Work involves complexity. Some decisions require consultation, some processes require controls, and some responsibilities must remain separate for legal, financial, or operational reasons.
Not every obstacle is unnecessary.
Organizational friction becomes a problem when the effort required to navigate a system is disproportionate to the value that system creates.
This can happen when:
A process requires more steps than the underlying task justifies.
Employees cannot identify who has the authority to make a decision.
Teams repeatedly exchange information because systems are disconnected.
Managers spend more time coordinating work than enabling it.
Employees must attend meetings to obtain information that could be communicated more efficiently.
Existing procedures remain in place even after the original reason for introducing them has disappeared.
The important distinction is between necessary organizational complexity and avoidable organizational complexity.
The first helps organizations operate responsibly. The second consumes capacity without delivering equivalent value.
Why organizational friction remains invisible
One reason friction persists is that traditional organizational indicators do not always capture it.
An organization may monitor employee engagement, turnover, absenteeism, compensation, and performance while overlooking the everyday effort required to navigate its internal systems.
A process may technically meet its service-level target while still requiring employees to follow multiple unnecessary steps.
A department may deliver its objectives while creating delays for three other departments.
A manager may receive positive performance feedback while spending an excessive amount of time resolving problems caused by unclear organizational responsibilities.
These situations reveal a measurement problem.
Organizations tend to measure outcomes more consistently than they measure the effort required to achieve them.
As a result, inefficiencies can become normalized. Employees adapt, create workarounds, and develop informal ways of getting things done.
The organization continues functioning, but at a hidden cost.
The real challenge is therefore not simply to identify inefficient processes. It is to understand how the organization's design shapes the experience of doing work.
The Friction Economy as a leadership challenge
Organizational friction should not be treated as an administrative inconvenience that employees must learn to tolerate.
It is a leadership and organizational effectiveness issue.
Every unnecessary approval, unclear responsibility, duplicated activity, or avoidable delay consumes time and attention that could otherwise support customer outcomes, innovation, collaboration, and meaningful work.
For HR leaders, this introduces a broader responsibility.
The question is no longer limited to whether employees feel supported by their managers or satisfied with their workplace.
It becomes:
What does the organization systematically make difficult for its people?
Answering that question is the first step toward a more effective employee experience strategy.
2. Employee Experience Is More Than Engagement
The limits of an engagement-centered approach
Employee engagement has become an established priority for organizations seeking to improve retention, performance, and workplace culture.
Engagement surveys, recognition programs, manager development, and internal communication initiatives all help organizations understand and influence how employees experience their work.
These practices remain valuable.
However, engagement and employee experience are related concepts, not interchangeable ones.
Engagement primarily concerns the relationship employees have with their work and organization. It includes dimensions such as commitment, motivation, involvement, and willingness to contribute.
Employee experience is broader.
It encompasses the interactions, systems, relationships, environments, and organizational conditions that shape an employee's journey through the workplace.
This includes how people are recruited, onboarded, supported, managed, developed, evaluated, and enabled to perform their responsibilities.
It also includes something that is often overlooked: the practical experience of getting work done.
An employee may believe in the organization's mission and enjoy working with colleagues while becoming frustrated by its internal processes.
A manager may feel committed to the company but struggle to deliver results because priorities change without explanation.
A high-performing team may have strong relationships yet lose significant time navigating disconnected systems.
These experiences do not necessarily indicate a lack of engagement.
They indicate that the organization may be creating unnecessary barriers to effective work.
The difference between feeling good and being able to work effectively
Consider two employees with similar roles in different organizations.
Both have supportive managers, competitive salaries, and access to modern technology.
The first employee can access the information needed to complete a task, understands who makes relevant decisions, and knows how to obtain support when an issue arises.
The second employee must contact several colleagues to find information, wait for approvals from multiple departments, and repeatedly clarify responsibilities.
Both employees may report similar levels of engagement.
But their everyday experiences are fundamentally different.
The first organization makes productive work relatively straightforward.
The second requires additional coordination and effort simply to achieve the same outcome.
This distinction matters because organizations cannot build a sustainable employee experience strategy by focusing exclusively on attitudes and perceptions.
They must also examine the conditions that influence employees' ability to perform.
The organizational side of employee experience
A practical way to understand employee experience is to consider three interconnected dimensions.
1. The human experience
This includes relationships, trust, recognition, leadership behavior, inclusion, and the quality of interactions between colleagues.
2. The operational experience
This concerns the practical systems employees use to perform their work: processes, decision-making, responsibilities, communication, technology, and access to information.
3. The organizational experience
This reflects the broader structures and priorities that shape everyday work, including organizational design, management practices, resource allocation, and cross-functional collaboration.
These dimensions influence one another.
A poorly designed process can create tension between colleagues. Unclear organizational responsibilities can undermine trust. Conflicting priorities can make even supportive managers appear inconsistent.
Employee experience is therefore not simply the sum of individual interactions.
It is also the result of how the organization is designed.
Why engagement initiatives cannot solve every problem
Imagine an organization that identifies declining employee satisfaction within a particular department.
Its initial response is to organize listening sessions, provide manager training, and introduce additional recognition initiatives.
These actions may help.
But suppose the underlying problem is that employees must obtain approval from several departments before completing routine tasks.
The initiative may improve communication and relationships without addressing the actual source of frustration.
Employees may feel heard while continuing to experience the same operational difficulties.
This illustrates an important limitation of engagement-led interventions: they can address how people respond to their environment without necessarily changing the environment itself.
A more effective employee experience strategy combines listening with organizational diagnosis.
It asks employees not only how they feel, but also:
What makes your work unnecessarily difficult?
Which processes consume more time than they should?
Where do decisions regularly get delayed?
What information is difficult to access?
Which responsibilities are unclear?
What do you frequently have to repeat?
Which obstacles prevent you from doing your best work?
These questions move the discussion from general perceptions toward identifiable organizational conditions.
From employee sentiment to work experience
This does not mean that engagement should become less important.
Rather, it should be understood as one dimension of a broader employee experience strategy.
Organizations need to recognize that employees can be motivated and frustrated at the same time.
They can appreciate their colleagues while criticizing their systems. They can believe in their organization's purpose while struggling with its internal complexity.
The objective should therefore be to create workplaces where people not only want to contribute but also have the organizational conditions necessary to do so.
A positive employee experience is not simply about making people feel better about work. It is also about making work better for people.
That is the shift from engagement-centered thinking to organizational effectiveness.
3. The Eight Sources of Organizational Friction
Organizational friction rarely has a single cause.
It usually emerges from several interconnected conditions that influence how employees communicate, collaborate, make decisions, and complete their responsibilities.
For People & Leadership Managers, identifying these sources is an essential step toward improving employee experience.
The following eight dimensions provide a practical starting point.
1. Unnecessary Processes
Processes are necessary for consistency, accountability, and quality.
However, processes become a source of friction when their complexity exceeds their purpose.
Employees may be required to complete several forms, enter identical information into different systems, or follow approval sequences that no longer reflect the organization's actual needs.
The result is administrative work that competes with the work employees were hired to perform.
What HR should examine:
How many steps are required to complete routine tasks?
Where does information have to be entered more than once?
Which processes create repeated employee complaints?
Are employees following procedures that no longer serve a clear purpose?
The objective is not to eliminate processes indiscriminately. It is to ensure that every significant step creates value, manages a legitimate risk, or supports a necessary outcome.
2. Bureaucracy and Excessive Approvals
Approval structures can protect organizations from financial, operational, and compliance risks.
The problem arises when approval requirements become disproportionate or when decision-making authority is unclear.
Employees may know what needs to happen but have no clear understanding of who can authorize it.
A routine request can move between several managers before reaching someone with the authority to decide.
This creates delays and encourages employees to prioritize administrative compliance over problem resolution.
What HR should examine:
Which decisions require multiple approvals?
Are approval responsibilities clearly defined?
Do approval levels reflect the actual risk involved?
Are managers empowered to make decisions appropriate to their roles?
A well-designed approval structure should protect the organization without unnecessarily slowing it down.
3. Decision Bottlenecks
Some organizations have capable people at every level but concentrate too much decision-making authority at the top.
As a result, teams wait for decisions that could reasonably be made closer to the work.
This can happen when senior leaders retain control over routine operational choices, when responsibilities overlap, or when managers lack clear decision rights.
Decision bottlenecks affect more than speed.
They can weaken accountability, reduce initiative, and make employees reluctant to take ownership.
What HR should examine:
Where do decisions regularly get stuck?
Which decisions repeatedly move upward without a clear reason?
Do employees understand their decision-making authority?
Are escalation procedures clear and proportionate?
The solution is not to decentralize every decision. It is to establish clear decision rights and ensure that decisions are made at the appropriate organizational level.
4. Meeting Overload
Meetings help organizations coordinate activities, resolve problems, and exchange information.
But when meetings become the default solution for every communication or coordination challenge, they can consume the time needed to complete actual work.
Employees may attend multiple meetings to discuss the same issues, provide updates that could be shared asynchronously, or clarify decisions that were never properly documented.
Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index research highlights the extent of workplace fragmentation. Its global survey found that 48% of employees and 52% of leaders described their work as chaotic and fragmented. Separately, Microsoft 365 telemetry indicated frequent interruptions from meetings, emails, and notifications among the users studied.
These findings illustrate why communication volume and effective collaboration should not be treated as the same thing.
What HR should examine:
Which meetings have a clear purpose and expected outcome?
Are the right people attending?
Could some updates be communicated asynchronously?
Are decisions recorded and communicated after meetings?
Do employees have sufficient uninterrupted time for focused work?
The goal is not fewer meetings at any cost. It is more purposeful coordination.
5. Unclear Ownership and Accountability
Work frequently crosses departmental boundaries.
A customer issue may involve sales, operations, finance, and customer success. An employee-related issue may require coordination between HR, legal, IT, and a line manager.
Without clear ownership, responsibilities can become fragmented.
Several people may assume someone else is responsible, while others duplicate work to ensure that nothing is missed.
This creates uncertainty, delays, and unnecessary coordination.
What HR should examine:
Is there a clearly identified owner for each important process?
Do employees understand who is responsible for decisions?
Are handoffs between departments properly defined?
Where do tasks regularly fall between organizational responsibilities?
Clear ownership does not mean that one person must perform every task. It means that responsibility for coordination, decisions, and outcomes is understood.
6. Communication Friction
Organizations can communicate constantly while still failing to communicate effectively.
Information may be distributed across emails, messaging platforms, meetings, shared documents, and internal systems.
Employees may receive conflicting instructions or discover that important decisions have not reached the people affected by them.
Communication friction also occurs when employees do not know where to find reliable information or which version of a document is current.
The consequences include duplicated work, misunderstandings, and repeated requests for clarification.
What HR should examine:
Where do employees look for essential information?
Are important decisions communicated consistently?
Do teams have clear communication expectations?
Are communication channels appropriate for the information being shared?
Effective internal communication is not measured by the number of messages sent. It is measured by whether people receive the information they need, when they need it, in a form they can use.
7. Organizational Complexity
As companies grow, they naturally develop additional departments, reporting relationships, management layers, and coordination mechanisms.
Some of this complexity is necessary.
However, organizational structures can become difficult to navigate when responsibilities overlap, reporting lines conflict, or employees cannot identify the right people to involve.
This is particularly challenging in organizations operating across multiple business units, locations, or functions.
Employees may spend substantial time understanding how to navigate the organization rather than advancing the work itself.
What HR should examine:
Are reporting relationships clear?
Do organizational structures support cross-functional collaboration?
Are there overlapping responsibilities between departments?
Can employees identify the appropriate contacts for common decisions and issues?
Organizational effectiveness depends not only on having the right people and structures but also on ensuring that those structures support the work the business needs to accomplish.
8. Technology and Systems That Make Work Harder
Technology should reduce friction, improve access to information, and support collaboration.
Yet disconnected systems, poor integration, complicated interfaces, and inconsistent data can create additional work.
Employees may switch between several applications to complete a single task, manually transfer information between platforms, or maintain parallel records because systems do not communicate properly.
The organization may have invested in modern technology without significantly improving the employee experience.
This is an important distinction: digital transformation does not automatically produce simpler work.
What HR should examine:
How many systems do employees use to complete routine tasks?
Are essential tools properly integrated?
Do employees receive adequate training?
Which technology-related workarounds have become routine?
Are systems designed around actual workflows?
The objective is to ensure that technology supports the work rather than adding another layer of complexity.
The eight sources are interconnected
These dimensions should not be treated as independent problems.
An unclear approval process can create decision bottlenecks. Decision bottlenecks can generate additional meetings. Poorly documented decisions can create communication friction. Fragmented systems can make ownership even harder to establish.
This is why isolated improvements do not always produce lasting results.
Reducing meeting time, for example, may have limited impact if the underlying reason for the meetings is unclear accountability.
The more effective approach is to understand how different sources of friction reinforce one another.
For HR leaders, this means looking beyond individual complaints and identifying recurring organizational patterns.
The question is not simply which process needs improvement.
It is which combination of processes, structures, technologies, and decision-making practices is making work unnecessarily difficult.
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4. The Hidden Cost of Friction on People and Performance
Organizational friction has a cost that is rarely visible in a single report or performance indicator.
It appears in small delays, repeated administrative tasks, duplicated work, unnecessary meetings, unresolved questions, and decisions that take longer than they should.
Individually, these situations may seem manageable.
Collectively, they can affect the organization's ability to perform.
The productivity cost: time spent navigating work instead of doing it
Every additional step in a process requires employee attention.
Every unclear responsibility creates another coordination task.
Every delayed decision can prevent other activities from moving forward.
The resulting productivity loss is not always caused by employees working slowly or lacking the necessary skills.
It can be caused by the organizational effort required to get work done.
Consider a team that spends several hours each week gathering information from different departments because there is no shared source of truth.
The team is working. Its members may even be highly productive by traditional measures.
But a meaningful proportion of their time is being consumed by coordination rather than by the activities that create value.
This distinction is essential.
Workplace productivity is not simply a question of how much effort employees invest. It is also a question of how much organizational friction stands between effort and results.
The financial cost: small inefficiencies accumulate
Organizational friction can generate several categories of cost:
Employee time spent on unnecessary administrative activities.
Delays in delivering projects or responding to customers.
Duplicated tasks across departments.
Additional management time devoted to coordination and escalation.
Rework caused by unclear instructions or fragmented information.
Reduced capacity for innovation and improvement.
Not all of these costs can be measured immediately or attributed to a single process.
However, organizations can begin to estimate their impact by identifying recurring activities, measuring the time involved, and understanding the consequences of delays and duplication.
The objective is not to assign an artificial financial value to every workplace frustration.
It is to recognize that unnecessary complexity consumes organizational resources.
The human cost: frustration, fatigue, and reduced autonomy
The impact of organizational friction extends beyond productivity.
Employees generally expect to encounter challenges at work. Complex projects, difficult decisions, and demanding responsibilities are part of professional life.
The problem arises when unnecessary obstacles become a regular feature of the working environment.
Repeatedly waiting for approvals, searching for information, resolving conflicting instructions, or compensating for disconnected systems can create a sense of frustration.
Over time, employees may begin to feel that their effort is being spent on navigating the organization rather than contributing to its objectives.
This can affect:
The sense of autonomy employees experience.
Their perception of organizational competence.
Their confidence in internal processes.
Their ability to concentrate on meaningful work.
Their willingness to take initiative.
Their overall perception of the workplace.
These effects are particularly important for experienced professionals who expect to use their knowledge and judgment to solve problems.
When the organization consistently prevents them from doing so, frustration can become part of the employee experience.
The management cost: leaders become coordination mechanisms
Managers are often expected to improve productivity, support employees, resolve problems, and maintain alignment between teams.
But organizational friction can progressively shift their role.
Instead of focusing on coaching, development, performance, and priorities, managers spend increasing amounts of time:
Following up on delayed approvals.
Clarifying responsibilities.
Resolving communication problems.
Escalating decisions.
Repeating information.
Coordinating between departments.
Finding workarounds for inefficient systems.
This creates a paradox.
Organizations invest in manager development while leaving managers responsible for navigating systems that prevent them from applying what they have learned.
The issue is not necessarily that managers need more training.
Sometimes, they need an organization that allows them to manage effectively.
The retention cost: when everyday frustration changes the employee experience
Employees do not necessarily leave an organization because of one inefficient process or one frustrating meeting.
However, repeated negative experiences can influence how they evaluate their workplace.
A person may enjoy their colleagues, respect their manager, and believe in the company's mission while becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions surrounding their work.
When these frustrations remain unresolved, they can contribute to a broader perception that the organization is difficult to work in.
For HR teams, this creates an important distinction between measuring employee sentiment and understanding its causes.
A declining engagement score may identify a problem, but it does not necessarily reveal whether the underlying issue is leadership, workload, organizational complexity, communication, or inefficient processes.
Understanding the experience behind the score is therefore essential.
The strategic cost: organizational capacity remains underused
Perhaps the most important consequence of friction is its effect on organizational capacity.
Organizations hire talented people to solve problems, develop ideas, serve customers, improve processes, and contribute to business objectives.
But when too much of their time is consumed by internal complexity, less capacity remains available for these activities.
This is not simply a productivity issue.
It is an organizational effectiveness issue.
An organization may have the right talent, the right strategy, and the right technology while failing to connect these resources effectively.
Reducing friction helps close that gap.
It allows people to spend more time on meaningful work, gives managers greater capacity to lead, and helps teams coordinate around shared outcomes.
The hidden cost is also an opportunity
Organizational friction should not be viewed exclusively as a problem to eliminate.
It is also an opportunity to improve how the organization operates.
Unlike some performance challenges that require significant investment in additional talent, technology, or infrastructure, certain forms of friction can be reduced through clearer responsibilities, simpler processes, better decision rights, and more effective communication.
This does not mean every improvement is easy or inexpensive.
It means organizations should examine whether they are using their existing capabilities as effectively as possible before assuming that more resources are the only answer.
The central question for HR and business leaders is:
How much organizational capacity could we unlock simply by making it easier for people to do the work they are already responsible for?
5. Why Good Managers Cannot Compensate for Broken Systems
The growing expectations placed on managers
Managers occupy a central position in the employee experience.
They translate organizational priorities into everyday objectives, provide feedback, support development, resolve problems, and help employees understand how their work contributes to broader business goals.
They are also expected to maintain engagement, manage performance, support change, encourage collaboration, and respond to individual employee needs.
These responsibilities make managers essential to organizational effectiveness.
But they also create a risk: organizations can become overly dependent on managers to compensate for problems they do not have the authority or resources to solve.
Consider a manager leading a team that consistently struggles with competing priorities.
Senior leaders regularly introduce new initiatives, but existing responsibilities are rarely removed. The manager must explain changing expectations, renegotiate deadlines, and protect the team's capacity.
Or consider a manager whose team depends on another department to complete routine activities. Despite repeated follow-ups, the process remains slow because decision-making authority is unclear.
In both situations, the manager may be capable, committed, and supportive.
Yet the underlying problem is not managerial behavior.
It is organizational design.
The manager as a buffer between employees and organizational complexity
Managers frequently become the human interface between employees and systems that do not work particularly well.
They explain confusing policies, resolve administrative problems, clarify responsibilities, and find informal ways around inefficient processes.
This can make an organization appear more effective than it actually is.
Employees receive support from their managers, and operational problems are eventually resolved. But the organization remains dependent on individual effort to compensate for structural weaknesses.
Over time, this creates additional pressure on managers.
Instead of concentrating on leadership, coaching, and team development, they spend increasing amounts of time managing organizational friction.
This is particularly concerning in environments where managers already have large teams, limited decision-making authority, or conflicting expectations.
Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global manager engagement declined from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. The report also highlights the importance of manager engagement to the wider employee experience.
The finding does not establish that organizational friction alone explains declining manager engagement. However, it reinforces the importance of examining the conditions in which managers are expected to operate.
Organizations cannot indefinitely increase managerial expectations without examining the systems supporting the role.
Why manager development is not enough
Manager training is an important investment.
Managers need the skills to communicate effectively, manage performance, develop employees, address difficult situations, and lead teams through change.
But training cannot resolve every organizational problem.
A manager cannot independently eliminate an unnecessary approval requirement imposed by another department.
They cannot resolve conflicting strategic priorities without alignment from senior leadership.
They cannot create reliable information systems when technology and operations remain disconnected.
And they cannot provide employees with meaningful autonomy when decision-making authority is concentrated elsewhere.
This distinction is important when designing manager effectiveness initiatives.
Before concluding that managers need additional training, organizations should examine whether the environment allows them to apply their existing capabilities.
A useful diagnostic question is:
Are our managers struggling because they lack the necessary skills, or because the organization makes effective management unnecessarily difficult?
The answer may involve both.
But failing to distinguish between them can lead to interventions that increase expectations without addressing the causes of poor performance.
From manager effectiveness to organizational effectiveness
A more sustainable approach connects manager development with organizational design.
This requires examining four conditions.
1. Clear priorities
Managers need a realistic understanding of what matters most.
When priorities change frequently or conflict with one another, managers spend time negotiating trade-offs instead of leading their teams.
2. Appropriate decision authority
Managers should understand which decisions they can make independently, which require consultation, and which must be escalated.
Unclear decision rights create delays and undermine accountability.
3. Functional systems and processes
Managers need processes that support their responsibilities rather than create additional administrative work.
This includes access to reliable information, effective HR systems, clear workflows, and appropriate operational support.
4. Shared organizational accountability
Manager effectiveness should not be treated as an isolated HR responsibility.
Senior leadership, HR, operations, and other functions must share responsibility for creating the conditions in which managers can succeed.
The distinction is fundamental.
Organizations should continue developing better managers. But they must also develop better systems for those managers to operate within.
Manager effectiveness is partly an individual capability. Organizational effectiveness is the environment that allows that capability to produce results.
This is why improving workplace culture requires more than investing in leadership development. It also requires removing the organizational barriers that prevent good leadership from translating into better work.
6. Who Owns the Employee Experience?
The ownership problem
Employee experience is often associated with Human Resources.
HR teams typically lead engagement surveys, employee listening initiatives, onboarding programs, workplace culture projects, performance management, and leadership development.
This makes HR a natural contributor to employee experience.
However, many of the conditions that shape everyday work sit outside the direct control of the HR function.
Technology determines how employees access information and complete tasks.
Operations influence workflows, responsibilities, and process efficiency.
Finance establishes controls and approval requirements.
Leadership determines priorities, organizational structures, and decision-making authority.
Communications influences how information moves across the organization.
Managers translate these systems into everyday employee experiences.
This creates a fundamental question:
If employee experience is shaped by the entire organization, who is actually responsible for improving it?
The answer cannot be a single department.
Why employee experience cannot be delegated entirely to HR
Imagine an organization that wants to improve employee experience.
HR launches a listening initiative and discovers that employees are frustrated by slow internal processes, disconnected systems, and unclear responsibilities.
The HR team identifies the problems and recommends improvements.
But the processes belong to Operations. The systems are managed by IT. Approval structures involve Finance. Departmental responsibilities are determined by senior leadership.
HR can identify the issues, coordinate discussions, and advocate for change.
It cannot independently redesign every system affecting employees.
This is not a limitation of HR competence.
It is a consequence of how organizations distribute authority and responsibility.
An effective employee experience strategy therefore requires cross-functional ownership.
The organizational functions shaping employee experience
Several functions have a direct influence on how work happens.
Human Resources: The employee experience integrator
HR can establish the overall employee experience strategy, coordinate employee listening, identify recurring problems, connect insights across the employee lifecycle, and support managers through organizational change.
It also helps ensure that employee experience initiatives remain connected to workforce priorities and organizational culture.
Leadership: The strategic decision-maker
Senior leaders determine organizational priorities, allocate resources, define decision-making authority, and influence the structures through which work is performed.
They must establish the conditions for reducing friction and ensure that organizational improvement is treated as a business priority.
Operations: The process owner
Operations teams often control the workflows that employees navigate every day.
They are essential to identifying unnecessary steps, duplicated activities, inefficient handoffs, and process bottlenecks.
Technology and IT: The digital experience enabler
Technology teams influence access to information, system integration, workflow automation, and the usability of workplace tools.
Their responsibility is not simply to deploy technology. It is to ensure that digital systems support actual work.
Finance: The governance and control partner
Finance plays an important role in designing approval processes, expenditure controls, and resource allocation mechanisms.
The objective should be to maintain appropriate financial governance without introducing disproportionate administrative complexity.
Communications: The information connection
Internal communications helps ensure that employees understand organizational decisions, priorities, policies, and changes.
Clear communication reduces uncertainty and prevents employees from spending unnecessary time searching for information or interpreting conflicting messages.
Managers: The everyday experience translators
Managers connect organizational decisions with the realities of individual teams.
They are often the first to identify where processes fail, responsibilities become unclear, or priorities create unnecessary difficulties.
Their feedback should therefore inform organizational improvement rather than simply be treated as an indicator of individual managerial performance.
A shared ownership model
For employee experience to become an organizational responsibility, companies need to distinguish between strategic accountability, operational ownership, and everyday implementation.
Each function has a different contribution to make.
Executive Leadership — Setting Direction and Accountability
Senior leaders establish strategic priorities, allocate resources, and ensure that improving employee experience remains an organizational priority.
HR / People — Leading the Employee Experience Strategy
HR coordinates the overall employee experience strategy, connects employee feedback with organizational priorities, and supports cross-functional improvement initiatives.
Operations — Improving Processes and Workflows
Operations identifies inefficient workflows, unnecessary steps, duplicated activities, and process bottlenecks that make everyday work more difficult.
IT / Technology — Enabling Better Digital Experiences
Technology teams ensure that workplace systems, digital tools, and information platforms support employees rather than create additional complexity.
Finance — Balancing Governance and Efficiency
Finance helps maintain appropriate financial controls while reviewing approval requirements and administrative processes that may create unnecessary delays.
Internal Communications — Improving Information Clarity
Internal Communications ensures that employees receive clear, consistent, and accessible information about organizational priorities, decisions, and changes.
Managers — Translating Strategy into Everyday Experience
Managers implement organizational initiatives at team level, identify recurring employee frustrations, and provide feedback about what works and what needs improvement.
This is not a universal reporting structure. Organizations should adapt responsibilities to their size, operating model, and governance requirements.
What matters is that ownership is explicit.
When everyone is involved but nobody is accountable, employee experience initiatives can become disconnected projects rather than coordinated organizational improvements.
The role of HR: from program owner to organizational partner
For People & Leadership Managers, this creates an opportunity to expand the influence of HR.
Rather than treating employee experience as a collection of separate programs, HR can help the organization understand how its systems affect employees.
This involves:
Connecting employee feedback with operational data.
Identifying recurring friction across departments.
Bringing managers into process improvement discussions.
Helping leadership understand the human impact of organizational decisions.
Establishing shared priorities with Operations and Technology.
Tracking whether changes actually improve everyday work.
This approach also changes how HR demonstrates its contribution.
Instead of reporting only on participation in engagement programs or completion of employee initiatives, HR can show how organizational improvements affect time-to-productivity, process adoption, issue resolution, employee experience, and workforce stability.
Employee experience becomes more than an HR program.
It becomes a shared organizational capability.
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7. Measuring Organizational Friction: From Perception to Evidence
What organizations measure shapes what they improve
Organizations tend to improve what they can see.
If leadership receives regular information about employee engagement, turnover, absenteeism, and performance, these indicators naturally influence workplace priorities.
But when organizational friction is not measured, it can remain invisible.
Employees may repeatedly complain about slow approvals, unclear responsibilities, excessive meetings, or disconnected systems without these issues appearing in formal performance reports.
The challenge is to make everyday friction observable without creating another layer of reporting complexity.
A useful measurement approach combines employee perceptions, operational indicators, and business outcomes.
Three levels of organizational friction measurement
Level 1: Employee experience signals
These indicators reveal how employees perceive the conditions in which they work.
Examples include:
Clarity of responsibilities.
Clarity of priorities.
Ease of accessing information.
Perceived ability to make decisions.
Satisfaction with internal processes.
Perceived quality of cross-functional collaboration.
Confidence in organizational communication.
Ability to focus on meaningful work.
These signals can be collected through engagement surveys, targeted pulse surveys, interviews, focus groups, and employee listening sessions.
The objective is to understand where employees experience unnecessary effort.
Level 2: Operational friction indicators
Operational indicators help identify where organizational processes create delays, unnecessary steps, or additional work.
Rather than measuring everything, organizations should focus on the areas where friction is most likely to affect everyday productivity.
Consider the following examples:
Approvals
Average approval cycle time.
Number of approval stages required.
Decision-Making
Time between a request and a final decision.
Frequency of decisions requiring escalation.
Processes
Number of steps required to complete key workflows.
Frequency of duplicated activities.
Communication
Number of repeated requests for the same information.
Time employees spend searching for information.
Meetings
Meeting hours per employee or team.
Time spent in meetings without clear decisions or outcomes.
Ownership
Number of unresolved or reassigned tasks.
Frequency of unclear responsibilities between departments.
Technology
Frequency of manual workarounds.
Number of activities requiring employees to switch between disconnected systems.
HR Operations
Employee issue resolution time.
Number of requests requiring repeated follow-ups.
These measures should always be interpreted in context.
A longer approval cycle is not automatically evidence of unnecessary friction. Some decisions legitimately require additional review.
The important question is whether the time and effort involved are proportionate to the value and risk of the decision.
The objective is not to eliminate every control or process. It is to identify where organizational complexity creates more effort than the situation requires.
Level 3: Organizational outcomes
The final level examines whether friction reduction contributes to better organizational results.
Relevant indicators may include:
Time-to-productivity.
Employee retention and voluntary turnover.
Project delivery time.
Rework and error rates.
Employee issue resolution.
Manager capacity.
Internal service satisfaction.
Customer response time.
Operational productivity.
These indicators help connect employee experience improvements with business performance.
However, organizations should avoid assuming that a change in one indicator proves that friction reduction caused the improvement.
Other factors may influence the result.
A more credible approach is to establish a baseline, document the intervention, monitor changes over time, and consider other relevant explanations.
A practical organizational friction scorecard
People & Leadership Managers do not need an extensive measurement system to begin.
A focused scorecard can help identify the most significant sources of friction within a department or business unit.
Eight dimensions provide a useful starting point.
1. Process Simplicity
Diagnostic question: Can employees complete routine tasks without unnecessary steps?
Suggested measure: Process cycle time.
2. Decision Clarity
Diagnostic question: Do employees know who has the authority to make decisions?
Suggested measure: Decision turnaround time.
3. Role Clarity
Diagnostic question: Are responsibilities and expectations clearly understood?
Suggested measure: Role clarity survey results.
4. Communication
Diagnostic question: Can employees easily access the information they need to do their work?
Suggested measure: Employee feedback on information accessibility.
5. Collaboration
Diagnostic question: Can teams coordinate effectively without excessive handoffs?
Suggested measure: Frequency and duration of handoff delays.
6. Meeting Effectiveness
Diagnostic question: Do meetings support meaningful progress and clear decisions?
Suggested measure: Meeting hours and documented outcomes.
7. Technology
Diagnostic question: Do workplace systems simplify everyday work?
Suggested measure: Frequency of manual workarounds.
8. Manager Capacity
Diagnostic question: Can managers dedicate sufficient time to leading and developing their teams?
Suggested measure: Manager time allocation and qualitative feedback.
The scorecard should not become another administrative exercise.
Its purpose is to support discussion, identify recurring problems, and determine where further investigation is necessary.
Start with a small number of indicators, establish a baseline, and expand the measurement approach only when it provides additional value.
The importance of establishing a baseline
One of the most common mistakes in organizational improvement is introducing a solution before understanding the original problem.
For example, a company may decide to reduce the number of meetings across the organization.
But without examining why meetings are taking place, the initiative may simply move coordination into emails, messaging platforms, or informal conversations.
The apparent improvement in meeting volume may not reduce the overall effort required to get work done.
A better approach begins with a baseline.
For a selected process, HR and the relevant operational team might examine:
How long does the process currently take?
How many people are involved?
How many handoffs occur?
Where do delays happen?
How frequently is information requested more than once?
How often does the process require rework?
What do employees find most frustrating?
Only then can the organization assess whether a proposed change improves the actual experience.
Ask better questions, not simply more questions
Employee surveys can generate valuable information.
But lengthy questionnaires may themselves contribute to the problem when employees are repeatedly asked to provide feedback without seeing meaningful action.
A more focused approach uses specific questions linked to identifiable aspects of work.
For example:
Which recurring process makes your work more difficult than it needs to be?
Where do you regularly experience delays when trying to make progress?
Which responsibilities or decision rights are unclear?
What information is difficult to find or access?
What is one organizational change that would make your work significantly easier?
These questions help employees identify practical obstacles rather than simply rate their general satisfaction.
They should also be followed by visible action.
Listening without improvement can gradually weaken employee confidence in organizational initiatives.
Measure effort as well as outcomes
An organization may achieve its targets while requiring employees to navigate unnecessary complexity to get there.
That is why performance measurement should consider not only what gets accomplished but also the effort required to accomplish it.
For example, two departments may achieve similar results.
One completes its work through clear responsibilities, efficient processes, and effective collaboration.
The other relies on repeated escalation, manual workarounds, and extensive coordination.
Their outputs may be similar, but their operating models are not equally effective.
This is an important insight for HR and business leaders.
Organizational effectiveness is not only about achieving the right outcomes. It is also about creating the conditions that allow people to achieve those outcomes sustainably.
8. How to Build an Organization That Makes Work Easier
Understanding organizational friction is only the beginning.
The real challenge is turning insight into practical improvements that employees can experience.
For People & Leadership Managers, this requires a structured approach that can be applied without waiting for a complete organizational redesign.
The objective is to identify the most important obstacles, understand their causes, involve the right stakeholders, and make measurable improvements.
The HKW Organizational Friction Reduction Framework
Human Kapital Weeks proposes a five-step framework for helping organizations move from identifying friction to improving the everyday experience of work.
Identify → Understand → Prioritize → Redesign → Measure
The framework is designed to connect employee experience with operational improvement.
Step 1 — Identify: Make friction visible
Start by identifying where employees experience unnecessary difficulty.
Do not begin with a predetermined solution.
Instead, collect information from the people who perform and manage the work.
Useful sources include:
Employee listening sessions.
Manager interviews.
HR service requests.
Process documentation.
Workflow observations.
Employee survey comments.
Operational performance data.
Look for recurring patterns rather than isolated complaints.
For example, several employees may report that obtaining information from another department is difficult.
Managers may describe repeated follow-ups, while operational data reveal delays in completing the same type of request.
Together, these signals suggest a recurring organizational problem.
Practical output: A list of identifiable friction points, supported by employee feedback or operational evidence.
Step 2 — Understand: Find the underlying causes
Once a friction point has been identified, investigate why it exists.
The first explanation is not always the actual cause.
An approval delay, for example, may appear to result from an unresponsive manager.
But further investigation may reveal that the approval process has too many levels, that decision authority is unclear, or that the responsible manager receives incomplete information.
This distinction matters.
Addressing the visible symptom without understanding the underlying cause can create additional work without producing lasting improvement.
Useful diagnostic questions include:
Why does this step exist?
What risk or business need does it address?
Who owns the process?
Where does responsibility become unclear?
Which information is missing?
Is the problem caused by policy, technology, structure, or behavior?
Does the process still serve its original purpose?
Practical output: A clear explanation of the root causes and the organizational conditions sustaining the friction.
Step 3 — Prioritize: Focus on the friction that matters most
Not every organizational obstacle deserves immediate attention.
Some problems affect only a small number of employees. Others create repeated delays across multiple departments.
Some are relatively easy to solve. Others require policy changes, technology investment, or executive decisions.
To identify where improvement efforts will have the greatest impact, organizations should evaluate four dimensions.
1. Employee Impact
How significantly does the issue affect everyday work?
Does it create frustration, unnecessary administrative effort, delays, or difficulties completing routine responsibilities?
2. Business Impact
Does the issue affect productivity, work quality, project delivery, operational efficiency, or customer outcomes?
3. Frequency
How often does the friction occur?
A problem experienced daily by several departments may deserve more attention than an isolated issue, even when the latter appears more visible.
4. Feasibility
Can the organization realistically address the problem?
Consider the resources, decision-making authority, technology, and cross-functional cooperation required to implement a solution.
Putting prioritization into practice
These four dimensions help distinguish quick improvements from more substantial organizational changes.
For example:
A confusing internal document may be relatively easy to improve through clearer communication and updated documentation.
A recurring approval bottleneck may require clarification of decision rights and changes to existing workflows.
A fragmented technology environment may require a longer-term investment involving IT, Operations, and senior leadership.
Organizations should avoid prioritizing initiatives simply because they are visible or easy to communicate.
The most important problems are those that create meaningful, recurring obstacles to effective work.
Practical output: A prioritized list of improvement opportunities, with clear ownership and an initial implementation scope.
Step 4 — Redesign: Make work simpler and clearer
This is where diagnosis becomes organizational change.
Depending on the problem, redesign may involve:
Removing unnecessary process steps.
Clarifying responsibilities and accountability.
Simplifying approval requirements.
Establishing clearer decision-making authority.
Reducing duplicated reporting.
Improving information access.
Redesigning meeting practices.
Integrating disconnected workflows.
Reviewing organizational handoffs.
The guiding principle is not to remove complexity indiscriminately.
Some processes exist to protect employees, customers, financial resources, and the organization itself.
The objective is to preserve necessary controls while eliminating unnecessary effort.
Consider a team that needs several approvals to complete routine internal requests.
Rather than simply removing approvals, the organization could review the risk associated with different request types and establish proportionate approval requirements.
Low-risk decisions might be delegated to the appropriate manager, while higher-risk decisions retain the necessary controls.
This approach improves efficiency without weakening governance.
Practical output: A redesigned process, clearer responsibilities, or a specific organizational change that employees can experience.
Step 5 — Measure: Confirm that work has actually improved
An improvement should not be considered successful simply because a new process has been introduced.
The organization must determine whether the change has reduced friction.
Compare the original baseline with the results after implementation.
For example:
Has the approval cycle become shorter?
Do employees understand who owns the process?
Have repeated requests for information declined?
Are managers spending less time on administrative follow-ups?
Has employee feedback improved?
Has the process become easier to use?
Where possible, compare results across a defined period and consider whether other changes influenced the outcome.
Importantly, employee feedback should remain part of the evaluation.
A process may become faster according to operational data while becoming more difficult for employees because of additional steps elsewhere.
Both dimensions matter.
Practical output: An improvement assessment, documented lessons, and a decision about whether to scale, adjust, or discontinue the intervention.
Applying the framework: A practical example
Consider a hypothetical U.S. professional services company with approximately 800 employees.
Its HR team receives recurring feedback that employees experience delays when requesting internal support from other departments.
Managers report spending considerable time following up on requests, while employees are unsure who is responsible for resolving their issues.
The company decides to apply the HKW Organizational Friction Reduction Framework.
Step 1 — Identify: Recognize the Problem
The HR team collects recurring employee complaints and manager feedback about delayed internal requests.
The objective is to establish whether these experiences represent isolated incidents or a broader organizational problem.
Step 2 — Understand: Find the Root Cause
Further investigation reveals that requests pass through several teams without a clearly designated owner.
Employees are unsure where to direct their questions, while managers frequently intervene to obtain updates.
The problem is not simply slow communication. It is unclear process ownership.
Step 3 — Prioritize: Focus on the Most Significant Issue
The company decides to focus on high-frequency requests that have the greatest impact on employee productivity.
Rather than redesigning every internal process, it selects a specific category of requests as the starting point.
Step 4 — Redesign: Simplify the Process
The organization introduces clearer ownership, simplified request routing, and defined escalation responsibilities.
Employees know where to submit requests, which team is responsible, and what happens when a request cannot be resolved within the expected timeframe.
Step 5 — Measure: Evaluate the Improvement
The company compares resolution times, repeated follow-ups, and employee feedback before and after the change.
This helps determine whether the redesigned process has genuinely reduced friction.
The Organizational Lesson
The improvement does not require a new engagement program.
It requires a better-designed process.
This example illustrates an important principle: some employee experience improvements begin with organizational decisions that may not traditionally be considered HR initiatives.
By identifying friction, understanding its causes, and involving the right stakeholders, HR can help create improvements that employees experience directly in their everyday work.
Start with one friction point, not an organization-wide transformation
A common mistake is to approach organizational friction as a large transformation project.
This can make the task appear too complex, particularly for HR teams with limited resources.
A more practical approach is to begin with one recurring problem that has a visible impact on employees and a realistic opportunity for improvement.
For example:
A difficult onboarding process.
An unclear performance review workflow.
A slow employee request process.
A recurring approval bottleneck.
A communication problem between two departments.
A meeting structure that prevents focused work.
Choose a problem, establish a baseline, involve the relevant stakeholders, and test an improvement.
The resulting experience can provide evidence and build support for broader changes.
The role of People & Leadership Managers
People & Leadership Managers are particularly well positioned to contribute to this process.
They regularly interact with employees, managers, HR processes, and organizational initiatives.
They often hear about problems that do not appear in formal reporting systems.
Their role is not to take ownership of every organizational inefficiency.
It is to help translate employee experience into actionable organizational insight.
This means becoming more systematic about identifying recurring problems, connecting employee feedback with operational evidence, and bringing the appropriate decision-makers into the discussion.
It also means helping managers distinguish between issues they can resolve within their teams and issues requiring broader organizational intervention.
In this way, HR moves beyond responding to employee frustration and becomes an active contributor to organizational effectiveness.
The Employee Experience Friction Audit
To help HR and People leaders apply these principles, Human Kapital Weeks has developed the concept of the Employee Experience Friction Audit.
The audit provides a structured way to examine how organizational systems and processes influence everyday work.
It can help teams identify:
Where employees encounter unnecessary steps.
Which decisions regularly become bottlenecks.
Where responsibilities are unclear.
Which communication practices create confusion.
Which systems require repeated manual workarounds.
Where managers spend excessive time coordinating instead of leading.
The objective is to create a clearer picture of the employee experience beyond traditional engagement measures.
Rather than beginning with another broad question about whether employees are satisfied, the audit starts with a more practical one:
What makes it unnecessarily difficult for people to do their work here?
For HR professionals who want to move from diagnosis to action, this is a useful starting point.
9. Conclusion
Beyond Engagement: Designing Organizations People Can Actually Work In
For organizations seeking to improve employee experience, the next challenge is not simply to increase engagement.
It is to examine the organizational conditions that shape how people experience their work every day.
Good managers matter. Competitive compensation matters. Strong leadership, meaningful work, and positive workplace relationships matter.
But none of these can fully compensate for systems that make work unnecessarily difficult.
Employees need more than supportive managers and positive workplace values. They need clear responsibilities, accessible information, effective processes, appropriate decision-making authority, and the tools to perform their work without unnecessary obstacles.
This is why organizational friction deserves greater attention from HR and business leaders.
It helps explain why organizations can invest heavily in employee engagement while continuing to create frustrating working environments.
It also reveals an opportunity that is frequently overlooked: improving employee experience by improving the organization itself.
From engagement initiatives to organizational effectiveness
For People & Leadership Managers, this requires a shift in perspective.
Instead of approaching every employee experience problem as an engagement, communication, or management challenge, HR professionals should also examine the systems behind the experience.
When employees feel frustrated, the question should not only be whether they feel heard.
It should also be whether the organization is prepared to remove the obstacles they are describing.
When managers struggle, the question should not only be whether they need additional development.
It should also be whether they have the authority, resources, and organizational support required to lead effectively.
And when productivity declines, organizations should not automatically assume that employees need to work harder.
They should examine whether the way work is organized is preventing people from making their full contribution.
The next chapter of workplace culture
Workplace culture is often described through shared values, behaviors, leadership expectations, and employee relationships.
But culture is also experienced through everyday organizational practices.
Employees experience the organization's culture when they try to obtain a decision, resolve a problem, access information, collaborate across departments, or complete a routine task.
The difference between a workplace that works and one that frustrates its people is often found in these ordinary moments.
This makes organizational design an essential part of employee experience strategy.
The organizations that make meaningful progress will be those that connect their people strategies with the operational realities of work.
They will listen to employees, but they will also examine processes.
They will develop managers, but they will also give them the conditions to succeed.
They will invest in technology, but they will ensure that technology simplifies rather than complicates everyday activities.
Most importantly, they will understand that employee experience is not the responsibility of HR alone.
It is the outcome of how the entire organization operates.
The question every organization should ask
The Friction Economy offers a different way to think about workplace effectiveness.
Instead of asking only:
How engaged are our employees?
Organizations should also ask:
What does our organization make unnecessarily difficult for the people who work here?
That question can reveal problems that traditional engagement initiatives may overlook.
It can also open the door to practical improvements that benefit employees, managers, and business performance.
Beyond Engagement means moving from designing workplaces where people are expected to adapt to organizational complexity toward designing organizations that make it easier for people to do their best work.
Because a good workplace is not simply one where people want to work.
It is one where people can actually work well.