How much is workplace friction costing your office?

[00:00:00] Micah Remley: Welcome everyone to our webinar today. We’re so glad that you could join us. We wanted to make this as high impact as possible, make sure that it’s worth your time, so we’re going to keep this webinar to 30 minutes and really focus on the high points of workplace friction, what it is, and what you can do about it.

[00:00:16] So to start things off, we enlisted the Collab Collective, which is an industry analyst firm that’s focused on workplace collaboration, to survey more than 500 people across the modern workplace to understand how people view the office and how they interact with it. That’s going to be the basis for our entire conversation today.

[00:00:36] We did email out beforehand an assessment where you could determine your own organization’s workplace friction index value. So we hope you had a chance to do that. If you didn’t, that’s okay. There should be a link to it in this presentation.

[00:00:55] If you haven’t had a chance to complete it, you’ll get a chance to down the road or after the webinar, and then you’ll be able to catch up on everything that we’re talking about today. So no worries if you didn’t get a chance to complete that. So as we start to dive into this, first I just want to introduce myself.

[00:01:11] I am Micah Remley. I’m the CEO of Robin. We’ve published the Workplace Friction Index, and we’re covering this topic because it’s an area that we kept hearing about. Robin is a workplace management software company. We continue to hear these challenges from our customers, which is that running a modern hybrid office is more challenging than running a traditional workplace.

[00:01:38] So we went and commissioned this research from Craig Durr at the Collab Collective. It’s important to know that these findings are from an outside independent research firm, not from Robin, and I think that you’ll find them pretty insightful as we go through it all. Abby, do you want to introduce yourself?

[00:01:56] Abby Normandeau: Yes. Thanks, Micah. I’m Abby Normandeau. I’m the accounts director here at Robin. I have these conversations daily with workplace leaders like yourself, so I’ll be able to share some anecdotes of what we hear boots on the ground, managing the office in this type of coordination effort.

[00:02:15] Micah Remley: Awesome, and thanks.

[00:02:16] And speaking of coordination, Abby and I are actually in our Robin headquarters here in downtown Boston. We’re in the same office together, but to make it easier for everyone to see and hear us, we’re in separate rooms, which always feels weird because we’re in the same location but in separate rooms.

[00:02:31] So we’re actually adding to workplace friction in the Robin office today because we’ve taken two rooms for this one presentation. So, to jump into the agenda, we’re going to cover three main topics today, and the first is the coordination tax. What is this tax that all employees are paying in their offices?

[00:02:54] Then we’re going to get into the Workplace Friction Index, and this is where you’re going to be able to benchmark your organization against other organizations and see where you stand. Then we’re going to get into the meat of the conversation, which is where to focus first. If there are places for you to improve your Workplace Friction Index, where do you start?

[00:03:12] What does that look like? And what improvements can you make? And finally, we will leave time for Q&A at the end for any questions that you may have as we go through all of this. So to jump right in, it’s interesting, our starting point here was that hybrid work was supposed to make the office better, and hybrid work gave everyone flexibility, and that flexibility was amazing, right?

[00:03:35] And that was real flexibility, where people could find better work-life balance. But what we found, and we keep hearing this over and over again, is that it made the office much more challenging to manage. And that’s across everyone who uses the office. So for workplace managers, first, that variability swings greatly from day to day, from week to week, even month to month, and keeping up with those changes is very, very challenging.

[00:04:03] From an employee’s standpoint, I remember before the pandemic, if I went away for a long weekend and then came back into the office, it was kind of disorienting. I had to remember where things were, how things worked, what passwords were, everything else. And now all of our employees are doing that almost on a weekly basis, where they’re coming back into the office after a three- or four-day weekend if they’re working Tuesday through Thursday, let’s say, in the office in a hybrid workplace.

[00:04:28] Layered on top of that, employees’ expectations have changed greatly. People want the comforts they’re used to at home, or better, when they come into the office. We talk a lot in this industry about earning the commute and whether an office earns the commute or not. So employees’ expectations are very high, and their expectations are set from the place that they’ve crafted around their own needs, which is their own home.

[00:04:51] And that’s really challenging across all of the different employees that come in to use an office on a regular basis. The other layer that’s added to all of hybrid work is that policies change often. If you’re lucky enough to be in an organization where policies have stayed very steady over the last four years, congratulations.

[00:05:09] What we see across many organizations is that the number of days, the requirements in the office, and team-based requirements are changing, or one management team is strictly enforcing hybrid policies where another management team maybe isn’t. So that creates this other layer, and then finally, space planning decisions have become much more challenging because of all this variability, and people often don’t have the data to make informed space planning decisions.

[00:05:37] So all of this has created kind of this mess, which adds up to workplace friction. So we have these three problems that really show up in every single office. Abby, you hear about all of these every single day. Which comes up the most when you think about these three layers of workplace friction?

[00:05:56] Abby Normandeau: I would look at, honestly, attendance first as one of the biggest challenges.

[00:06:01] Hybrid policy could have been implemented, say, at the start of this year. Now, if you’re actually looking at the attendance data, it’s showing something completely different than what you expected and what you had initially implemented. A good example: we have some customers that have put in a policy based on team days in the office.

[00:06:20] Well, you have your set team day, but not all your team comes in, so all of those in-person meetings you’re expecting to have now become hybrid meetings. You need to scramble to find conference rooms to accommodate those hybrid meetings, or maybe a different team who was supposed to be in on a different day all decided to come in, taking resources from a different team.

[00:06:40] They took the specific desks or certain conference rooms with certain equipment that another team was planning on using for their day in the office. So all of that goes into the friction that we’re seeing on a daily basis that maybe wasn’t planned for, because organizations thought that the hybrid policy they put in place would be the one that would continue to work and function day in and day out.

[00:07:03] Micah Remley: Yeah, totally makes sense. And as we think about how that extends, now we get into where the friction actually plays out. So I’d love to have you dive into workplace friction a little bit more.

[00:07:14] Abby Normandeau: Yes. What the research is showing is that coordination time is really undercounted. If you look at what workplace operations counts as coordination time versus what employees count, it’s about a two-hour difference week over week.

[00:07:31] Those small losses go a little bit more unnoticed by employees. Say the conference room equipment didn’t work and they had to jump to a different room. They’re not sure if their colleague’s in the office, so they do an extra lap around. Though that’s lost time, they’re not looking at it as a bigger problem over time.

[00:07:52] It’s more annoyances day to day as they come into the office, whereas your operations teams see this in aggregate, as a larger systemic problem that’s causing real hours of friction. And especially if you add that over the number of employees experiencing that friction, that causes a lot of wasted time that operations teams could get back from planning more impactful work around the office. A good example that I’ve seen with one of my customers is managing new hires.

[00:08:29] So you have a team of new hires that come in every few weeks. To a regular employee, it may be just getting their desk bumped for the day, a desk that they booked a couple weeks in advance. No big deal, a little bit annoying. They might feel an initial pain, but after 10 minutes finding a new desk to move to, completely fine.

[00:08:47] For your workplace operations team, those new hires that consistently come in every few weeks mean figuring out what team they’re a part of, where their team typically sits, and who they can disrupt from the desks that are already there so that they can place that new hire in, so they have a smooth onboarding experience in their first few weeks in the office.

[00:09:08] Those hours of coordination every few weeks really add up. That friction adds up, and that creates more time lost.

[00:09:18] Micah Remley: Yeah. Totally makes sense. And that continues to add up, right?

[00:09:24] Abby Normandeau: It really does. What we’re seeing is that year over year this friction continues to get worse, not better.

[00:09:32] We see about 60% of workplace operations teams saying that this friction has continued to increase, whereas only 12% have said it’s improved. That gap works out to five times as many teams reporting things getting worse, which is one of the strongest signals that we found within this study.

[00:09:56] It’s really showing that this isn’t just a static problem. It’s something that is continuing and is really worth investing time in fixing. And I know, Micah, you talk to workplace leaders every day about what that time is really costing them.

[00:10:12] Micah Remley: Yeah, I was surprised by this result. Then when I thought about it, it totally made sense, and I think the reason is that, post-pandemic, a lot of offices were oversized.

[00:10:23] There were a lot of resources. We’re going to talk about this more later in this presentation. What we hear from customers is that as they’ve right-sized or downsized offices, or increased their hybrid policies and offices have become more full, this workplace friction in the hybrid office is really rearing its ugly head. That’s what we hear over and over again: it’s not as easy to just jump to an empty conference room next door if there’s an AV problem or something broken in a room.

[00:10:49] I then have to deal with it, or I might have to change my behavior, which we’ll talk about more later, but I think that is really the core of why the perception out there is that it’s getting much worse rather than better. And this is where the rubber meets the road. So this is pretty amazing.

[00:11:08] If you do some math on what the costs of all this workplace friction are: if you’re going to screenshot something in this presentation, this is the slide to screenshot, because this is the business case. Whenever we as workplace leaders go to talk to company leadership about initiatives, they always want a business case, and this is where the business case for improving workplace friction and employee experience really starts.

[00:11:30] So if we take the hours that are reported lost by both employees and workplace leaders and multiply them by the average number of hours employees work and the average amount they earn, for a thousand-person company, that’s $4.5 million lost per year using the self-reported numbers from employees.

[00:11:50] If we use the workplace leaders’ numbers, that’s $9 million per year, and this is for a general labor rate. If we apply it against knowledge workers, which offices are often full of, the amount goes up even more than that. So these are some serious numbers that start forming the basis of that business case.

[00:12:09] So Abby, what do you think the reaction would be if you walked leadership, as a workplace leader, through this math? What do you think would happen?

[00:12:18] Abby Normandeau: I think this math really paints the picture of what the cost is of having this friction. Right now, a lot of this coordination friction that we keep talking about is taken as a soft complaint, which means workplace leaders need to find workarounds, different ways to solve this problem.

[00:12:40] But once you start putting a dollar figure toward what this friction is causing, that’s when you get engagement from people like finance, who can actually put budget behind making these changes. Take employees finding a desk when they come into the office. We have some workplace operations teams that spend the first few hours of their day just putting desk signs on each desk to let employees know where they’re sitting.

[00:13:07] It seems like a small workaround that is working fine, but the second that they moved to a more automated system to allow employees to self-serve, yes, that took a bit of budget to get a system like that in place to automate that type of workflow, but that gives back time to the workplace operations team to focus on more strategic projects like programming for the office, helping leadership plan an upcoming move, and figuring out lease and real estate plans.

[00:13:37] So you can actually put tangible dollars behind the work that’s getting saved, and the work that they’re actually able to do by not spending these manual hours coordinating the office.

[00:13:48] Micah Remley: Yeah, and that’s really the benefit of the business case: you can show in hard dollars and cents where the savings potential is and how you can increase productivity across the workplace.

[00:14:00] So that’s the diagnosis and the cost associated with workplace friction. Now here’s the important part, the benchmark. We created this Workplace Friction Index along with the Collab Collective. It’s very simple to do if you haven’t done it already. It’s 20 questions across five different dimensions that gives you a score from zero to 100, one score that allows you to benchmark your organization against others, which is really important.

[00:14:28] When you think about the two things that management always wants to hear, it’s what the cost of something is, and then how we compare against other organizations, and this allows you to do both of those things. So when we completed and built the Workplace Friction Index and the assessment calculator, it allows you to see where you benchmark against three main categories.

[00:14:52] The first being, because the score is zero to 100, if you’re zero to 26, it means that you’re unified, and the system is working really well together, that you’ve been very intentional about how you’re addressing workplace friction, that you’ve really thought through the workplace processes that employees go through, and you’ve given them the resources they need to be very productive in the workplace and reduce the amount of friction.

[00:15:23] Unfortunately, only a minority of organizations exist in that unified space. Most organizations fit in either fragmented or reactive. And it’s not that organizations that fit in these worlds aren’t trying to do the right things in some places, but they’re not typically tackling all of this in a really focused way that thinks about all of the inputs in making the workplace better and more productive for employees.

[00:15:52] So we’re going to dive into each of these and talk about where you can make some improvements. As we think about the differences across each of these, this is one of the findings I find most interesting. Abby touched on it a little bit earlier: employees self-report lower workplace friction than workplace teams do, which is the opposite of what you see in most functions.

[00:16:14] Most functions think they’re doing a better job managing something than employees report. Here we see the opposite. Workplace leaders see more friction than employees see. And that makes sense, because employees have that bad moment in a day, whereas all of that rolls up to workplace leaders, who really see where it all comes together, and they see that friction is 13 points higher than employees do, which is a really large statistical gap.

[00:16:38] So Abby, I’m interested, how does that gap show up in the conversations that you have with workplace leaders?

[00:16:44] Abby Normandeau: Yeah. This gap is exactly why it’s hard to get budget and put action behind what employees see as one-off complaints but is a real problem in the office. Take equipment in a conference room not working, which happens across the customers I work with.

[00:17:05] To an executive or employee, it’s one small moment of, say, a speaker not working, or you can’t launch your video conferencing tool on the TV in the room. It could impact that meeting, but it’s one moment in the day. They may need to jump to a different conference room immediately.

[00:17:26] And it could be a bad morning, an angry email, I’m sure, to the workplace operations team, but once that moment passes, they move on to the next. For your operations team, it’s a recurring pattern. I have some teams that need to walk around every morning to inspect every single room and test every single piece of equipment, especially in an executive wing of conference rooms, to make sure that nothing goes off without a hitch.

[00:17:56] But then if a problem does arise, it’s a scramble. A ticket needs to get created, the issue needs to be solved, but what if that issue takes a few days to get fixed and that conference room is offline? How do we communicate that to employees? How do you move those meetings into another room? So as you start talking through what it looks like behind the scenes to actually solve these one-off complaints that we’re saying employees have, it’s actually a larger systemic problem that, to our point, you can put dollars and cents behind to hopefully get backing to find a better solution.

[00:18:30] Micah Remley: Yeah. That’s such an important point. And one thing is, sometimes we hear pushback about this, which is, “Listen, people will complain about anything, so maybe the friction isn’t actually costing us much.” I remember I was talking to a CIO once who had just moved his company into a gleaming new office, and he complained.

[00:18:50] He said, “I’m getting all these complaints because the Wi-Fi signal isn’t strong enough in the bathrooms.” He’s like, “Really? That’s what we’re going to complain about today?” But if you look at the numbers, the issues don’t back up that this is just people complaining about anything, because in the most reactive workplaces, 63% of people reported that workplace friction was a drag on their overall productivity, whereas in unified offices, only 14% do.

[00:19:16] So this is a really meaningful difference in how people view their productivity in different workplace environments. This isn’t just people complaining about anything. And this is where that cost leak actually occurs. It’s amazing because it occurs across two different spectrums. First of all, when people run into some sort of friction, and especially let’s talk about resource friction, maybe a room that doesn’t meet their needs or is booked or is broken, about a third of people will just go find another resource and use it.

[00:19:51] Two-thirds of people choose a different path, and that’s either finding a resource that doesn’t quite meet their needs, or moving to a virtual meeting, or canceling their meeting altogether. Unfortunately, that defeats the entire purpose of coming to the office. The whole reason for coming to the office is to drive collaboration, to drive togetherness, to bring people together to solve and work through problems.

[00:20:15] And when they run into this friction, you defeat that entirely, and that actually happens on empty days too. On empty days, they might be able to jump to another resource, but once again, if the office isn’t full because of that, then you’ve defeated the whole point of coming to the office.

[00:20:32] I talked about it a little bit before, AV is a huge part of this. It was actually the second biggest friction dimension in the study. That’s why a booked room, even if the room is available and isn’t filled with someone else, is worthless if the AV doesn’t work. We hear about this a lot from customers: in the post-pandemic world, almost all meetings nowadays are multi-location.

[00:20:55] People from different places are partially remote, so making sure that room AV works really well is such an important part of this, and that it’s integrated into the rest of the workplace technology stack, because if it isn’t, then there’s a disconnect between those two different systems. So Abby, do you want to take this and talk about how you connect those together?

[00:21:15] Abby Normandeau: Yes. We mentioned we want to talk through how we actually close the gap on something like this, and we look at it as one unified platform running one shared set of workplace data, doing three or so jobs every day throughout the workplace. You see we break it down into three key areas here.

[00:21:38] Plan is your long-term view for managing your office. It’s things like planning out where everyone’s going to sit, looking at your analytics to understand your occupancy data to help make future decisions about the office. It’s understanding how people are coming into the office so that you can make better real estate decisions.

[00:22:01] It’s really answering your visibility problem. Think of the customer I mentioned about trying to figure out where new hires sit and shuffling people around. It’s really that planning aspect of the office in a longer-term sense. Then we go over to managing the office, which is the day-to-day functions that you need to do.

[00:22:20] It’s how your systems run together so that you’re not doing your daily firefighting, like scrambling to figure out which equipment and rooms are working. It’s having your ticketing system tied to your booking system tied to managing the guests coming into the office. All these systems function together so that all the data is housed in one place, and the teams managing these day-to-day workflows have one unified place to go to put out these fires, per se.

[00:22:52] And then you have the employees actually using the office and how they’re able to seamlessly come into the office and plan and book what they need on the days that they come in, and this is done in tools that they already use today and are comfortable with, integrating with things like Slack, Teams, Outlook, Google, so that teams, say, don’t have to put out desk signs every day to let people know where they’re sitting.

[00:23:21] Employees can feel empowered to go into tools and manage these flows themselves. The reason we see this as closing the gap is that it’s helping have that shared data underneath all three of these areas, with these tools connected with one another. So operations teams can get a whole picture of what’s going on with the office.

[00:23:45] Employees just see that it works. A few clicks, they get what they need, and everything’s being pulled from the same place.

[00:23:56] And so here’s what you can actually do and focus on to figure out what comes next. We mentioned we have a workplace index survey that you can take to figure out which of these three key areas you fall into. You may have done that beforehand, no worries. You can do it after the fact as well. But to give you a sense of what to do next once you figure out where you fall: Micah mentioned most people aren’t sitting in the unified category.

[00:24:23] If you are, that is great. Your office is functioning more or less to its highest capabilities. This is where you just want to make sure that you’re doing quarterly check-ins. Make sure that if any new complaints pop up, it’s not a new workflow that’s not functioning as it should, or maybe it’s just adjusting a small tweak.

[00:24:43] But really, it’s more keeping everything status quo and functioning as you have it. The focus is if you’re in that fragmented or reactive state, what do you do as first few steps to try to improve some of these flows? The first thing I recommend to my customers is to review the tools that you’re using.

[00:25:06] What are the manual workflows that you need to do, whether it’s in spreadsheets or Slack? Where have you created workarounds in your day-to-day workflows, or where do you have missing data where tools aren’t connecting with one another? If you had data connected between multiple tools, it would create a better, more accurate picture for you about the office.

[00:25:30] Once you lay those out, pick one of those that’s causing the most pain and look to see where you can automate that workflow to make it less manual. Is there a place where you can add additional integrations to bring that data together between systems?

[00:25:50] A good example: I had a customer earlier this year struggling with managing employee lunches. It seems like a small bit of someone’s day. They have a couple of days a week where lunches are supplied to the office, and there are 200 lunches that people can go in and get on the days that they’re in the office.

[00:26:11] But this was actually a larger problem that the workplace team was facing, because they only had 200 lunches but 300 or so people coming into the office. They had employees lining up an hour and a half before the cafeteria even opened to hope that they could grab a lunch for the day.

[00:26:28] That means you have an hour of people needing to move meetings around, being unproductive, scrambling to hope that they can get lunch. By peeling back the layers on what they were doing today with this process and how we could automate it a bit better, employees can sign up for their lunches ahead of time, they badge into the office to confirm that they’re there so that we hold that lunch spot, and then they have a specific time that they go in to pick up their lunch, so there are no long lines.

[00:26:58] It allowed us to cut down what was hours a day, a week, trying to plan and manage these lunches to something that just ran more automatically in the background. So one small problem can cause a lot of pain, and peeling back those layers and figuring out where to plug in those gaps can really help.

[00:27:19] Micah Remley: Love that story, and I think that’s such great advice, Abby.

[00:27:23] We’re coming up on half an hour here. I’m going to give the last word to the analyst who wrote this research, Craig Durr at the Collab Collective. The problem is real, it’s measured, so that next move really belongs to you. We do have time for a question or two, so please pop questions into the Q&A chat.

[00:27:45] I know we had a couple come in while we were talking. Abby, this is really interesting. We’ll see if you can answer it quickly or not. How do you handle a team that ignores the team day schedule and takes space another team needs? I’m going to give that to you because I don’t think Abby will come up with the right answer to that one.

[00:28:01] Abby Normandeau: That’s a great question. I will say it definitely comes from the leadership down. If you’re relying on each employee just abiding by these policies themselves, that makes it far more difficult to have people abide by these policies. I really think encouragement comes from leadership first. So whether it’s the executive team or the managers of those teams specifically, really planning meetings with the team on the days that the team is in so they can collaborate in person, and really showing up and making that presence known in the office, really drives their team into the office.

[00:28:40] Micah Remley: Yeah. That’s great advice. Starting from the top down, I think, is so important. If you don’t have buy-in across the organization, it just doesn’t work well at all.

[00:28:50] Abby Normandeau: And free lunch here and there for your team never hurts either.

[00:28:54] Micah Remley: Free food never hurts either, right?

[00:28:56] Right. That’s totally right. Well, I know we’re at time. Unfortunately we can’t get to all the questions. We will answer any questions that people give to us individually. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. We really enjoyed the conversation. Hopefully you get to fill out the workplace assessment on your own if you haven’t done it already, and enjoy the rest of your day.

[00:29:16] Thank you, everyone.

[00:29:17] Abby Normandeau: Thanks, everyone.

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