← Work For Humans
Work For Humans
Workflow Friction: The Missing Link in Work Design and AI Transformation | Stephanie Denino
01:03:23
Loading summary
Transcript86 lines
- [00:04]
A
Friction is the tax you'll pay when work is poorly designed. Through this work we get to hear stories from all kinds of workers in all kinds of professions. And one that I'll never forget. We were working in the context of a call center in a healthcare environment. This was shift based work. And naturally people in these types of roles, every second and minute of their day is counted. And I'll never forget how many people in these roles felt like they couldn't take a bathroom break when they needed it. And that is friction too. It stands in your way as an individual from being human at work and doing a good job. And these types of examples, they stick with you because you realize how pervasive some of this friction is. But it's is left unaddressed in the system in many organizations.
- [00:59]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Every organization is full of friction. The meetings that don't need to happen. That dumb field that you have to fill out with data that nobody's ever going to use. The tool that requires 10 clicks to get anything done. Friction is just one of the costs of doing work, but it doesn't have to be that way. It's a signal. It tells us something about how work is designed as a product and how we might design it better. My guest today is Stephanie Danino, head of advisory at FOUNT and a partner at TI People. Stephanie helps leaders find and fix the friction inside their organizations. Her work uses data and design to pinpoint where things get stuck in workflows, in systems or culture, and then redesign work so that it flows smoothly. In our conversation, Stephanie and I talk about what friction really means, how language shapes the way we think about work, and why she believes that workflow is a better word than experience. We explore how HR can think more like a product team and why AI is putting new pressure on workflow design and what it means to design work that gives time back to people and helps them use it well. If you haven't already, of course, hit, follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss future conversations like this one. All right, let's get to it. Here's Stephanie Danino. Stephanie Dinino. Welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:41]
A
Thanks for having me, Dart. I'm so excited to be here.
- [02:43]
B
You and I have spent quite a few sessions talking to each other in the past about your work. And you know the show and you know the two questions I ask at the end. I always ask the question about what job do you hire your job to do for you. But I also ask the question, what does it cost you? And a lot of your work has been about taking friction out of the experience of work, which I generally classify as part of the cost of work. A part of the cost of work is drudgery, stupid tasks, effort that you don't see creating value. And so that's where I want to start. And I want to start by exploring the nature of that cost and what you find when you help companies remove that cost, things like that. So first of all, could you just introduce yourself and the work that you do?
- [03:35]
A
I play a few roles. I work for a boutique consultancy called TI People, but I also work for a software company called Fount, where I'm head of advisory. These two companies are highly intertwined sister companies. And when I try and summarize my work simply, I say I help organizations continuously improve work. But when I want to get into the specifics, I'll say something like, I help leaders get the kind of data they need and put in place the right practices to identify and eliminate workflow friction. And what that does is it makes it easier, better, faster for people to get work done. And ultimately that can trigger a whole host of benefits and outcomes. But one of the big ones is it unlocks capacity in organizations. And I'll start with that outcome. But there are many outcomes that are both business serving and people serving. Dart, to quote you. I think it also helps people feel much more alive at work when you are able to remove friction in their workflows. But naturally the outcomes they drive depends on the problem you're trying to solve. So we'll talk about that more as we think about the types of people this work serves in this conversation.
- [04:54]
B
What's friction?
- [04:55]
A
We've come to learn that the word friction is interpreted very differently by different people. In fact, you can think of friction in the context of physics. You can think of friction that is interpersonal. And that's why we've stopped just using the word friction without a word preceding it. For the longest time, we've used the word work friction to describe anything that gets in people's way at work as they're trying to accomplish something. More recently, we've been talking about workflow friction because it feels much more specific and you can decompose that a lot more than just work. But in essence, workflow friction leads me to have to expend unnecessary energy that I just shouldn't have to. And it shows up in the forms of approval loops that feel endless, of unclear roles or standard operating Procedures, rework. The list of causes is very long. But ultimately it leads people to think, why do you have to make this so difficult for me? And it leads to a number of feelings like, you are wasting my time, you're slowing me down, you're making it harder for me to do a good job. It makes more work for me. It's disrespectful. The list is very long. But it triggers a lot of feelings of frustration for individuals who are in a system that is filled with friction.
- [06:24]
B
What's a classic example? What's a surprising example?
- [06:29]
A
Classic example is there's just too many steps that you're making me have to jump through to get this thing done. So something like getting a symbol approval for a new design that you're working on requires that you make me get too many people to say yes before moving on. That's one common example. Or you make it hard for me to find the resources I need to do this. I'm battling systems internally to go find an answer I need. We see that commonly because we do a lot of work with people who are serving customers either in call centers or in stores, and they're often looking for the way to perform optimally in a situation. And then you asked what's something surprising? Well, there's friction that sometimes just feels like drudgery, as you called it. But sometimes there's friction that feels a lot more disrespectful. And through this work, we get to hear stories from all kinds of workers in all kinds of professions. And one that I'll never forget. We were working in the context of a call center in a healthcare environment. This was shift based work. And naturally, people in these types of roles, every second and minute of their day is counted. And I'll never forget how many people in these roles felt like they couldn't take a bathroom break when they needed it. And that is friction too. It stands in your way as an individual from being human at work and doing a good job. And these types of examples, they stick with you because you realize how regular they may be and how pervasive some of this friction is, but is left unaddressed in the system. In many organizations, one of the tricks.
- [08:28]
B
Between work friction and workflow friction, it seems to me, is that do you ever find that friction is outside of the workflow? And so I can imagine believing that my commute is friction. I can imagine knowing or at least feeling the politics that might be influencing the nature of my work as fiction. Do you find it outside of workflow.
- [08:56]
A
To me, those are both part of workflow, because we're really defining a workflow as the steps people take towards a goal, whether it's the goal of getting to work or I think what you're suggesting is they stand outside of what may feel like the value add work you do at work. But to us, a lot of things count as a workflow. And if there is something that is inherently valuable about making that thing easier, better, faster, then we will have done work on it or we will help people do work towards eliminating friction in it. So yeah, our definition is taking us to a lot of different types of work with a lot of different types of people in organizations. And yeah, we have previously worked with people who wanted to understand the perceived friction in commuting to work, and it led to a policy that allowed people to stay home a lot more to work. So in some contexts we've measured that, but we haven't done that recently.
- [10:04]
B
And it seems like friction can come at different kinds of cost. And it's interesting because you draw a box around the company and some of those costs are going to land outside the company. And so a commute, for instance, might be seen as landing outside the company scope because the employee carries that friction outside of working hours. I can also imagine that, let's take the box of the company and I guess I'm saying sort of the standard working day. And I can imagine that it both extends the working day sometimes, which is it takes people beyond. If you looked at what percentage of the work that they do beyond a normal work week is friction driven or it doesn't extend beyond the working week and it shows up as getting less done. My question is, do you see all three? You see things that fall outside of the scope of the company, inside the working day extend beyond the working day.
- [11:02]
A
I think all three are possible. And I think what's worth remembering is the work that we are taking on. Actually, this is a helpful frame for us in this conversation. There are two main types of workflows we are helping leaders identify friction within. The first type of workflow are what we're calling central services workflows. These are workflows that are often owned by central functions or corporate functions or shared service functions like hr, it, procurement, legal, you name it. And those workflows include things like the HR function trying to help you hire into your team, or the procurement function trying to help you buy something, or finance forcing you to budget in a certain way. These big workflows of hiring, buying, budgeting are some examples that These central functions have responsibility over and are trying to optimize to make it easier for you to do. But also what they're trying to aim for is higher service quality at lower cost. That's a bucket of type of workflow we're often working within. The second bucket is what we're calling role specific workflows. So this is within the bounds of your functional job. If you're a nurse, you do things like coordinating care and administering medication. If you're a software developer, you're understanding user requirements and prioritizing your backlog and deploying code. I'm giving you examples of workflows that are specific to the role you've been hired to do. And those are the two big lenses through which we're bringing a method and data to identify friction and fight it with leaders.
- [13:08]
B
Where do you find customers for solving problems in those two different workflows? And specifically what I'm probing for is whether or not if you find a central function that is responsible for the more distributed quality of work, and that would be HR departments who see it as in their scope to change the experience of work for a nurse doing work that's related to nursing.
- [13:38]
A
So what's really interesting is there really hasn't been, up until now, I think, a function that has attempted to influence, with the breadth we're describing here, and what that has meant is a lot of the work we've done has served very different people in different organizations. In one organization, our main client is a coo. In another it's a chro. In another, it's a business unit lead. In another, it's a leader in a GBS function who is at the helm of the people experienced in operations. So these titles are all very varied because they see the applicability to finding and fighting friction in the workflows they own. But the reality is no one owns all workflows. And to measure, identify and fight friction in these workflows, you have to have the people who own them at the table with you often. So what we've been looking for is who is the person who has the most influence to go as wide and deep as you may want to go to tackle friction across all workflows of an organization. And you ask me this now? I think these days my answer to that is I think increasingly chros are the best position to play across both these categories. And I want to say why. First, we're seeing a lot of push through HR functions to be the ones who are helping play a role deploying agents Chatbots that are helpful to everything that is a central service workflow. And organizations are wanting to deploy this in unified ways across their central services. They don't want every function to do this differently. And HR and IT are playing together hand in hand to ensure that kind of deployment. So that's the central service workflows dimension. But as you think about role specific workflows, HR functions are thinking about workforce transformation in light of AI. They are thinking about what needs to evolve in the daily work of people. And they are being given bigger and bigger scope to go answer that question. And I'd say up until a few years ago, I don't know how easy it would have been for someone in HR to go get their hands dirty into the workflows of a nurse unless they were a highly strategic business partner that had established a great relationship with their business leader and was doing this kind of work. But HR has not been in the depths of role specific work. This has been traditionally owned by operational leaders and business leaders. And for that reason we're seeing opportunity for chros to play this dual role across both central services and the role specific work.
- [16:44]
B
That's very interesting. I've seen it too. I've seen AI as an entryway for HR functions to expand their scope. And it's a surprise to me. I'm very surprised. And I suspect, I mean, I'm sure it's not happening equally every place. It's the people we talk to, the people who talk to us and who we talk to are the HR departments that have embraced that scope. But it's still, it's. That's an exciting thing.
- [17:12]
A
It is. And I think because we do work that is applicable in so many functions to solve so many different types of problems, finding that pivot person, the one that has the most influence to bring this capability to all parts of the organization has been really important to us. And it's something that we're continuing to find opportunities to establish relationships with new players that have this vested interest in, as I said, identifying where in the workflows they own there is friction to be tackled. And in reality, I think the idea of there being one central owner is not realistic. I think what we should be thinking about is how organizations have decentralized responsibility and decentralized the tools and the capability to go do this in the realm that they own. And that is why I know that you and I, Dart have often gone back and forth on the question if work is a product, who is the product owner? And what I've now Realized is that question is an impossible one. Asking who the product owner of work is big and theoretical. But if you say who is the owner of a workflow, well then that's much clearer. You can find ownership much more easily in that way. And if you find a way to equip these owners of workflows with data from their customer in that workflow, well then you're scaling very quickly this capability in a way that feels a lot less disruptive.
- [19:00]
B
One of the things I've come to realize is that who is the owner of the product work? I agree, and I think I've said this to you in the past, that I'm not sure that makes sense. Part of the reason is that every organization's process flows are different work products. So in other words, having one for all of them doesn't make sense. Because the truth is it's a quite diverse set of products having a product operations function. So product ops, which would enable the individual product owners to deliver better work, that makes sense because you're not actually owning the product. What you're doing is you're owning the creation and distribution of the capabilities to do that. And now how far you distribute that is going to depend. I argue, as you know, that you distribute it all the way to linemanagers wherever possible. Well, that's not true. You hold it as centrally as you possibly can, but in many cases you're going to have to distribute it to the line managers. But an example is that you take something like Fount. Fount can look at a whole company and identify friction any place where it lies. That would be a great capability to be rolled out by a product ops function for the work.
- [20:19]
A
I agree and in fact we're seeing these functions form around this capability with the organizations we're working with. So in contexts where people see the multi application of this capability, they're building central teams that they're calling friction fighting teams. And these teams know how to use this capability, which at its core collects data from employees to help measure friction time spent and experience quality in workflows. And they are the ones who know how to use this capability, deploy it in new ways, support the end sponsor and user of this to solve business problems with this capability. So that's been really fascinating to see take foot because it feels like that very much resembles the central work design or product ops now function that you're describing.
- [21:26]
B
That's super interesting. The way I describe the work that you've done around friction is I say there's a two by two And I say one axis of the two by two is how much effort something is, and the other axis is how stupid it is. And stupid effort falls into the category of friction. Whenever I've said that to you in the past, you haven't said anything. It makes me think that's not quite right. But where I want to focus is that there's a kind of heat, emotional heat, around the term stupid that I'm after, which is it's not just friction because it gets in my way. It's friction in part because I'm outraged that it gets in my way. So the emotional burden of friction might matter.
- [22:16]
A
This is making me want to answer your question with another question, perhaps actually with an example. So let's take a workflow that a people leader would have to do in an organization which has to do with terminating or off boarding someone. Ask them if they like doing this and they'll say, no. Who likes to do that? I hate doing that. Ask them if it's made easy for them to do and they might say, yeah, actually, in our company, there's sort of white glove treatment. HR helps me do that, so it's easy for me. And so where is friction there? Right. Do you like doing it or is it hard to do? And sometimes, instead of trying to answer what is friction? We are just capturing more and more dimensions of the experience. So I've just named we've captured effort and we've captured satisfaction. Sometimes we're capturing things like, does it feel like it's an efficient use of your time? We're capturing many, many dimensions that are meant to be a way to decompose what it feels like to perform in any given workflow. And sometimes effort is the dimension by which you prioritize. Sometimes the efficiency is. Sometimes it's the time you spend. It really goes back to what's the problem you're trying to solve. And we've used different variables, depending on whether you were trying to release capacity for people leaders or if you were trying to improve their overall experience. So maybe the answer is there isn't just one. Two by two.
- [24:00]
B
I'll tell you what this aligns to, or at least opens a door in my mind to. I recently had David Norton on the show, who's one of the original experience designers who worked with Joe pine in the 90s. And what he talks about, and I think Joe Pine talks about too, is that a well designed service you measure by how time well saved. A well designed experience is time well spent.
- [24:27]
A
Yes.
- [24:28]
B
And a well designed transformation offering Is time well invested in oneself, really? And so there's a way in which the failure to do any one of those is a different kind of friction. If something's getting in the way of time well saved, that's one thing. If it's getting in the way of time well invested, it's another thing. And so that may actually be a useful taxonomy.
- [24:53]
A
I agree. And maybe to bring this to life, you think about time differently across different workflows. There are some workflows where you're like, I want people to do as little of that as possible, just approving timesheets or time cards. I want to reduce that down to zero. That shouldn't be something you're dedicating much time to. But what about workflows like discussing career goals and aspirations or providing feedback? No one thinks that you're trying to minimize that you're trying to maximize time well spent in, in those types of workflows. And so we too are seeing that helpful distinction in how teams are using this data to make decisions about where do you automate and where do you augment, where do you try and shift the work or eliminate the work versus keep it and make it more and more time well spent. And it's a regular part of most of our conversation with organizations who are taking a role evolution lens to this kind of work.
- [26:02]
B
That's interesting. And, you know, one time I did this manager work practice study where we went around the world for almost six months, embedding ourselves with managers and looking at how they saw their own world. And management practices were the center of our universe. And we found that many of the managers categorized that as administrivia. So many managers saw, for instance, career discussions as friction, Especially where there's an interaction between two people, I can see where one person's friction is the other person's time well spent.
- [26:40]
A
But if something is inherently valuable to an individual and their ability to do good work, and therefore to the organization's ability to drive better outcomes, I think there's an opportunity to reframe that in the minds of people leaders, because I think some things may not be what you want to do, but they're inherently valuable. We certainly don't look individually at how people rate these activities. We look at them on aggregate. And generally we're trying to make it easier, better, faster for people to do these things. And when I say better, that can mean a lot of things. It can also mean more enjoyable. So there are a lot of angles through which you can optimize any given Workflow. And again, it depends on what your aim is, depends on what business problem you're trying to solve as you use this tool.
- [27:38]
B
I want to talk about language. You've written a lot about language and you've thought a lot about language. I suspect it's because one way to think of it is that you're bringing mental models from one part of the business, which might be the CX world, and bringing them to other parts of the business where the language just doesn't fit. So let's talk about a couple of words. Which one would you like to pick as a word that we use in a way that we may not be conscious of?
- [28:11]
A
First, I want to say you're right that I've thought about language, a law, because we've found it to be a way to bring along stakeholders into this work who otherwise may not pay attention. The right word brings people to the party and the wrong words has you wondering if we'll ever gain any traction. Some of the words that I think are worth spending some time on, we've already spent a lot of time on work versus workflow. It's been a realization of ours that when you say work, people bring their lens to that word based on what they are responsible for. So Dart, you and I have so often had the pet peeve of hearing people say, well, yeah, work, the HR products and services that support work. And you're like, no, work is so much more. Work has everything to do with the value added activities that people are hired to do. So work has been helpful but broad. And so we've been pushing ourselves to talk about workflow as the way to decompose this very broad word and to get specific. So that's one example. But one thing I want to point out is even just this word workflow is for many people, they've up until now thought about it as a system or automated workflow. And we're really reclaiming this word. We're saying, no, we're talking about human workflows. We're talking about the steps people take as they try and achieve a goal at work. And whenever I've used that word and described it in that way, people have said, oh, you mean a journey? And I've said, well, yes, but I'm not using that word.
- [30:07]
B
Why not? Why not journey?
- [30:09]
A
Because journeys come from the realm of experience. And experience work has in the last few years been viewed as optional, costly, when you have to make judicious choices about where you can spend dollars in your company. And that's why we have seen so much more traction when talking about let's go identify and fight friction in workflows as opposed to let's go improve the employee journey. Those trigger completely different things in your mind as a business stakeholder. On one hand you think yeah, this is optional, costly, and really only serves employees. And on the other hand you think, oh, this is important, critical, and will help advance both business and employee outcomes. Right? So the choice of word here has been for us the difference between winning work and losing work. It's been the difference between some of our key stakeholders keeping jobs and losing jobs. It is not trivial. It's been the difference between people creating large scaled influence and the ability to orchestrate across functions versus being irrelevant.
- [31:37]
B
Foreign. Hi everyone. Here are some gift ideas inspired by guests on Work for Humans. For the people in your life who like a challenge, try the exquisite puzzles of Stumpcraft's Jason Robillard, who told us all about the essentials of great puzzle design. For something seasonal, you might like Mistletoe Market, but my favorite is called Queen Bee. If someone you know is taking work way too seriously, help them to lighten up with Greebroff's Shiny new book Today was fun. If you have a friend who's at sea in the pace of change, I recommend Embracing Uncertainty. It's the latest book from Margaret Heffernan in which she tells us the techniques that writers, musicians and artists use to thrive in an unpredictable world. And the one that I'm definitely going to put in my own stocking this year. Joe Pine's new book, the Transformation Economy, is now available for pre order. So a lot of times there's these three different frameworks that I see us using to think about experience. One is we're going to look across the employee journey and we're going to call that journey. We're going to say what's the whole thing? It's hired or retirement. And so that's very high level and vague. And we're going to identify moments that matter within the employee journey. I'm not saying that they aren't important, some of them really are. It's just that's not necessarily the work that tends to be the HR services view of things. There's this other one, this other long end to end look, which is strategy to workforce, which is how are we going to identify what our strategy is? How are we going to translate that into what we need from the workforce? And then how are we going to change our HR services to deliver the kind of workforce necessary to achieve the Strategy workflow is way more micro. And the truth is most of our day is not experiencing the macro flow. That's an analytical tool. The macro thing is help us to understand the whole thing. But what's it like for me to answer a customer call, for instance? That's the minute to minute experience of work. And it's really not well addressed by these macro end to end things.
- [34:10]
A
I agree. And in fact I think we have been missing language to talk about this. Right. Organizations have constructs like processes that they manage and optimize end to end. They have constructs like your tech architecture and job descriptions. But we haven't really had a unit that explains from the perspective of the worker what are you trying to do? What is that? Worker centric lens on getting work done. And in the absence of this construct, I think people have believed that there's no other way to optimize than to make your processes better and make your tech better and maybe redesign a role. But there is a lot hiding in the work people are getting done. And when you don't have the ability to expose the reality of work in these workflows, well then there is no way to optimize it. And what I believe we're bringing to the table is a new lens, a new lens that people have never had before. There's a perfect visual that one of our clients has come to use. It's a on the left picture of an org centric view of work. You see process flows that look tidy, you see dashboards that make you feel in control of all that's unfolding. And on the right, you of course see a spaghetti diagram of what work actually is like. And their shorthand for describing the work they're doing with us is we're identifying what it's actually like to get work done here. And we are reducing friction, morsel by morsel. And we are in doing so, releasing capacity, making this work more engaging, serving our customers better, saving costs to serve these customers. And that feels really tangible and practical to leaders who are ready to hear that a new lens is needed.
- [36:26]
B
It's interesting. A part of what I think is really valuable about the way you approach the problem space is that you ask people where's your friction? And they know from their ground level first person perspective where the friction is the difference. I always explain the difference between experience, design and I know that we're now hedging around that word, but I'm still going to use it between experience, design and a lot of what I've done with process Work is with process work, you look at the outputs and you say, is this really achieving the outputs that you want most? Process work, you look a lot less at what's the first person experience of being in that process? And so the way I explain that to people is I say if I'm looking at a highway and I'm measuring the throughput of that highway, if you have one car every 10ft and they're all going 10 miles an hour, that throughput is the same as one car every hundred feet where every car is going 100 miles an hour. The throughput's the same. From a process perspective, I'm like, the thumbs up, those are both great because I've got high throughput. But from the first person experience of somebody in the car that's stuck in traffic, it's a totally different experience. And so a process person might come to workflows, which I think is a term that was invented by process people, and ask the question, how's it performing for the company? But by coming at it from a what's it like in there perspective, people will say, I'm stuck in traffic.
- [37:53]
A
Yeah. And what it's opening up is more opportunity to optimize the system. It's almost as if we have been tapping into some optimization potential, but not all. And we're putting our finger on things that have felt like a given, like a de facto in these systems. And we're saying, no, there's more we can make better here. But I want to give you an example dart of how different people view this new lens. Because not everyone is ready to buy into the fact that you need the lens of the worker to improve the work. And I have an experience that happened to me this year that is a good way to describe this. I have been in touch with a number of COOs through our work, but there are two that couldn't be more different. On one hand, One of the COOs we're serving has embraced this capability that we're bringing to the table and is saying, as someone who is having to drive large scale digital transformation, who needs to ensure operational excellence, who needs to help better serve our customers, Every one of those objectives is only realized if I'm able to identify and fight friction that people are facing as they're trying to do this work. And they have completely adopted this way of working as a management practice. Meanwhile, a COO in the exact same industry, in the insurance industry, had on a call for no more than 15 minutes. At one point they paused us and asked, so tell Me, what data are you collecting and how? And we said, oh, we're collecting data from employees. And. And he laughed at us and said, oh, I don't care what employees think about their work. I will only trust data that comes from systems. And that's all I need to optimize work and reach the outcomes I'm held to. And so what a contrast between two leaders in the exact same role in the exact same industry, at the helm of businesses of the same size, and yet fundamentally different mental models on just how valuable it is to have input from your customer, your internal customer, your employee, on improving the work.
- [40:26]
B
The second one would say they're not customers.
- [40:29]
A
Exactly.
- [40:30]
B
They'd say they're inputs to production. Let's see if we can take a moment and see if we can actually support the position of the second person. I might struggle, but I'm going to try. It would go something like this. You know what? People are inherently lazy and they're never going to like work. And if you pander to what they want, they're going to want leisure. And working to create conditions that people like at work is a waste of time. They're never going to like it. I mean, I have a response to that.
- [40:58]
A
Let's hear it.
- [40:59]
B
There's a lot of evidence that people do like work when it's well designed. And there's a lot of evidence that when they hate it, it makes them less effective. In fact, all of the academic research supports the idea that companies do better on every measurable dimension when the people who work there like the work. And so there's a lot of evidence against that. I mean, there's tons and tons of evidence.
- [41:22]
A
Yeah. And maybe we should come up with a one liner to the coo, which is something like, okay, well, friction is the tax you'll pay when work is poorly designed.
- [41:34]
B
Yeah. Friction is the tax you pay and you're going to pay it in a lot of different ways.
- [41:39]
A
Yeah.
- [41:40]
B
One of the biggest ways you're going to pay it is in customer churn, you know, subscriber churn, which is that people are going to come and go from your company and they're going to treat it as absolute mercenaries and they're going to know that you don't care about them and they're not going to care about you.
- [41:53]
A
I think this becomes real for leaders when they see it though. And a lot of what we have been trying to do in our work is to make the barrier to entry low and to say, okay, give us four weeks and a very Small amount of money we will show you. And it's eye opening for leaders because really what's happening is I think most leaders believe that asking how people feel about work resembles their engagement survey efforts. And many are ready to throw in the towel on those. But if you say, I'm going to bring you a new type of data that is like an X ray of the work your people do and that helps you understand where they're slowing down. And let's make this more concrete. In the insurance industry, the use case we were putting in front of him as an example was agents in your call center who are needing to answer policy questions from clients who are needing to provide basic claim information. All of these different workflows that make up the work of these people. We were able to expose which one of these workflows are particularly difficult. How could you make them better? And the team that chose to do this work very quickly within three months was able to say, we're saving time on calls. We're putting customers on hold for less time. We are up in our customer satisfaction measures. Customer satisfaction is not yet reduced Churn. But they do tend to that as you increasingly manage the customer relationship. And so the link is undeniably strong if you're willing to give it a chance. And I think the leaders who are willing to try something different, the leaders who are willing to admit that process mining wasn't enough and that lean Six Sigma and continuous improvement wasn't enough and that deploying new tech isn't enough. The ones who are willing to admit that there is more hidden in the system that can be optimized if only you ask workers. Those are the people who are reaping the benefits of this and who are opening up new avenues to create value.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah. It's funny, sometimes I resist putting it in terms that are sort of brutalist financial terms.
- [44:31]
A
Yeah.
- [44:32]
B
Which is, on the one hand, what you could say is you could say, look, there's a lot of the labor that's happening in your organization, which is scrap, which means that you're paying for it and it's not providing any value to your paying customers. And scrap labor, it's a mathematically correct idea. And then you could also say there's something about defective labor, which is because people hate their work. And because you have constant turnover, your call center doesn't know what the hell it's saying when people get on the phone. And you know what? They kind of hate the people on the phone. And so they're going to treat them bad and that's defective labor. But a part of me wants to say to not turn to those sort of brutalist terms and say it is wrong to neglect the needs of anybody. Right. And it is wrong to treat people as instruments of production. And so I think I have a two by two in my head. And the two by two looks like this one axis is, does leadership trust people? So how much is trust? So the left quadrant is low trust. And then the second one is how broad is their stakeholder group that they are concerned about. Is it entirely shareholders or is it a broader stakeholder perspective? And if you find that your leadership is in the bottom left, which is don't trust people and is entirely shareholder focused, and I'm going to say part of what that means is that they don't recognize the link between shareholder value and stakeholder value, then probably that's not a great environment for these ideas.
- [46:08]
A
One thing that you've noticed about how we use language is that we often are trying to appeal to the current mental model, which is very economic in nature. And we're doing that because I think you are able to affect change. When you meet people where they are and instead of coming at them with a principled better way, you say, I'm going to help you achieve the business outcomes you care about. Oh, and by the way, we're going to make this great for your people.
- [46:46]
B
Which is critical path to creating the business outcomes that you care about.
- [46:50]
A
Yeah. And I'll never forget a partner we've worked with in this space. They said, do you know what I love about what you guys do? They said, it is so covert. You're driving a highly human centered evolution of work and the experience of work. And you didn't even need to use those words. And what it's allowing you to do is to win new work with new types of executives and you're making this mainstream. And that dart, that's my ultimate ambition here. My dream is for this work, which we're going to call intentional work design and work optimization and workflow optimization. I know there's a lot of language in there, but it's to bring it to the Global 1000, to the Fortune 500. It's for this to be a, a critical capability that every company has built because they understand that when they intentionally manage the work and workflow and reduce friction within it, they are creating a system that is designed for workers and it is opening up business outcomes like they never imagined were possible.
- [48:10]
B
What about the word product?
- [48:12]
A
I think the word product is interesting to People, but confusing to people. I think I'm witnessing that from the perspective of work I do some of the time in HR functions that are trying to adopt a more product centric way of operating. And I think you've seen me talk about this. But the reality is what are you describing as the product? And I think a lot of people are using different language to talk about what the product is. And it has people spinning their wheels over how to adopt product management like principles and practices in their realm. So I like it. But I think people are still trying to figure out what it means for how they evolve the way they work, because most don't know what the product or products should be in their world and people are paralyzed in front of that.
- [49:15]
B
I've noticed a couple of things too. One is I thought that the thing that I said that was the most surprising was that employees are customers. And I found from that that I followed that to work as a product. It turns out it's not the most surprising thing because lots of people who are delivering HR services see employees as customers of HR services appropriately. It turns out that the more surprising thing is work as a product and that that is something that's much less usual. And I noticed that you have referred to people as a product, which is HR delivering the workforce to the company. People experience as a product, HR operations as a product, HR as a product and then work as a product.
- [50:03]
A
Yes. This was me listing the many variations.
- [50:06]
B
I had come across that all mean something different and people are all anchoring on the word product. And taking a product approach to something is a methodology for delivering it.
- [50:15]
A
Yes.
- [50:16]
B
And you can take that approach to delivering lots of different things.
- [50:19]
A
Exactly. And I think that's the point to remember because it can be applied to so many different environments. And what I think is useful about what is at the core of product management is yes, you are highly customer centric. Yes, you work in highly iterative and data driven ways and you solve in far more cross functional ways and you're much more outcome focused. So if those are the things that people are trying to introduce into how they make different parts of work better for people, then I think that's fantastic. I think people need to define what it means for them and to embrace it and let it be an engine for change as opposed to something that confuses many people around them.
- [51:07]
B
How does this apply to the rollout of AI? And we've talked a little bit about that, which is that HR now has a different seat at the table as potentially the organization that really has a lot more of a role beyond HR services. Do you find though, that understanding friction is an important part of the implementation of AI?
- [51:28]
A
I do. I think understanding the friction in workflows is critical to the successful adoption of AI. So let me take a few steps back. We're seeing studies that are coming out that are describing failed attempts at AI pilots, or Gen AI pilots more specifically. In fact, I recently mentioned an MIT study that everyone's been quoting and that suggested that 95% of these pilots fail and get zero return. When you read the why behind much of that, there isn't much being said about the underlying data or the models that aren't great. They're talking about how they are difficultly integrated into workflows. And what that means is, not surprisingly, you will not succeed if you are deploying AI, throwing it over the fence to people and expecting that they are going to pick it up and use it and all is going to make sense. Right. It's reminding us that we're going to need to be a lot more intentional about how this gets inserted into workflows. And it's also reminding us that if the workflow to begin with is inherently friction filled, AI may not save us. And I'm going to give you an example of this. So we have been working with a large media company that has been transforming the sort of ecosystem of roles in their agile and tech development teams with a focus on software developers. And the work of a software developer has a lot of activities that surround the main activity of creating code, which most developers will tell you is their favorite part. But there are a lot of activities before and after that are inherently difficult, have a lot of friction in them, like managing a scope change or identifying the user requirements or prioritizing the backlog. And even if you were to drop AI into those workflows, there are still difficult parts of that work that have a lot to do with who you have to make decisions with and how you will move on to the next step in this work. And what that organization had been seeing is that despite the deployment of Genai to these software developers, the work wasn't accelerating, the outputs weren't improving. And so there was a need to say, well, how are we doing this today? What's fundamentally friction filled for these software developers? And an organization was able to define what to go fix very specifically in some of these workflows, but they were also able to step back and say, whoa, we're noticing that what's really hard here is people feel like there's so many stakeholders they have to work through and with. And it's led them. This work has led them to dramatically simplify the number of roles, from 11 to 6 in their ecosystem to make it much easier to work with others. And only then did they start seeing gains as a result of introducing AI into the system. So there is a need to look very holistically at what it means to try and accomplish specific goals at work. And AI may accelerate some of the things you do, but not all. And it may not also fit well in the things you do unless you've intentionally redesigned those workflows. So this is leading to the realization that, yeah, we're going to need to be a lot more intentional than we may have otherwise thought.
- [55:16]
B
There's two things I hear in that that are really interesting. One is sort of a theory of constraints thing, which is that your process flow, taken as a whole, can only create as much value as its narrowest bottleneck. And the narrowest bottleneck may not be the thing that you're applying AI to, and so doesn't make any difference. Potentially, and especially in the early rollout days, it might add challenge. And so that's one thing I hear. The other thing to say about that MIT article is that although it said that the big iron central rollouts of AI are not making a big difference, it said individuals are finding a ton of value in their own use of it. So it's worth noting that when you hand the capability to people who are interacting with the work and give them the opportunity to use it creatively, they solve problems in their space that are most important to them.
- [56:13]
A
Yeah, it reminds you that this type of transformation is inherently user driven. Adoption is very, very user driven. Far more than any past digital transformation where you've said, here's the tool to use, go use it. You have no other choice. Now, there's optionality, there's choice, there's how do I want to do this? And if you're sitting atop tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and thinking, how do we best wield this capability? Well, then you need to have been looking through the lens of these people trying to get something done to say, hmm, will they use it? And if not, what should I do to fit this in a way that means they will for the long list of benefits we've drawn up as a result of this. Right? And really what that reminds us of is adoption is an experience challenge. And we need to be very intentional about experience design to drive the type of adoption most executives are Dreaming about when it comes to AI, I have.
- [57:19]
B
A few closing questions that I ask at the end of every show. You're quite familiar with them as a listener. The first one is, what do you, Stephanie, hire your job to do for you?
- [57:28]
A
Every time I've thought about my answer to this question, it's been slightly different. I don't know what that means for how evolving our needs are or how difficult it is to design work for humans if they can't answer the same question every time. But enough preamble. For me, I think I. I hire my job to push people in their thinking. I get a lot of satisfaction from that, to expose the reality and push people to think slightly differently. And a second part is to achieve great things with people I enjoy.
- [58:08]
B
That's interesting, that part about pushing. You're lucky that that's what you like to do, because you get to do that a lot in your work. As opposed to what maybe my attitude, which is, you don't get this already.
- [58:21]
A
I like the challenge. Yeah, I agree.
- [58:24]
B
I will say, though, that pushing people in their thinking is one that I don't really have on our list of jobs to be done.
- [58:32]
A
Oh, I love hearing that we're stretching the boxes.
- [58:37]
B
And that's. In fact, the list never stops growing, in my opinion. And they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They overlap, and that's fine. But we have on the list to see others shine. That's a little different. We've seen to leave a legacy as it relates to educating others and that what people want to do is they want to create the next generation of leaders, for instance, if they work for a business school. But just the experience of stretching the people around you, it's a little more local. We're going to add it to the list.
- [59:15]
A
Okay.
- [59:16]
B
What does it cost you?
- [59:18]
A
I'm someone who loves loving my work. I don't know if that's a sentence, but because I love loving work, it costs me a lot of little losses. I wouldn't say it's one big thing, but it's a little bit less time with my family, a little less time being active, a little less time having hobbies. All of these little losses added together have an overall cost to my ability to just not be a worker. Very recently, I also read Bree Groff's book, which is amazing, and her words have really helped me to start making managing that cost. There is a sentence in her book that reads, when you overwork, you under live. And it's the kind of book that I think I'll be Coming back to and revisiting when I find myself loving work a little too much and needing a bit more balance in my life. But that's what I'd summarize as the cost.
- [60:23]
B
It's interesting. I had somebody ask me recently, if you really make work people love, are you essentially ruining the rest of their lives?
- [60:32]
A
It's a very good question.
- [60:34]
B
And what I said was, well, would it be better if we created work everybody hated? Because then I think you can ruin people's lives with work they hate as much as with work they love too much. I don't know the answer. I think the answer is if you make work people love, they get to decide for themselves how they want to allocate it.
- [60:54]
A
I think so, too. And I think it's a privilege to be in a position to love the work you do. I remember being a teenager when I thought to myself, my hope in life is to love the work I do. So I'm fortunate to be in that position. I just have to balance it out with all the other goodness in my life.
- [61:14]
B
Yeah. And I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy to say that. By the way, Professor Bri has the ability to turn a phrase. It is just marvelous. However, saying work is not life, Bri would be all about making work a great part of your life.
- [61:32]
A
I agree.
- [61:33]
B
And so it is. It's still life.
- [61:37]
A
It is still life. Maybe the reminder here is there are so many beautiful parts of life and you shouldn't overdose on any one part of life.
- [61:48]
B
Was it epicureans or the hedonists who said, look, balance in all things? I can't remember. The hedonists are sort of known as being, like, overdoing, but I think that it was actually much more like, no, it's balanced. Well, it's been fabulous talking to you. Really great. I appreciate you coming on the show.
- [62:08]
A
Thank you, Dart. I'm so thrilled to be here and I'm cheering you on. Thank you for the work you're doing in this space, for your weekly provocations that are advancing this field and making it more mainstream for all of us. So thank you.
- [62:25]
B
Where can people learn more about you and your work?
- [62:28]
A
Come find me on LinkedIn. I'm regularly trying to share a bit of the work that we do there and I'd love to connect with anyone who is interested in learning more or sharing about work they're doing.
- [62:41]
B
Fantastic. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it. Believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build a kind of work work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.