How to Identify Friction at Work

Nathan Bricklin
Apr 28
3 min read

Reducing Friction at Work (Part 1: From Feedback to Action)

In previous posts, I’ve written about the Workplace Experience System and how environment, work design, leadership, and enablement systems shape how work happens.

This post starts a new series on reducing friction at work - focusing on how organizations move from feedback to action.

A common question that follows is: how do you actually identify where friction exists?

Most organizations have a general sense that something isn’t working as well as it could. But identifying friction in a clear, actionable way is often more difficult.

In practice, it requires looking at the workplace from multiple angles.

The first is employee feedback.

Surveys can be useful, but only when they are focused. Broad engagement surveys tend to highlight general sentiment but don’t always pinpoint where work is difficult. More targeted questions around focus, collaboration, tools, and decision-making tend to surface more actionable insights.

The second is direct conversation.

Focus groups and interviews help add context behind the data. They make it easier to understand why something feels difficult and how it shows up in the day-to-day experience of work.

The third, and often most overlooked, is observation.

Spending time watching how work actually happens can reveal gaps that don’t show up in surveys or conversations. How people move through the workplace, how meetings are run, how tools are used, and where work slows down all provide signals of friction.

Each of these methods on its own is incomplete. Together, they create a more accurate picture.

One challenge many organizations run into is not a lack of feedback, but how that feedback is organized.

Most large companies are already collecting input from multiple sources. HR gathers employee sentiment through engagement surveys. Technology teams collect feedback on tools and systems. Workplace teams track service requests, space usage, and experience issues. There is also a steady stream of unsolicited feedback coming through day-to-day interactions.

Each of these efforts makes sense on their own, but they are often managed separately. The result is that important signals are spread across different systems and teams.

Employees may be raising the same friction point in multiple ways, but because those signals are not brought together, it takes longer than it should for patterns to emerge.

In many cases, organizations believe they need more data, when they already have a clear picture of workplace challenges sitting in pieces across the business.

Identifying friction effectively is less about collecting more feedback and more about connecting what already exists.

It’s also important to focus on specific moments in the workday rather than general sentiment. Asking whether employees are satisfied is less useful than understanding where they lose time, where work slows down, or where processes create unnecessary effort.

When done well, identifying friction becomes less about gathering input and more about understanding how work actually happens.

In the next post, I’ll focus on how to separate signal from noise - distinguishing between isolated feedback and patterns that point to real, systemic friction.

Nathan Bricklin

Senior Consultant, Global Workplace Experience

Helping enterprise leaders close the gap between executive intent and lived employee experience at scale.

Email Nathan

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