Pebbles in your shoe: how leaders find and fix workplace friction

What negative friction looks like

Every job runs on processes: how requests get approved, how tools work, how information moves, how decisions get made. When those processes are well designed, work feels good. When they are not, people spend their days working around them.

Here is how I put it after reading The Friction Project by Stanford's Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao:

"If getting work done well is simple, safe, easy and valuable, our jobs tend to be gratifying and low in negative friction. If they are difficult, complex, frustrating, unsafe and wasteful, then work is mostly high in negative friction and miserable."

The outcome of too much negative friction is predictable: exhaustion, burnout, and eventually, departure.

One of our clients gave this a perfect name: pebbles in your shoe. A pebble is small. You can keep walking. But every step hurts a little, and after a while it is all you can think about.

Pebbles at work often sound like this:

• Too many approvals for simple requests.
• Customer requests waiting on sign-off.
• Standup meetings that slow the team down instead of helping it.
• A broken piece of equipment that never gets fixed.
• A tool that takes six steps to do a two-step job.

Not all friction is bad. Sutton and Rao are clear that occasional high friction is a good thing, such as a careful check before a risky decision. The goal is to remove the friction that wastes people's time and energy, not every pause.

Why pebbles matter more than perks

When engagement drops, many organizations reach for perks. But in the Culture10 workbook, I point out that "the most common frustration in engagement surveys is not having the tools and processes needed to do the job well. That is a design failure, not a people failure."

I saw this clearly at Starbucks. One hit summer drink required six ingredients and two blenders, while baristas were also expected to make eye contact, write a genuine message on each cup, and do it all within four minutes. Rather than asking baristas to be heroes, why not reduce the negative friction in their daily work?

Perks cannot fix that. They are, as I wrote then, "like aloe for a sunburn that shouldn't have happened to begin with."

This is the heart of the first Culture10 element, People First and Customer Obsessed. When a process is well designed, the person executing it looks and feels exceptional. You cannot genuinely serve a customer through a process that diminishes the person delivering it.

Three principles of friction fixers

Sutton and Rao's research highlights three principles shared by leaders who are great at removing friction. How well do you apply each one?

1. Serve as trustees of other people's time

Friction fixers understand that people who spend most of their work getting pebbles out of their shoes are wasting their own precious time, and everyone else's. They see that this is unsustainable and do something about it.

2. Take ownership of friction fixing

Friction fixers take ownership for hunting down and removing soul-sucking friction. They see it as a primary leadership function, not a side project. Too many leaders, as I have noted, are "more attracted to friction fire fighters versus friction fixers." Workarounds feel heroic. Fixes last.

3. Treat design as the highest form of friction fixing

Every process was designed, which means every process can be redesigned. Friction fixers design work to be people first. They watch how processes affect people and fix the design, rather than relying on remedies and workarounds.

A five-step loop for removing pebbles

You do not need a transformation program to start. You need a simple, repeatable loop.

1. Ask what gets in the way. Make it easy and safe to report friction. A single weekly question works well: "Is anything getting in the way of your best work?" Keep the focus on processes, policies, and tools, never on individuals.
2. Go and see. Visit Gemba, the real place where the work happens. Watch the process from the point of view of the person doing it.
3. Find the pattern. One report is a story. Ten similar reports from different people is a theme. Group what you hear so you fix causes, not symptoms.
4. Give it an owner and fix the design. Every recurring pebble needs one person accountable for it and a date. Redesign the process rather than adding another workaround.
5. Show people what changed. Tell the people who raised it what you did. This is what makes them willing to speak up next time.

A small fix with a big echo

I have the privilege of working with Dr. Casey Kosiorek, a school superintendent in Hilton, New York, and his team on advancing the culture in their district.

Casey told me about walking through one of the schools and stopping into a classroom to ask a teacher how things were going. The teacher was disappointed that he could not get a piece of equipment he really needed. Casey engaged the school's principal to get it resolved that night. When the teacher arrived the next morning, the equipment had been fixed and was ready to use.

That is perhaps a small thing, but a very big thing from a culture perspective. A story like that reverberates through a whole organization. Great cultures are made up of literally thousands of small wins, and positive storytelling that affirms the action you want to see more of.

Start with one process

The best place to begin is close to home. Two challenges from the Culture10 workbook:

• For a team: Fix one irritating process your team dislikes.
• For yourself: Identify one process you control or strongly influence. Redesign it from a people-first lens. Then implement it.

Then tell the story of what changed, and ask people to point you to the next pebble.

How Bestwork helps you find and fix pebbles

In Bestwork, a Pebble is an optional weekly report of process, policy, workflow, approval, or tool friction, never a complaint about a person. Employees can share one with their weekly Touchpoint check-in. Bestwork groups recurring Pebbles into themes, helps route each theme to an owner, tracks the action, and shows employees what changed.

Be a friction fixer. Your people will feel the difference with every step.

Think big, start small, act now.