‘Workplace friction’ costs organizations up to US$9 million a year: report

Six in 10 (60%) of workplace operations professionals said friction had worsened over the past year, against 12% who reported improvement — the largest single signal in the research, the report states. It attributes this to workplace teams seeing every escalation organization-wide, while employees experience each broken booking as an isolated incident.

One workplace operations professional in the technology sector, quoted anonymously in the report, said: “The biggest frustration is finding available meeting rooms that actually have working AV equipment.” 

In the most disconnected organizations surveyed, 63% of employees called friction a noticeable drag on productivity, against 14% in the most integrated organizations.

Workarounds undermine the business case for the office

The Collab Collective-Robin report examined employee responses when a booking fails. The four most common responses were finding an alternative space, making do with a non-ideal space, moving the meeting online, or postponing it.

Three of those four workarounds run counter to the purpose of requiring in-person attendance, the report states. A second workplace operations respondent described a disconnect between digital scheduling and physical presence, adding that employees often arrive to find pre-booked rooms sitting empty — a pattern the report labels “ghost meetings.”