Want to eliminate workplace friction? Become a “trustee of time”

At some point, you’ve probably evaluated the success of your day by measuring it against the amount of friction you encountered — those tasks, obstacles, and arguments that make life harder than it needs to be. This appraisal is even found in everyday expressions. A good day is smooth sailing. It’s seamless, frictionless. A bad day is choppy waters. It’s rough, grating.

Our distaste for friction is such that smoothing over it has become the hallmark of many industries. Our entertainment is available on demand. We tap our phones rather than pull out our wallets. Our food comes fast, and our internet faster. Slowing down, we’re constantly reminded, is not only antithetical to business practices and an effective managerial style. It is antithetical to modern life.

The takeaway is clear: Friction is the enemy. It causes heat and slows us down.

However, according to Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author, our approach to friction needs a rethink. As he told Big Think+ in an interview: “When we face a problem, whether it’s planning a trip, fixing a LEGO model, or leading an organization, our natural tendency is to sort of race ahead. But some friction, well, that’s actually a good thing.”

The trick is recognizing how to make good friction work for you and deciding how to eliminate it when it doesn’t.

How tell good friction from bad friction

Sutton defines “bad friction” as when a customer, employee, senior leader, or whoever runs into an obstacle that makes an action slower, harder, or more frustrating while adding no benefit. This friction, also called organizational drag, is often a hidden cost that becomes apparent once you look for it. 

One of the most common culprits of bad fiction is also the most obvious: meetings. One audit of 25 large companies concluded that around 20% of a line supervisor’s time can be saved by eliminating unnecessary emails and meetings.

“Good friction” also forces us to slow down, but it comes with the benefit of improving processes and products.

While researching organizational friction, Sutton came across the example of Drew Houston, CEO and founder of Dropbox. Houston had his IT team remove all standing meetings from employees’ calendars. He then introduced good friction by making it impossible for meetings to be added back in for two weeks. This move forced employees to stop and consider what meetings were necessary and what could be accomplished without them. When meetings were permitted again, they were more mindfully initiated.

Another example of good friction is when it blocks a terrible idea or product from moving forward. To this end, Sutton even praises a fact of life that more commonly elicits a groan: organizational bureaucracy.

Pointing to the launch of Theranos, Sutton notes how founder Elizabeth Holmes attempted to eliminate all friction when rushing the company’s blood-testing device to market. At one point, she attempted to bypass what she saw as bad friction by leveraging her connections with a four-star general to pressure lower-level bureaucrats. He refused because the device did not have FDA approval — a military requirement. Organizational bureaucracy caused friction, got in the way of adoption, and potentially saved lives as it later came out that Theranos’s trademark technology didn’t work.

To tell good friction from bad friction, sometimes the simplest thing to do is evaluate the function it serves. In his book The Friction Project, Sutton emphasizes questioning if your goal is the right or wrong thing to do.

“If it’s the right thing to do, it should be easy, and it should happen fast and be frictionless. But if it’s the wrong thing to do, I don’t know, stealing money from your organization, breaking a law, well, those things, they should be difficult or impossible to do,” he says.

Slow down and establish purpose

Before you try to implement good friction, it’s necessary to take a beat. The misapplication of good friction can turn it bad and result in one more cumbersome process you’re tempted to work around. This is where working with your team is essential. Managing friction, especially at an organizational level, is collaborative. 

Sutton says, “One of the traps that organizations fall into is essentially what we call broken connections. […] There are all these different sorts of activities and people and operations that need to fit together because that’s the essence of organizational life. It requires collaboration and coordination.”

When implementing new systems for yourself and your employees, Sutton proposes four situations where it is critical to slow down and align your team:

• When forming and reconfiguring your team. These are crucial times to make decisions that promote effectiveness. Be intentional about defining your mission, roles, and tools. 
• When you feel time pressures. In a time crunch, we’re less likely to offer help, and it becomes easier to take shortcuts — perhaps even act unethically. 
• When engaging in creative work. Creativity requires deliberate attention, so build in time for your team to experiment and collaborate. 
• When good things happen. Savoring the good is as important as the achievement itself. Create a healthy habit of pausing to recognize when wins occur. 

Sutton references Gretchen Rubin, a best-selling author who studies happiness, when discussing this last point. Rubin encourages people to make a “ta-da” list instead of a “to-do” list. Sutton builds on this, suggesting, “So on Friday afternoon, pause and celebrate with your team all the great things that we did. […] The idea here is to slow down and savor the good things in life, which I think we need more of sometimes.”

Become a trustee of time

To better evaluate friction, Sutton suggests examining your role and the processes you undertake as they relate to the people around you. Instilling a sense that you and your employees are trustees of time is key because this mindset enables you to appraise how the big and little decisions you make affect others. While this applies to anyone in a managerial role — which is essentially a role that exists to help those around you function better — it is advice anyone can implement. 

To exemplify this, Sutton recounts a trip he took to the Department of Motor Vehicles. After arriving at 7:30 in the morning and encountering a long line, he was resigned to this chore taking all day. However, fifteen minutes later, an employee walked out and asked each person in line why they were there. Some were sent away because they couldn’t accomplish their goal at the DMV, and others were given forms to fill out and directed to the right line. 

“I was out of the office at 8:20 in a state of shock that a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles was one of the lowest friction experiences I’ve had, and it was in large part because of that gentleman who went down the line, showed respect for our time, and helped us navigate quickly through the process.”

The employee could have sat at a booth and taken each person as they came in but instead acted as a trustee of time. By introducing a little good friction to his day and interacting with every person in line, he negated the overall negative friction-filled experience of a day at the DMV.

Sutton’s takeaway from this experience is that anyone in any position can be a friction fixer if given the chance and the mandate to care for other people’s time. He adds, “A friction fixer is someone who is obsessed and focused on making the right things easier and the wrong things harder.”