Bury These Friction Reports!

Chapter 21 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance

Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

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Keith worked on his next set of reports for two solid weeks. To the surprise of Kate Stamper and the great irritation of Mitch Cascade, he refused to deliver anything at all on the Monday following, telling them that there was just too much data to churn through. Cascade was pissed—he wanted obedience. Stamper was pleased—she liked the backbone. Keith promised them that it would be worth their wait.

Come Monday morning, there they were: paper copies on the desks of Stamper and Cascade, and, to the surprise of everyone who had ever worked with the guarded, careful Keith Conn, a link to the reports (and to all the data behind the reports) on the HD-All Slack channel, with this note:

“In order to engage the best thinking of the entire Human Dynamics team, I present here what I’m calling the ‘Friction Reports.’ I’ll leave it to all of you to determine whether any of this data reshapes the delivery of our services.”

Cascade pored over the reports before he even turned his computer on. These are nice reports, nice reports, was his first thought. We’re delivering taps across nearly all of the target behaviors, that’s good. But what’s this shit: tap friction? What the hell is tap friction? I’ve gotta dig deeper on that. He kept paging through, there were a dozen pages of reports. What’s this? Tap friction is up, all over the place. We’ve got to put a stop to that. What the hell is this? “Positive correlation between team productivity and friction”? How the hell can that be? Why would Keith even look for that? I thought he was a team player. I’ve gotta go see Stamper  …

Stamper too grabbed the printouts as soon as she walked in her office door. She too was happy that they were delivering taps across 20 different behavioral categories now, including most of the Leadership Principles. That meant that they were succeeding at identifying the signs of mis-aligned behavior. But what she noticed was that the more they tapped based on the Leadership Principles, the more the “friction” went up. Friction, she thought, what an interesting way to think about it! It did seem to create friction for some people and we need to consider that—maybe there’s a better way to deal with this stuff. Then she got to the sections comparing friction and performance. Wow, she thought, those teams that generated the most friction are the best performers—that’s weird! I’ve got to dig into that one … 

Christopher didn’t get a printout and he wasn’t on the HD-All Slack channel, but a friend tipped him off to it and he popped into the channel to check it out. He breezed right through the first few pages. No shit, we’re buried in taps, I could have told you that. But then he got to the first report showing “friction,” and he was pleased to see that while his team was the earliest to show friction, friction was showing up all over the place. You’re damn right there’s friction! He thought. We’re sick of being jerked around with these stupid taps all over the place. Hell, it’s amazing productivity’s up, given how much we get interrupted. But he also knew that his team had started to rally together to do better, just to show them that you didn’t have to always go “by the book” to do a good job. What’d they hire us for? He’d say to his teammates, when he knew they weren’t being recorded. To follow the rules or to think?

Keith was just relieved: he had finally churned through every bit of data he could, and had gained enough traction to feel like he could allow the data to tell a story. And the story it told was that taps worked  … up to a point. But when they went too far—and honestly, he wasn’t sure how to define too far yet—-their effectiveness started to reverse and they just created friction. 

The only problem, Keith thought, was that the term friction didn’t really capture quite what was going on. It sure as hell didn’t capture how Christopher Dourado was responding to taps! There was resistance, even open hostility. And they needed to get a handle on that before Cascade did.

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