If you’re trying to convince someone to do something—whether that’s buying your company’s product or buying into your organization’s new policy—you can take one of two general approaches: you can try to entice people by making the offer more attractive, or you can focus on removing barriers and making the act easier for them.

Think of those two general approaches as either adding fuel (all the bells and whistles that make an action or decision enticing) or removing frictions (the tricky stuff that slows people down), according to David Schonthal, a clinical professor of strategy, and Loran Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations. In their book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas, they argue that people focus too much on adding fuel and don’t spend enough time thinking about removing frictions. (You may have caught their The Insightful Leader webinar on the topic last year.)

Today we’ll hear from Schonthal, who recently looked at two topics through the lens of removing frictions: getting employees to (finally) return to the office and improving the customer experience.

Get Employees Back into the Office by Removing Friction

Once upon a time, before the pandemic, expecting employees to work from the office involved little friction. It was simply what was expected. But that is no longer the case.

Employers who are hoping to bring people back into the office more regularly would be wise to think about where resistance is coming from, and then address the related frictions directly, Schonthal says in a piece in Insight.

Here are a couple of his ideas for how to accomplish this:

Understand that people don’t like being told what to do: Reactance, or our natural aversion to being changed by others, is one of the key frictions at work in these situations. “When employees feel like they are being required to come back into the office at certain times, they may view such a mandate as a frontal assault on the autonomy they gained during the height of the work-from-home era,” Schonthal says. To address this, he suggests slowly introducing new policies so that employees have the chance to get used to them. “Make sure that you’re not asking somebody to commit to something the first time they hear it,” he says. “The more frequently people hear about something, the more open to it they will be when the time comes to make a decision—because they’ve had time to get used to the idea. In this way, unfamiliar new ideas have time to become more familiar to the audience.”

Address the powerful tendency toward inertia: This is another key friction. Most of us have “an overwhelming desire to stick with things that are familiar,” Schonthal explains. One way to address this is to frame return-to-office plans as an experiment. “People tend to be more willing to say yes to an unfamiliar idea when it doesn’t feel like they’re committing to it indefinitely,” Schonthal says. Ideally, experiments are evaluated over a set time frame. If, for example, you say that the experiment will let people choose which days they’re in the office or permit certain teams to remain remote, then you must also agree upon success criteria. If it works after six months, continue. If not, you try again.

Overall, thinking through frictions (as opposed to just adding fuel, like catered lunches for those in the office) will serve leaders well today and in the future. After all, the virus is not going anywhere soon—and an ever-growing list of geopolitical and climate disruptions face many industries. Growing concerns about a recession could also further upend employer–employee dynamics.

“Employers are going to have to think about and evaluate sources of friction frequently as almost everything is going to be a “new idea” every six months if the world continues like this,” Schonthal says. “We need to shift our focus as leaders to not just think about the new idea, but rather how we introduce it to an audience whose context is constantly changing.”

You can read the full Insight article here.

Remove Frictions from the Customer Experience

It may seem intuitive that companies should be actively seeking to remove frictions for their customers wherever possible. But, as Schonthal explains in a recent article in Inc., sometimes they’re deliberately introducing frictions. And this is a bad call.

He tells the story of a recent frustrating encounter he had with an airline that wouldn’t let him refund a ticket via the app. Instead, he had to call customer service. This was, he presumes, an intentional friction the airline is using to try to get people to forgo a refund and take a credit instead.

“I’d argue this is extremely shortsighted. They’re effectively trading off short-term gain for lower customer lifetime value,” he writes.

Companies risk losing frustrated customers to competitors, he says, and could even get publicly shamed on social media for their more egregious acts.

“The bottom line: Customer acquisition costs have never been higher. There is mounting competition in every sector, so look for where you can reduce friction in your offering, and take steps to do that in service of greater customer lifetime value.”

You can read his full Inc. article here.

LEADERSHIP TIP

“Any way you can frame the recipient as being close to the donor can only help.”

—Associate professor Rima Touré-Tillery in Insight, on her research, which shows that people are more likely to give a charitable donation if they feel that the recipients are relatively nearby.