'it's clear that workplace friction isn't just a minor annoyance, but a significant, quantifiable drain on business performance'
Hybrid-office friction – failed room bookings, empty desks reserved but unused, colleagues who cannot be located on a given day – can cost a mid-sized organization as much as US$9 million annually, according to a recent report.
The report – published by industry analyst firm The Collab Collective and sponsored by workplace operations platform Robin – applies U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compensation data to self-reported hours lost to coordination tasks.
End users are estimated to be losing about two hours a week to finding rooms, finding desks and coordinating schedules. Workplace operations professionals are estimated closer to four hours per employee per week.
Applied to a 1,000-employee organization, those estimates translate to $4.5 million to $9 million annually at the bureau's conservative rate, and as high as $14 million at its knowledge-worker rate, the report states.
The report cautions the hours figure is a range, not fixed. "The true number per organization sits somewhere in that range," it states, in an analysis attributed to Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and founder of The Collab Collective.
The lack of enough office space has created some difficulties for employers as the federal government implemented its return-to-office mandate.
Perception gap between workplace operations and employees
Workplace operations professionals scored friction 12.66 points higher than employees on the same 100-point index, a difference the report calls statistically significant, according to the The Collab Collective-Robin 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."
The report concludes the data points toward a unified workplace platform consolidating booking, desk reservations, visitor management and scheduling onto one shared data layer, naming Robin as an example of that approach.
"Anyone who works in an office knows that hybrid work has some unique challenges, but now it's clear that workplace friction isn't just a minor annoyance, but a significant, quantifiable drain on business performance," says Micah Remley, CEO of Robin.
"When employees spend so much of their workweek struggling through chaotic attempts to find a place to sit or hold a meeting, the costs compound quickly. Our research shows that most organizations are already investing to solve this problem. The issue is that they're doing it with disconnected systems that don't share data, so a lot of that investment is spent managing friction rather than eliminating it."
Digital friction makes 47% of workers frustrated and less satisfied with their jobs, according to a previous report.
