Employee Effort: The Silent Killer of Employee Experience
Imagine this: You’re an employee forced to navigate clunky, outdated tools or convoluted processes every single day. Tasks take twice as long as they should, mistakes pile up, and frustration becomes a permanent part of your routine. Let’s be honest—most of us don’t have to imagine it. We’ve lived it.
In those moments, a question inevitably creeps into the mind of every frustrated employee: “Why does my company make it so hard for me to do my job?”
And here’s the truth: No amount of empowerment, recognition programs, or free snacks in the breakroom will fix this. If the daily grind is defined by inefficiency and roadblocks, the employee experience is more fundamentally broken.
What Is Employee Effort?
Employee effort measures how hard or easy a company makes it for employees to do their jobs every day. Think of it as the workplace equivalent of the Customer Effort Score—a metric that’s widely embraced by customer experience leaders. The premise is simple: when you make it harder for customers to work with you, they’re less likely to stick around. The same applies to employees.
If employees are constantly fighting their own processes and tools, their patience and engagement will evaporate. Over time, they’ll disengage, and eventually, they’ll leave.
High Employee Effort Is Costing You More Than You Think
This isn’t just an HR problem—it’s a business problem. Companies often struggle to connect employee engagement to business outcomes, but the link is undeniable: high-effort processes frustrate employees and customers alike. Worse, they drain your bottom line in ways you can’t afford to ignore.
Let’s break it down:
Frustrated employees leave: High effort leads to higher attrition, driving up hiring and training costs.
Inefficiency is expensive: Processes riddled with inefficiencies waste time, drain productivity, and increase operational costs.
Customers notice: High employee effort often translates into poor customer experiences, resulting in lost business.
Here’s the reality: companies that make work harder than it needs to be are burning cash and driving away talent and customers simultaneously.
Symptoms Are Easy to Spot, but the Root Causes Are What Matter
Consider this scenario: An employee struggles with roadblocks every day—whether it’s waiting on approvals, dealing with unreliable technology, or jumping through unnecessary hoops. Over time, they start feeling unsupported by their manager. They question their career growth. They wonder if the organization even values their ideas.
Most employee engagement surveys will flag the symptoms of this frustration—low morale, disengagement, or declining satisfaction scores. But they rarely get to the root cause: the systemic issues that make work harder than it should be.
If your engagement surveys aren’t identifying the barriers that are killing productivity, they’re incomplete. It’s time for a rethink.
The Productivity Connection: A Hard Truth
Improving employee effort isn’t just about making people happier—it’s about driving results. Studies show that a mere 1% increase in productivity can drive a 1.3% increase in annual revenue growth. That’s not a rounding error—that’s a significant business impact.
Want to move the needle? Start asking the right questions:
How much effort does it take for employees to get their work done?
What organizational roadblocks are slowing them down?
How does this effort impact productivity and your bottom line?
This isn’t just an HR priority; it’s a business-critical initiative.
Why This Matters Now
In today’s competitive talent landscape, companies that ignore employee effort are playing with fire. Talented employees won’t stick around in a work environment where they feel like every day is an uphill battle. They’ll leave for companies that value their time, reduce unnecessary friction, and make it easy to succeed.
Employee effort is the silent killer of engagement, productivity, and profitability. If you’re not actively addressing it, you’re leaving money—and talent—on the table.
The Call to Action
It’s time to overhaul how we think about the employee experience. Start by integrating Employee Effort Score into your engagement assessments. Go deeper—ask employees about roadblocks, inefficiencies, and wasted time. Link those insights directly to productivity and business outcomes.
Companies that make it easier for employees to succeed will be the ones that dominate their markets. The question is: Will your company be one of them?