The Friction Audit
Most workplace programs don't fail on the idea. They fail on the friction. A 20-second extra step cuts participation roughly in half. Here's the audit that finds them.
Your wellness program, your recognition platform, your feedback tool. They weren't rejected on the idea. They were rejected on the clicks.
BJ Fogg's behavior model, confirmed in dozens of field studies, keeps producing the same number: each additional step to complete a behavior cuts participation by roughly 20 percent. Four steps means half your people drop out before they start. The behavior didn't fail. The path did.
Cass Sunstein named the workplace version "sludge": small procedural frictions that compound into silent opt-outs. We rarely audit for it because the people who hit it don't complain. They just stop.
The hack: Pick your most important voluntary behavior (recognition, feedback, learning, whatever). Run it yourself, from the user's exact starting point. Use a stopwatch. Count every click, every login, every page load, every scroll to find the button. Write each step on one line.
Then circle the longest step. Remove it this week. Not the whole process. Just that one step. Measure participation in 14 days.
The step you circle is almost never the one you'd guess from the spec.
