Employees judge their workplace largely by how easy it is to get work done. Each time they can’t find information or figure out who owns a decision, frustration builds. HR teams often overlook this part of the employee experience, and it gets harder to manage as a company grows. In a small company, everyone knows who handles what. Once responsibilities spread across more people and departments, employees have a harder time working out who to ask for help or who is responsible for a task. HR leaders who find and fix these everyday obstacles can keep employees happier and more likely to stay.
Alison Whitfield is Head of People and Operations at Katchr, a UK legal-tech company that builds business intelligence software for law firms. She started her career in customer service and operational delivery, then spent seven years at CloudCoCo, where she moved from service management into the Head of People role as the business grew through acquisitions. The shift came after she saw that many of the company’s delivery problems traced back to training, engagement, and how well employees understood where the business was headed. That experience taught her to read recurring employee complaints as clues about how a company is organized.
“Looking out for the micro issues that don’t seem like a big deal is a good way to get under the skin of what’s happening. Those little annoyances build up to much bigger frustrations,” says Whitfield. Problems this small are easy to miss, and employees often don’t think to mention them. HR teams have to go looking.
Listen over coffee
When small snags go unresolved, they start to affect how colleagues treat each other. “That’s where you might see people bumping heads, because is it my problem? Is it your problem? Who’s responsible for this?” Whitfield notes. An employee who seems off on a given day may be reacting to these everyday hassles, and a people professional who picks up on that can address the cause before it turns into a conflict.
Spotting the cause gets harder when employees keep quiet about what’s slowing them down. BambooHR’s Redesigning Work report finds that 53% of workers try to find an answer themselves before asking anyone, and 39% now bring questions to AI that they once would have taken to HR or operations. If HR waits for complaints to reach it, many never will.
Formal channels such as management meetings, skip-level conversations, employee forums, and engagement surveys give HR a regular read on how teams are doing, but some of the most useful clues come up in casual conversation. An employee chatting about something unrelated might mention that a process took ages to find, without realizing they’re flagging a problem.
“You can just pick up on those little comments and then ask, ‘Why did it take you so long? Where did you have to go to find that? Who did you have to ask? How many touch points were there?'” Whitfield adds. Those answers show HR where to dig, whether the delay comes from a missing owner or information scattered across too many systems.
Ask before you build
BambooHR’s 2026 hiring report finds that internal moves accounted for 62% of all roles filled in 2025, up from 51% in 2021. That means the colleague who knows how a process works today may be in a different job next quarter. Whitfield watches for these single points of failure, or the one or two people who hold critical knowledge in their heads.
“Even if you’ve still got one or two people who are absolute fountains of knowledge, it’s about getting that knowledge out of their head into something that’s scalable,” Whitfield says. Writing down who is accountable for each decision, and how to reach them, keeps work moving when those people change roles or leave. It also makes succession planning easier, because the next person in the role has a record to learn from.
Getting that knowledge on paper usually means introducing a new process, and for some employees that word signals more admin and closer monitoring. Those employees may push back before the discussion even starts. “If you go into those conversations with the introduction of, ‘Hi, I’m HR and I’m here to build a process,’ you will be met with resistance,” Whitfield warns.
For that reason, she waits to frame the work as a process until it’s clear that’s what the team needs. She opens with questions about what’s bothering people and what they would change. In a recent exercise with an operational team, she asked employees to write down what they would keep, start, stop, and fix with a magic wand, then compared answers in groups. Themes surfaced quickly, including manual work and details spread across several tools. “Sometimes the things people complain about 50 times a week mean we’ve got a design problem that people are having to figure out on their own,” she notes.
Close the loop
When HR comes back with a proposed fix, Whitfield recommends showing employees how their feedback shaped it and asking whether it would work before anything is final. Employees who see their input in the result are more likely to adopt the change. Winning leadership support can take more effort. BambooHR’s State of the Workforce report finds that 54% of business leaders have chosen not to fix a known operational flaw because the cost or disruption seems too high. Tying each fix to a business priority, such as revenue or cost, gives HR a stronger case for moving it forward.
Managers are often HR’s strongest partners in this work, but they can be too close to day-to-day work to see the pattern. HR sees across teams, so it can help managers spot issues they would miss on their own. That starts with taking complaints seriously and asking what’s behind them. “Just look for that friction. Managers might be so used to looking at the detail that they struggle to zoom out. You can get them on board by listening to their frustrations and their team’s frustrations and helping them untangle the mess that’s within that,” Whitfield says.
