One of my credos in terms of employee experience, which is also in line with operational experience, is that simplification is the basis of everything. The work and its organization must be fluid, legible and logical so that employees can concentrate on their mission without being constantly held back by the unnecessary complexity of everyday life.
But, to my great surprise, my idea is often misunderstood. I have been told several times, “We’re not going to pay people to do simple things, we pay them precisely because it’s complicated”.
As if simplifying working conditions were tantamount to impoverishing the work itself or wasting talent.
Note that this is a possibility that may be worth exploring: what if the reason we recruit highly experienced and qualified people is only to deal with a complication (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience) and an organizational debt (How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth) that we don’t have the will or the courage to resolve?
But in fact the original meaning of my comment is quite different.
In short :
- Simplification should be seen as a lever for efficiency, enabling employees to focus on high value-added tasks by removing unnecessary obstacles, and not as a reduction in the amount of work.
- Unnecessary complexity in organizations often stems from organizational debt: obsolete processes, unsuitable tools, excessive controls and routines without any real purpose.
- This complication saps motivation, dilutes the energy of teams and prevents the expression of the skills for which employees were recruited.
- Simplifying means reinforcing the quality and the demands of the work by freeing teams from structural friction, not reducing expectations or turning them into performers of trivial tasks.
- This requires an alliance between HR and operations, a culture of continuous improvement and, above all, managerial courage to make work smarter and more useful.
What people want is not to do simple things
What they want is for us to simplify what has no reason to be complicated!
It is not a question of turning jobs into trivial tasks, but of removing unnecessary obstacles, those that distract attention, wear down motivation and consume energy without creating value.
Unnecessary complication is everywhere in business:
- processes designed in another era that no one dares to question,
- poorly integrated tools that turn every task into an obstacle course (A complicated IT experience. Irritant #7 of the Employee Experience),
- endless validation circuits that multiply points of friction and delay decisions,
- meetings, emails, and reports that take up time but rarely make sense.
It is the result of the organizational debt I mentioned earlier, but also of the work of managers whose appetite for control is matched only by their lack of interest in improving work.
All of this ends up distracting employees from what is essential. They are recruited for their intelligence, their analytical skills, their creativity, and then locked into systems that prevent them from using them.
Simplifying does not mean lowering standards.
On the contrary, simplifying means increasing the level of concentration and quality, and therefore quality, on the subjects that really matter.
Teams must be allowed to focus on complex, high value-added problems, freeing them from organizational chaos. Not only because this chaos should not exist and employees should not have to pay the price, but also because with the rise of AI, people will be hired more and more to manage complexity (and not complication!).
And no, AI will not solve the problem on its own without our help (AI Reasoning Is Cool, But First How Can We Tackle Organisational Debt?).
This is what we would naturally expect from a good user experience designer: to make the interface disappear, so that the user can focus on their objective
But why should this principle be reserved for customers and not for employees?
Simplification of operational excellence… but not only
Simplification is indeed at the crossroads of operations, employee experience and HR (HR and Operations: the only viable duo for driving employee experience and People are everywhere in the workplace, but HR is nowhere when it comes to work).
We have forgotten, or have never wanted to understand, but the employee experience is not a matter of cosmetic well-being or an HR program disconnected from the real (2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions). It is a lever for performance (The employee experience: a transformation lever at the service of performance), in the same way as quality, customer satisfaction or cost control.
And like any lever for performance, it requires a rigorous approach: observe, understand the irritants, remove friction, lighten what can be lightened.
This requires a real culture of continuous improvement (Just because work is invisible, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved), but above all, it requires managerial courage.
Not to make the work “more pleasant”, but to make it more efficient, more intelligent, and sometimes dignified. The rest is just a consequence.
Bottom line
Simplifying does not mean simplifying tasks, but simplifying the environment and context of work so that everyone can use their full potential where they are really useful.
It means creating the conditions for demanding, stimulating and rewarding work, but without unnecessary overload or gratuitous complexity.
People are not paid to do simple things but to solve complex problems, make decisions and get things done.
This works very well, but they still need to be given the time, room and energy to do so.
And for that, organizations have one and only one problem to solve: complication.
Illustration: generated by AI with ChatGPT, OpenAI, 2025.
Related articles:
Exclusive: the (fake) Steve Jobs interview on employee experience
The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience
The future of work: complex by nature, simple by obligation
(Bad) Processes kill productivity and employee experience
Being digital in 2018 : consumerize your organization
An overly informal organization, irritant #14 of the employee experience
