The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving in the conference room, a tiny, rhythmic pulse of light on a projection screen the size of a garage door. Brenda from HR has been talking for 17 minutes, her voice a soothing, relentless drone about synergy and process optimization. The software is called ‘Streamline!’, and the exclamation point feels like a threat.

‘Streamline!’ is the new expense reporting tool. Brenda is now showing us, with palpable excitement, how to submit a receipt for a $7 sandwich. The process, she chirps, is intuitive. First, you log in through the main corporate portal, which triggers a multi-factor authentication request to your phone. Then, you navigate to the finance quadrant, open the ‘Streamline!’ sub-portal, and create a new expense report, giving it a unique alphanumeric title based on the project code you can find in a separate system. You select from one of 47 expense categories. You must choose a vendor from a pre-populated list of 777 approved businesses. If your vendor isn’t there, you have to file a separate request to have them added, a process that takes 7 business days. Then, you upload a PDF. Not a JPG, not a PNG. A PDF. The system’s OCR will then attempt to read it, fail, and require you to manually enter the date, the amount, and the vendor name you just selected. Then you submit, and it goes into a four-day approval workflow.

Seventeen clicks. At minimum. To expense a sandwich that took two minutes to buy. A profound, collective sigh fills the room, the sound of 27 souls simultaneously dying a little.

The Point of Friction

We’ve all been here. We’ve all been promised a seamless future and been handed a bucket of digital gravel. And our first reaction is always the same: this is broken. The people who designed this are incompetent. The company that bought it got scammed. But what if that’s wrong? What if the software isn’t broken at all? What if your inconvenience, your 17 clicks, your soul-crushing despair over a sandwich receipt… what if that’s the entire point?

This isn’t about you. It was never about helping you, the employee, get your $7 back faster. It’s about giving management a perfectly formatted, machine-readable, endlessly categorizable data point. Your expense report is no longer a reimbursement request; it’s raw material for a thousand dashboards. The system is designed to punish ambiguity and enforce compliance at the point of entry. It doesn’t trust you to categorize ‘Biggie’s Deli’ correctly, so it makes you choose from a list. It doesn’t trust you to remember the project code, so it cross-references another database. It doesn’t trust your judgment, so it replaces it with dropdown menus. Your friction is a feature. Your wasted time is the fuel that powers the analytics engine.

The Cognitive Dignity Clause

I sat in on a negotiation once. On one side of the table were the executives, armed with charts showing productivity metrics down to the hundredth of a percentage point. On the other was Yuki M.K., a union negotiator who looked less like a fighter and more like a weary librarian. They were arguing over a new logistics platform. Management loved it. It tracked every package, every vehicle, every driver with terrifying precision. The drivers hated it. What used to be a quick signature on a manifest was now a 27-step process on a tablet that crashed if you held it wrong.

Management kept talking about data integrity. Yuki waited. When they were finished, she pushed a single sheet of paper across the table. It was a proposal. Not for more money, not for more vacation days. She called it the “Cognitive Dignity Clause.” It stipulated that any new mandatory software had to be proven, with a 3-month trial period involving at least 17 union members, to reduce the total time and number of clicks required for the 7 most common tasks associated with that job role. If it failed, it was out. “You’re not paying them to be data-entry clerks for their own work,” she said, her voice quiet but unyielding. “You’re paying them to drive the truck. Let them drive the truck.”

They thought she was joking. She wasn’t.

The Lure of Visibility

It’s easy to get cynical and blame some shadowy cabal of micromanagers. I certainly did. For years, I believed every piece of terrible enterprise software was born of malice. But then I made the same mistake myself. I was leading a small team, and I championed a new project management tool. It was beautiful. It had Gantt charts, resource allocation heat maps, 237 different ways to tag a single task. I sold my team on the dream of total clarity. I promised them we’d never have another miscommunication. I showed them the dashboards. I used the word ‘intuitive.’

Within two months, productivity had fallen by 27%. People were spending more time updating the tool than doing their actual jobs. The work became about feeding the system that was supposed to be supporting the work. It was my own personal ‘Streamline!’. The lure of perfect, top-down visibility was so strong that I failed to see the human cost. I had inflicted a solution that was, in fact, a much bigger problem. I’d created the digital equivalent of a vacuum-sealed pickle jar; everything my team needed was right inside, but they couldn’t get to it because of the suffocating, terribly designed barrier I had put in their way.

This is the exact opposite of systems built for direct engagement, where friction is the ultimate enemy. On a platform like gclub จีคลับ, the entire design philosophy is to create the most seamless path possible between intent and action, because the user’s satisfaction is the primary goal. In the corporate world, the user’s satisfaction is often a distant seventh or eighth priority.

The Distrust of Expertise

The trend reveals a deep, fundamental distrust of the human worker. It’s a move away from trusting skilled people to do their jobs and toward building systems that assume incompetence. We hire people with years of experience and degrees that cost a small fortune, and then we give them tools that wouldn’t let them buy a coffee without a 7-step digital interrogation. The system doesn’t empower them; it constrains them. It infantilizes them by removing their agency and judgment, replacing it with a rigid, unforgiving workflow. The goal is no longer human efficiency, but machine-readable consistency. We’re being turned into organic middleware, the fleshy, error-prone connectors between various APIs.

There’s a strange tangent I often think about, concerning the design of early, notoriously difficult video games. Some of those games weren’t just hard; they were deliberately obtuse. Secrets were hidden in illogical places, and controls were intentionally clunky. The reason wasn’t always poor design. Often, it was to artificially extend the game’s length, to make a 7-hour experience feel like a 47-hour one, so you couldn’t beat it in a weekend rental. It was user hostility as a retention strategy. Enterprise software feels much the same, only the goal isn’t to keep you playing; it’s to extract the maximum number of structured data points from every single action, no matter how mundane.

The Real Fix

So what’s the fix? I used to think it was about finding the ‘perfect’ tool. I’d spend weeks researching alternatives, convinced that the silver bullet was out there. I was wrong. The tools are a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a management philosophy that values data *about* the work more than the work itself. It’s a culture that trusts a dashboard more than a conversation with its own employees.

Yuki M.K. understood that. Her fight wasn’t about software; it was about the fundamental premise of work. It was about reclaiming the right to use one’s own judgment. It was about acknowledging that true efficiency isn’t born from rigid, 17-click processes. It comes from giving a smart person a goal and the freedom to find the best way to get there.

Last I heard, she was preparing for another negotiation. A new company-wide communications platform was being rolled out. It promised to revolutionize inter-office collaboration. It only took 7 clicks to send a simple message. Progress, I suppose.