Workplace Consulting
Pain Points as Pathways: Workplace Consulting that Addresses Systemic Issues - Saskatoon, Canada, & Beyond
Jul 9, 2025
If you’re around long enough, your organization will develop pain points - these are an often neglected, ignored, annoyance of owning and operating a business. From the biggest Canadian industry giants to the smallest ‘mom and pop shop’ pain is a natural part of the process. While sometimes difficult to identify and navigate, exploring these “solution opportunities” is incredibly important for organizational health and wellbeing. Workplace consulting services can help uncover and address these challenges effectively.
There are many identified areas of pain, though we may not always frame them in quite that way. These areas include everything from:
Customer Experience Pain - issues that make a product or service frustrating from a consumer perspective,
Business Pain - operational challenges that get in the way of efficiency or,
Financial Pain - which includes over-priced services, hidden fees, and budgetary constraints.
However, there is one particular painful experience that many organizations overlook, likely in part because the moving pieces can be so difficult to pin down. We call it process pain.
Process pain can be difficult to assess for since it involves a system approach to obstacles. However, it is arguably the most important step to permanently address areas that create friction for customers, process gaps, user frustration, and operational inefficiencies. For permanent pain management, it is necessary to explore all of the moving parts that result in the breakdown in workflow, decision-making, and other issues that will undermine addressing organizational challenges. Where there’s a process issue, there is almost always a leadership issue, since the buck often stops with the people with the most power to create change.
Process Pain - How Do We Conceptualize This?
Well, much like with the human body, if the system is in pain, it cannot operate to its capacity and it will struggle with flexibility and growth - two key features of a strong adaptive business. The good news is that with the right workplace consulting services, Canadian businesses can in fact heal their internal aches and pains for better, smoother, and greater operational outcomes. If they can also protect themselves from some common pitfalls along the way.
Many organizations experience on-going issues, regardless of the leadership changes, new strategic planning, or newly implemented processes. It can be really frustrating to invest time and capital only to have issues that resurface. When we hear these stories at Wasson Counselling & Consulting (WCC) we are immediately interested in learning more about what is driving the continued concerns. This is because we can already get a sense that the issues at hand are a result of the not addressing the systemic patterns. Ignoring the systemic issues negatively affects an organizations ability to sustainably address their pain.
How does this happen? Usually it’s a series of short term fixes and a lack of analysis combined with organization inertia, poor communication and gaps in accountability. However, getting to the root causes requires a deeper look at the patterns that quietly derail the momentum needed for change. From here, it’s up to creative leadership and ground floor buy-in to come to the rescue. So let’s unpack some of these issues to give a better sense of how they can undermine your progress!
Short-Term Fix vs Long-Term Solution
The first of many pitfalls on the journey to real and lasting change is prioritizing quick wins over deep and meaningful structural change. Some examples include: a series of temporary patches in the form of ‘reorgs’, process tweaks, new technology, standards of practice, and quick hirings and firings that give the illusion of progress but don’t tackle root causes.
In most of these situations, you’ll see leaders that celebrate small improvements and over estimate impacts of tweaks but who often lack the depth of knowledge about their own organization to do meaningful work. If you were to survey the folks that work for them, you would see ambivalence about the changes implemented. This is often because at the workforce level, employees know that there are far greater systemic issues that aren’t being dealt with by new work standards, or that the implementation has fallen short. Moreover, even with promising new changes, employees will share that the process is missing the structures and accountability to ensure that the proposed change has a lasting effect.
Can’t Go Deep Enough - Lack of Analysis
Why is the effect so minimal? Well, it’s because instead of investigating why the problems persist, the leadership team has focused on the symptoms. This surface-level diagnosis leads to reactive policy changes in lieu of proactive solutions. If this is so pervasive, why do leaders respond this way? Often it is because solutions come with their own challenges (read - expenses). In the long run, systemic changes will have a far greater and lasting impact, but framing this in a way that all the company decision-makers understand can be a barrier unto itself.
A great example of this is the age-old workplace wellbeing seminar - designed to check a box that says “we care about employee health”. If done bravely and correctly, with plans to implement feedback, these kinds of training opportunities can be game changers for a company. Creating opportunities to address internal issues that impact on health and wellbeing, offering a turning point that can stoke morale, and providing a foundation to be a highly sought-after employer.
However, if feedback from participants is met with leadership chastising staff for being transparent or diminishing their experiences—the training will fall flat and may even further negatively impact employee mental health. Why? By missing the deeper reasons why staff are unwell. Leaders who are too defensive or conflict-avoidant to reflect on how this type of relational resistance impacts their employees, will quite literally pay later for the egregious error of a lack of self-reflection. Diminishing these experiences is the equivalent of the ‘ostrich putting its head in the sand’. The lack of reflexivity gives rise to the quintessential “If I don’t acknowledge the problem it doesn’t exist” mentality. The dollars and cents attached to this kind of error are clear—your benefit premiums and sick time climb. Perhaps you won’t be able to attract the talent you want? Worse yet, as we discuss later in this blog, talent will self-select out. Inevitably all of this costs more money in the long run. The reluctance to face deeper issues doesn’t just stagnate progress, it actively fuels resistance to meaningful change. Moreover, it creates circumstances where staff don’t feel seen or heard and where they become reluctant to engage in transformation dialogue, making future change even harder.
Organization Inertia and Resistance to Change
Organizations struggling with surface-level fixes often find themselves caught in a cycle of inertia, where real solutions are dismissed in favour of familiarity and comfort. This is where resistance and storming comes into play, preventing changes from taking root. Without a willingness to challenge outdated structures, leaders and employees alike remain stuck in their same ineffective patterns where they reinforce dysfunction rather than dismantling it.
Employees and leaders will often resist shifts that disrupt the organization’s structures for similar but different reasons. From a long-term employee standpoint, a workplace is just like any organism—it wants to maintain homeostasis. Anything that is perceived as different is met with suspicion or barriers—the prime example is the “this is how we’ve always done it” refrain. This perspective poses a significant challenge when trying to get employees to take a risk and try something new. However, it is also rooted in historical knowledge that may, in fact, explain why the process is so important—if anyone were curious enough to ask.
On the flip side, leaders, new and old, who walk into an organization with a start-from-scratch attitude best have a very clear plan in place. New leaders can get trapped into feeling like they need to “make their mark”. It’s this kind of gravitas that tends to create bigger problems since there tends to be a reason why things have been done a certain way. Whereas established leaders often miss the ways that they are also entrenched in “the way we’ve always done it” thinking and may not interrogate their decision-making patterns and simply repeat old behaviours. Without a deep analysis, you may not know exactly what you’re chucking out and what the ramifications will be. This is frequently a result of internal resistance that blocks reflection and reinforces disconnection. Symptoms of this come in the form of leaders who make workplace presumptions and inferences, that may well be based on knowledge and expertise - but that also highlight an arrogance of someone who has bought into their own ‘expert status’. Many people in leadership positions don’t know where they may lack the day-to-day operations experience—coupled with the humility to know it. These leaders preemptively make changes that trigger employee resistance because they don’t have the good sense (or again, humility) to ask the questions needed before implementing change. This is something that can shift, however, it will often take a good executive coach who can build a relationship strong enough to challenge the deeply held beliefs that keep leaders stuck in their own internal narratives.
Poor Communication and Accountability Gaps
Poorly timed or worded communication can derail a change process from the outset. In addition, processes that lack specific accountabilities critically linked to individual changes - will have no teeth. Often these gaps come from a history and culture of poor communication. Hindered by information silos that prevent team members from working collaboratively, a lack of ownership or collaboration tends to lead to finger-pointing, not solutions. Without clear lines of communication, accountability, and timelines, problems get passed from person to person, department to department and never fully resolved—like the world’s worst game of telephone. These communication issues are also impacted by historical relationships, lack of trust, fear of reprisal, and other blockers that make it challenging for the folks who need to come together to do so in a transparent and honest way.
Leadership and Staff Turnover - The Loss of Folk Knowledge
During these ineffective process changes, healthy staff will leave—though perhaps less healthy than they were when they arrived. As leadership changes occur, they will disrupt efforts by staff and more junior leaders, ushering in change fatigue and a sense of hopelessness that makes it so staff have no other choice but to go elsewhere. New executives tend to scrap existing strategies rather than seeking to refine them, and without proper coaching, they often lack the wherewithal to “hang in and learn” before feeling the need to make their mark. This only contributes to the lack of efficacy of process and feeds into the idea that “nothing in this organization ever changes”.
Meanwhile the staff that are readying to self-select out, who are expecting to be replaced, or seen as problematic for standing up for processes that work—will either retreat from the process or will leave the organization. Losing top talent is troubling enough, but what is often missed is that with them goes all the history, up-to-the-point problem-solving, and folk knowledge about what had been tried and failed and what has worked and provided a clear path forward. This is why so many organizations make their first mistakes when they fail to document the lessons learned during their process development, either because they don’t think to do so or because they are worried about capturing difficulties or areas of system conflict in written form.
Metrics that Prioritize Short-Term Wins
Either way, organizations with chronic pain concerns will focus on their KPIs (key performance indicators) - not lasting performance measures that are more qualitative in nature. Problems are ignored if they don’t immediately impact on revenue or metrics. The change efforts of the new executive fade when they don’t produce instant results, which deters new leaders from pursuing long-term change goals.
Fear of Acknowledging Systemic Issues
Truthfully, what it all comes down to is that organizations are often so fearful of airing their dirty laundry that they won’t admit to deep-seated issues as it will feel too risky for leadership to hold themselves accountable. What is deeply disappointing about this is the missed opportunity. Since it is through that willingness to expose vulnerabilities and engage in reflexivity, that leaders can disrupt the unhelpful power structures that need uprooting for real change to occur. It’s only through this kind of disruption that long-standing norms get managed, but most executives lack the bravery needed to do so.
Hiring the Wrong Changemakers
So why? Why don’t these folks have the bravery, the interest in long-term changes based on deep analysis to combat inertia/organizational blocks and the communication skills and accountability to address system issues? It begins at point of hire.
Many organizations will hire for image, not impact. They prioritize charisma over effective problem-solvers. They stream for the person who sells them on fast wins. They’ve been sold on the idea that they need visionary figures that look good on paper but lack the ability to execute change with the same old surface-level result and chronic pain in the long run. Problems are misdiagnosed from the get-go and companies often fail to identify and clearly demark what actually needs fixing which results in focusing on the wrong priorities.
Often internal talent is overlooked—despite being the most equipped to address pain points because these folks are seen as disruptors. This is the crux of the issue. These same organizations say that they want real change but then fear real disruption. So they hire people into leadership roles that maintain the status-quo, the same structural issues, the homeostasis, the pain. From there, the misaligned strategies persist.
Given this, how do we break the cycle?
Break the Cycle with WCC Consulting Services
This is where you can rely on WCC. Breaking the cycle is far from easy and starts by hiring outside support that is willing to do the assessments and tell you what you don’t want to hear. It is important that the deep dives are done with full confidentiality and where capacity assessments are not just fulfilled at the employee level but from the top down. Honestly and transparently, these processes are sometimes lengthy and require time, access, and the ability to develop trust with employees. They avoid quick-fix approaches that categorize conflict styles (though sometimes those are included as a part of broader interventions) and instead focus on learning your business, learning your flaws, and then providing you with a road map for success that includes the qualities you will need in new and emerging leaders.
Located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada we support you to: clearly define your pain points in order of importance, support disruptive leaders that emerge who will push you to be better, hire leaders based on merit and proven problem-solving ability, and to keep your focus on long-term qualitative measures of success that reflect your business and your industry.
At WCC we are consultants who genuinely want to work our way out of your pockets so that when new conflicts emerge, we’re the first ones you call. We know that true leadership isn’t the echo of authority—it’s the quiet courage to walk first into the unknown, so others dare to follow with purpose, and not fear.
Pain is inevitable; change and adaptability are possible.
Warmly,
Erin Wasson
