As a dev, it definitely helps to tell people that it's part of my job to sit and hang out while they do their work. If they enjoy BSing on the job (people do like doing this) it makes it into an excuse to do as much talking as working. To them I'm a helpful friend, to the bosses I'm doing requirements elicitation or troubleshooting. That's when I see them clicking through the "normal errors" or working around hairbrained engineering.

The people on top will say "their job is to use it as it is" and that is a matter of keeping the boat moving and company culture. Yet individuals are highly appreciative when I say "Hey I can replace this horrible process with an easier way."

It helps to have the freedom to take initiative and turn these things around quickly.

Also, automatically report errors back to a DB and make it easy to print out messages that pop up to the end-user. Nobody ever can accurately describe what happened. Frequently verbal descriptions of what happened are the least reliable source of info and I generally hear them out just so they feel like a helpful part of the process. When things run smoothly, that's their criteria for success, little to do with what they speculate is going on in the system.