Why tech alone can’t solve digital friction: Aligning people, processes, and tools

Every month, the average employee loses 1.3 workdays to technology issues, often referred to as digital friction, according to TeamViewer's 2025 Impact of Digital Friction report.

But digital friction doesn't just disrupt work. It reduces productivity, lowers job satisfaction, and contributes to employee turnover. According to the same report, nearly half of employees say technology issues reduce their job satisfaction, and more than a quarter have considered leaving their organization because of them.

The findings show how widespread the problem has become. Yet many organizations continue to invest heavily in new platforms, roll out automation, upgrade tools, and tighten controls to improve efficiency, productivity, and performance. However, these investments often focus on adding new technology without addressing the underlying causes of digital friction, allowing everyday technology issues to persist.

What is socio-technical systems theory?

For more than 70 years, socio-technical systems theory has shown that organizations achieve better outcomes when they design technology, processes, and people to work together rather than optimize each separately.

Developed in the 1950s, the theory describes every organization as two distinct but deeply connected systems:

• The social system, including people, skills, values, and organizational culture
• The technical system, including the tools, workflows, processes, and technologies organizations use to achieve their objectives 

Together, these systems shape how work gets done. By examining how they interact, socio-technical systems theory provides a perspective that's especially relevant in today's digital workplace and essential for proactive digital employee experience (DEX).

You don't need to know the theory to recognize this perspective. We all know what happens when organizations introduce a new tool without adapting workflows, incentives, or expectations. The technology may work exactly as intended, but employees often work more slowly, experience greater frustration, or face unnecessary complexity.

Creating people-centric digital workplaces

In TeamViewer's The Psychology of DEX, Douglas Hynes, Senior Product Manager, Digital Employee Experience at TeamViewer, explores how digital environments shape human performance. In particular, he shows how the tools employees use every day influence their ability to focus, work confidently, and stay productive.

The paper reveals a consistent challenge. Organizations often optimize digital workplaces for efficiency, security, and control without fully considering the employee experience, creating persistent, low-level friction that builds over time.

Our research found that:

• Around 80% of employees experience digital friction daily.
• Even brief moments of system lag disrupt focus and workflow.

These disruptions fragment attention, reduce productivity, and make it harder for employees to do their best work. Over time, they also weaken engagement, increase turnover risk, and limit the return on technology investments.

Digital environments built around employee experience behave differently. When technology supports people rather than simply managing them, it helps sustain more consistent human performance over time.

Employees perform best when digital work feels:

• Coherent
• Predictable
• Supportive

These qualities help employees stay focused, work with confidence, and complete tasks more efficiently. Achieving them requires organizations to look beyond individual tools and consider how people, processes, and technology work together.

A socio-technical perspective helps explain why. When organizations optimize one part of the system without considering the whole, they often shift friction instead of eliminating it. The result is greater cognitive load, more workarounds, and increased frustration.

Traditional IT metrics, such as ticket volume, response times, and outage reports, capture technical failures but overlook the everyday friction employees quietly adapt to as they work.

Digital friction is a systems signal

From a socio-technical perspective, digital friction signals that the workplace has fallen out of alignment. Instead of reflecting isolated technology problems, recurring patterns of friction show where people, processes, and technology are no longer working effectively together.

Our digital friction report identified several indicators of this misalignment:

• 88% of employees experienced connectivity issues in the past year.
• 40% used personal devices or applications to work around IT problems.
• 57% don’t trust IT teams to resolve issues quickly or effectively.

When friction becomes routine, employees adapt. Many stop reporting issues because they don't expect a timely resolution, while others turn to personal devices, cloud apps, or unapproved software to keep work moving.

IT teams refer to this behavior as shadow IT: the use of hardware, software, or cloud services without IT's knowledge or approval. But while organizations often treat shadow IT as a security risk, it also signals unmet employee needs. Employees don't bypass IT to avoid the rules. They use alternative tools to stay productive when workplace technology gets in the way.  

Over time, these workarounds erode trust between employees and IT teams, making it harder to encourage the use of approved tools and processes. Instead of enabling employees to work efficiently, workplace technology becomes something they work around, reducing visibility, increasing risk, and limiting the value organizations get from their technology investments.

Why technology-first fixes keep falling short

In socio-technical systems, changes rarely happen in isolation. A new platform reshapes workflows, automation changes responsibilities, and security controls influence how people work. When organizations overlook these interactions, improvements in one area often create friction in another.

As The Psychology of DEX explains, organizations frequently underestimate these ripple effects. Managers may overlook the human impact of IT disruptions, employees adapt instead of reporting issues, and IT teams spend more time reacting to problems than preventing them.  

By contrast, a proactive DEX approach addresses the system as a whole. Organizations that design digital workplaces around people, processes, and technology can reduce friction before it disrupts work, improve operational efficiency, and achieve better business outcomes. In fact, Forrester research found that organizations with mature DEX programs are 6x more likely to see fewer disruptions, 33% more likely to report higher employee satisfaction, and 62% more likely to see higher employee retention.

Why participation matters in complex systems

Socio-technical systems thinking recognizes that no single team has a complete picture of how work happens. As a result, organizations can only improve the digital workplace by involving the people who experience it every day, including IT, frontline employees, managers, and security teams.