Are you missing the impact of digital friction on your business?

When you're staring at an IT-systems dashboard, is no news always good news? Not necessarily. There are plenty of situations where an absence of alerts is a sign that something is wrong. Systems can hit every performance metric and still deliver a substandard employee experience.

This kind of digital friction is often partly, or even completely, hidden in standard reporting. But it has a huge impact on productivity and employee satisfaction. That's why more companies are measuring and tracking digital employee experience (DEX). It reveals the gap between system performance and real-world productivity.

In the latest TeamViewer research, 88% of IT professionals said investing in DEX directly improves employee productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction. 

Why digital friction is a hidden productivity killer

The problem with hidden digital friction is that you often can't measure it, because your reporting systems aren't designed to detect it. As far as your IT systems are concerned, everything is working fine, even when some things aren't working at all.

Take a common example: employees come to accept that a key system runs with a performance lag. Rather than reporting the issue, they live with frustration and lost productivity. As a result, the problem never generates helpdesk tickets.

Digital friction also drives risky behavior. Slow or ill-suited tools push employees toward workarounds and unapproved apps just to get their work done. That's shadow IT, and it trades short-term convenience for real security and compliance risk, wasted time, and higher error rates.

As The psychology of DEX whitepaper explains, hidden digital friction has wider consequences, driving human dysregulation:  

Think of a knowledge worker who experiences 10 separate instances of digital disruption on a typical day. They don't just stop and start their work 10 times. They must continually refocus, remember where they were, and rebuild their train of thought. Even minor disruptions consume far more time and mental energy than the interruption itself suggests.

The numbers back this up. According to a public-sector participant in TeamViewer’s DEX perspective survey, IT-related disruptions cut productivity in their organization by 15% a year. In the same survey, another participant explains “digital friction has a huge impact; all work is done on an employees’ computer so if they can’t access the programs or resources they need, they’d be dead in the water."

The recent impact of digital friction report provides more insights. 48% of respondents said digital friction had delayed critical operations or projects. 42% said it had led directly to revenue loss. Nearly 40% had lost business because of IT dysfunction. And 80% said they lost time to digital friction: an average of 1.3 workdays per employee per month.

Good DEX boosts productivity and cuts costs

The answer is to embed the provision, measurement, and optimization of digital employee experience (DEX) into your IT strategy and day-to-day operations. DEX is the product of how employees interact with your IT systems.

Do your hardware, cloud and SaaS applications, network connectivity, and IT support give staff the seamless support they need to achieve their goals? An excellent digital employee experience makes your systems almost invisible to the user. Systems are simply there when needed, functioning smoothly, without latency, downtime, or unnecessary complexity.

Elements of an outstanding DEX include:

• Experience-level visibility: capturing how devices, applications, systems and your networks perform from an employee's perspective.
• Automated issue resolution: monitoring your IT environment, detecting and resolving issues before they impact user experience and performance.
• Experience measurement: measuring performance against technical benchmarks and how your systems support user goals and priorities.

Your team can already monitor IT performance using existing systems. A DEX platform adds the ability to track and monitor how these systems impact the user experience and productivity. The same platform can intervene automatically, using AI to correct issues before they become bigger problems. For more complex or sensitive issues, it alerts IT specialists, who can then intervene remotely using one-click remote access.

A high-performance DEX environment becomes largely self-healing. And this can benefit your business in ways that are both significant and measurable. At the most basic level, it translates to fewer support tickets, yielding up to a 70% reduction in helpdesk costs.

That immediately measurable outcome is just the most obvious result of measuring and optimizing for experience. The greatest gains aren't in systems optimization; they're in what your people achieve with those systems. By closing the gap between how systems function and how well they meet employee needs, you improve employee performance, value creation, business outcomes, and customer experience. With the right approach to DEX, organizations can expect up to 20% higher employee productivity and 40% higher employee satisfaction.  

Why you need to focus on humans before technology

It's incomplete to think of digital ecosystems, made up of systems, networks, applications, and their interactions, simply as tools. These are the environments where modern work happens. And humans are the key, though no longer the only, actor within them.

So, any optimization program must start with the human users of the system. How do they interact with it? Are they using it as intended, or do usage patterns show workarounds and avoidance? How often is their work disrupted, and how does this show up, not in technical metrics, but in relevant business or personal measures?

By updating how you measure success, focusing on human as well as technical benchmarks and qualitative as well as quantitative data, you close the loop between system performance and human experience. That gives IT the insight it needs to identify the friction that matters most, prioritize improvements, and demonstrate their impact on the business.

Making the shift from reactive to proactive IT

Creating a sophisticated, modern DEX-led environment lays out the groundwork for the move to an autonomous, predictive digital workplace. The initial stage of this process is the shift left from reactive to proactive IT.

With proactive IT, your systems and technicians identify recurring problems, resolve them before they cause significant disruption, and use automation to reduce repetitive future incidents. DEX enables this transition, providing IT visibility into whether systems are functioning and how their performance affects the people who use them.