Doug Hynes, author of the recent paper, The Psychology of Digital Employee Experience (DEX), insists he’s no enemy of mean time to resolution (MTTR). The old metrics of IT success are still effective, he assures me; they just need supplementing with new ones.
In his paper, Doug, who’s a Senior Product Manager at TeamViewer, looks at the human impact of bad digital experiences. This includes the physical and psychological consequences that are difficult, but not impossible, to measure by ticket volume or MTTR. Getting the full picture demands a shift in approach. And it starts by looking at employees, and the ways technology— specifically, digital friction—disrupts their work.
So, that thing running in the background? Unless it’s directly impacting employees, it’s not relevant here. Effective digital employee experience (DEX) means focusing on the human and cutting out a whole lot of noise.
What is digital friction?
Imagine you’re driving somewhere, and you encounter a roadblock. So, you turn back and take an alternative and longer route. But before long, you’re faced with another roadblock. This happens over and over again. Before long, you’ve forgotten where you're going. Or whether you want to go there at all.
This is a good way of thinking about digital friction. With every software malfunction, forced reboot, or sluggish hardware, employees are distracted, disempowered, and obstructed from meaningful work. Some of our earlier research finds that 80% of employees report losing time to digital friction—averaging 1.3 workdays per month.
And the thing is, digital friction is self-perpetuating. The Psychology of DEX rightly points out that humans are more likely to notice when things go wrong rather than right (as Doug puts it, no one calls IT to say “good job”). And the more things go wrong, the less likely we are to ask for support. So, we engage in silent compensation: finding workarounds that often only compound the problem over time.
Speaking with Doug, he emphasizes that digital friction is a feature of all kinds of contemporary work, and not just knowledge workers. The plumber who organizes his business with technology, the logistics worker who uses AR to fulfill orders: we’re all by turns supported and hampered by technology. As he says, “Technology is in our veins, no matter your job.”
With every workplace now a digital one, it's imperative to remove as much friction as possible, and this journey begins with the individual employee.
The business impact of digital friction
An emphasis on employee experience is gathering momentum as IT decision makers recognize the very real tangible consequences of ineffective tech.
Firstly, employees are less productive. With technological roadblocks constantly popping up, they’re unable to stay in the flow state that’s key to effective work. One reason for this, mentioned in Doug’s paper, is so-called cognitive residue, which says you can't really move to the new task because your mind is still thinking about the initial one.
Another consequence is increased employee turnover. Everyday frustrations, day in and day out, take a real toll. Doug put it quite simply: “If you make work harder, people are not going to enjoy their job, and they're going to find other places of employment.”
Another consequence is less obvious, but no less dangerous, and happens when employees take measures into their own hands (silent compensation). In short, they turn to non-authorized options (shadow IT) for quick fixes, exposing companies to security or compliance risks.
At the same time, working with poor technology is often a job in itself. And when already-wide job descriptions widen to include it, it can lead to fatigue and burnout. In a recent survey, 42% of employees reported directly associating digital friction with burnout.
None of this happens overnight. As Doug points out:
“Even before you get to being so frustrated that you leave, there are all these things that are going to continue building over time. And the realization is that human performance is finite. Employees can only process so much information, switch contexts so many times, and focus so long, before fatigue, errors, and ultimately disengagement occur."
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No more “not this again”
The answer to bad digital employee experience (DEX), for Doug, is to use technology to avoid repeat employee stressors—the myriad technological papercuts that make employees disengage and leave:
“I think the nail in the coffin for both sides of the support desk, employees as well as the support people, is: “not this again”. If you hear that phrase on either side of the desk, you’ve failed. Because “not this again” shows we've seen this before, we know the workaround, we know a fix, or we know that this is a problem, and we haven't fixed it.”
Automation, for Doug, can be a key driver in preventing “not this again.” And this starts by understanding the issues that are repeatable, predictable, and potentially preventable. By using automation to prevent these repeat issues, we eliminate a vast amount of digital friction—for employees and IT teams alike.
Finding the right metrics
If MTTR and ticket volume no longer suffice for getting a picture of digital friction, then, what are the metrics worth looking at? According to Doug, we need to put the focus back on the employee and start looking at the frequency of interruptions; whether they follow a pattern, and if we can break it up.
At the same time, MTBF (mean time before failure) is another valuable metric to consider. This tells us how long we’re between friction states, and how long it’s taking us to get back to a steady state.
Above all else, this means centering the human experience of technology. Instead of looking at the 24-hour scale, Doug recommends focusing on the 7.5 hours when the employee is at work. As he put it: “User present degradation is more important than non-user present degradation.”
Where to start?
It’s important to remember that DEX isn’t really about making people work harder. After all, there's a limit to how much people can work. Instead, it’s about preventing the environment from making work harder than it should be. This starts with beginning to anticipate and prevent those repeat issues, the “not this again” tickets.
Once these are gone, you’ve eliminated a good portion of digital friction. Now it’s about enhancing the environment, and providing IT in a more selective fashion, based on the people you're supporting.
“That's the DEX journey,” Doug says: “First off, put out the fires, quiet the noise, and then start thinking about how to be more of a partner to the business by looking at what the individual needs.”
Want to learn more about digital friction?
Download our new paper The Psychology of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) to learn about the causes and consequences of digital friction, and the benefits of experience-led approach.
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