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Corporate technology failures are largely invisible. Research from TeamViewerBased on a global survey of 4,200 managers and employees, it finds that most digital dysfunctions never reach the IT help desk.
Instead of reporting, employees work around slow applications, failed logins, and intermittent outages, and they don’t have a clear picture of how their organization’s technology is performing. The cumulative cost is significant: employees lose an average of 1.3 workdays per month to digital friction, with effects ranging from delayed projects and lost revenue to increased employee turnover.
Andrew Hewitt, vice president of strategic technology at TeamViewer, says the study, which surveyed managers and employees in nine countries, confirms what many have long suspected: productivity loss from digital friction is significant, and much of it never ends up in the IT support queue.
“Enterprise outages are clearly visible because they cause system-level failures,” says Hewitt. “But much of the real disruption occurs earlier in the form of digital friction: slow apps, access issues, or intermittent outages that don’t exceed warning thresholds. These small issues, while quietly reducing productivity, often go unreported or normalized by employees.”
What is digital friction and why is it not being reported?
The most common sources of friction—connection failures, software crashes, hardware issues, and authentication problems—are not end-state scenarios, but rather the everyday experiences employees have learned to absorb without increasing. Connectivity issues were the most prevalent, with nearly half identifying them as the top productivity killer among common technology issues.
A tendency to absorb rather than report is at the root of the problem. Many employees don’t trust their IT team to solve problems quickly or effectively, so when login fails or an application freezes in the middle of a task, the path of least resistance is to restart the device, change tools, or use a personal phone.
“Employees are under more pressure than ever to prove productivity,” says Hewitt. “When the report is unlikely to result in a quick resolution, it creates a false sense of stability at the system level while the employee experience quietly deteriorates.”
How Much Productivity Is Digital Friction Costing Organizations?
Business results go beyond anxiety. Many organizations report delays in critical operations, lost revenue and lost customers as a result of IT dysfunction. Most respondents lose time each month, and few expect improvement, citing the complexity of workplace technology as a major issue.
Human value goes hand in hand. Employees associate digital friction with frustration, reduced motivation and burnout, and many believe it contributes to turnover with onboarding shifts lasting eight weeks or more.
"Employees are happiest when they feel productive and successful at the end of the day." Hewitt says. "When people fail to make progress in their daily tasks, frustration sets in and burnout follows. Great technology may not be a major attractor of talent, but bad technology can certainly play a role in driving it away."
Why employees use personal devices and unauthorized tools instead of reporting IT problems
When workplace technology consistently fails to meet employee needs, employees are finding alternatives, with a significant number of respondents admitting to using personal devices or unauthorized apps as solutions. It’s an entry point for shadow IT, or the use of unapproved hardware, software, or cloud services outside of IT’s visibility and control. While employees may turn to these tools simply to stay productive, they present security vulnerabilities, data leakage risks, and compliance gaps that IT teams may not discover until a breach occurs.
“It simply demonstrates that the IT environment is not meeting the needs of employees,” Hewitt said. “While this helps preserve productivity in the short term, it also introduces significant risks and moves business out of IT’s visibility and control.”
TeamViewer ONE It solves this problem by combining remote connectivity with real-time endpoint monitoring, enabling IT teams to detect and resolve device and application issues before employees seek alternatives. When the underlying environment is stable and support is fast, the impulse to work around it is reduced.
How a fragmented IT infrastructure creates blind spots between devices, applications and networks
Solving digital friction at scale requires more than faster help desk response times. Traditional metrics such as mean time to resolution and ticket volume capture only a fraction of the actual issues. A more complete picture requires measuring lost time, interrupted workflows and employee morale across devices, applications and network environments.
“Leaders need to move beyond measuring performance by IT tickets alone,” Hewitt said. “Performance needs to be viewed with employee experience and real-time digital workplace data.”
A fragmented infrastructure makes this difficult. With devices, applications and networks operating in separate silos, IT teams struggle to trace root causes or identify systemic problems before they spread, often responding to symptoms rather than underlying problems.
TeamViewer ONE is designed to bridge this gap by integrating digital employee experience analytics, remote support and device management into a single platform. Instead of aggregating signals from disconnected tools, IT teams gain an aggregated view of endpoint health, application performance, and network conditions across the organization.
How organizations can move from reactive IT support to proactive system monitoring
Achieving proactive IT is not a one-step transformation. Hewitt describes it as a breakthrough: starting with endpoint management and security, evolving to real-time visibility into the digital employee experience, and ultimately using automation and artificial intelligence to solve problems before they reach employees.
TeamViewer AI is built to support each stage of this development, using continuous monitoring to uncover anomalies and correlate signals across the digital environment, identifying patterns of poor practice before they escalate. When problems are detected, it suggests fixes, creates scripts to solve problems autonomously, and performs routine tasks such as common troubleshooting without requiring IT intervention, shifting the workload from reactive firefighting to proactive monitoring.
While the effectiveness of AI depends on the completeness of the data it works with, consolidation in a platform like TeamViewer ONE overcomes this limitation by giving AI a complete, real-time database to work with.
How system performance underpins productivity, retention and competitive advantage
TeamViewer ONE is not a wholesale replacement of existing IT infrastructure, but a connecting layer that connects insight with action, allowing organizations to increase productivity, improve storage capacity and ultimately gain a significant competitive advantage. It actually starts with the appearance of what causes friction around them. From there, leaders can use this data to prioritize fixes and then scale fixes through automation as confidence and capabilities grow.
"Reducing digital friction is not about overhauling everything at once;" Hewitt said. "Leaders need to start small, see what’s actually causing the friction, fix the biggest pain points, then scale those improvements through automation and AI. Even increased progress can affect employee engagement and productivity."
Dig deeper: Fix it before you feel it from TeamViewer.
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