Tech friction is ruining our workdays. How can IT pros get ahead of it?

Failed login attempts, constantly crashing apps, glacial loading times: These are just some of the small but—when multiplied across years and organizations—consequential friction points that too often define digital workers’ professional lives.

The results? Lower productivity; frustrated workers; greater attrition; security issues; headaches for IT, HR, and the C-suite—and ultimately, a less satisfying consumer experience.

“There’s immense productivity loss. You have frustrated users,” Michael Lovewell, a solution consulting team lead at digital employee experience company Nexthink, told us. “Your applications aren’t being leveraged that you’re spending significant amounts of money on. That leads to a lot of these problems.”

So what’s an IT pro to do? Instead of responding to tech friction fallout after the fact, our sources emphasized the importance of reevaluating outdated protocols, gathering feedback on existing problems, implementing processes to identify issues before tickets start trickling in, and creating tighter feedback loops.

“No. 1: Stay close to the problems and the actual work,” Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at runtime control platform LaunchDarkly, told Morning Brew, “and No. 2, structurally build in the time to take that feedback and start to actually fix some of those things that otherwise would not have the attention and resources devoted to them.”

Error message

470,000 hours: that’s the average productivity loss enterprise orgs see every year thanks to digital friction, Nexthink found in a workplace productivity report. Yet IT leaders estimated the losses at less than half that—underscoring the fact that those responsible for solving the problem don’t fully understand it.

Nexthink’s Lovewell said that there tend to be two main friction types: “when things simply don’t work,” and when employees don’t know how to use the digital tools that are available to them.

“Your device is taking five minutes to boot up and to fully log on,” he said. “That’s an initial, very frustrating friction point when you first log in in the morning, all the way to critical applications, whether that is Microsoft, Google Workspace, or even things like revenue-generating applications—SAP, Salesforce, things of that nature.

“If those aren’t available and functioning, then people who are relying on those applications to get their job done start to feel those disruptions throughout the workday,” he added.

Another reality check in Nexthink’s data: The average employee experiences 14 tech-related disruptions per week—think crashes, slow load times, login snags—each lasting nearly three minutes. Meanwhile, the report notes that even a five-second delay can increase error rates 3x—a stat that, when multiplied across thousands of workers, can have “staggering” consequences.

And a recent report by software company TeamViewer found that 46% of UK businesses blame digital friction for slowing work down. More than half reported delays on important projects because of IT problems. And nearly a third of UK workers expect digital friction to become a bigger issue in the next year.

The numbers aren’t all grim: Nexthink found that for every 10-point boost in a company’s digital employee experience score, every employee can get back 22 minutes of productivity each week.

Ripple effects

Tech friction isn’t just an IT problem. The effects ripple out to HR pros, supply chain officers, software engineers, and others.

Sometimes, focusing on digitization itself as an outcome makes supply-chain orgs less efficient, according to a Gartner analysis. Instead, supply-chain leaders should be laser-focused on business outcomes. Gartner’s analysis calls for steps like mapping outcomes such as total lead time, and integrating human insights with digital mapping tools.

Tech friction is also an issue in the software development life cycle. A zero-friction cycle, according to Gartner, “decouples business intent from technical implementation, using AI platforms to automate repetitive requirements, design, coding, integration, testing, deployment, and maintenance tasks.” Using this model, analysts claim, can boost productivity by freeing up employees to “focus on strategic, creative, and supervisory roles while AI manages execution.”

Getting it right necessitates a change in hiring and training, with a focus on skills related to supervising automated processes and “articulating business intent.” Also key, according to Gartner analysts, is using platforms that require minimal intervention from employees—while maintaining strong oversight.

And ultimately, LaunchDarkly’s Totenberg noted, tech friction trickles down to the end user, potentially driving them away from glitchy tech tools and apps forever.

“Any little bit of friction on that side really does aggregate over time,” he said, “due to the high expectations of consumers and the examples that we have out in the world of people doing it well.”

Check list

For IT pros looking to get ahead of tech friction, Lovewell recommended a “phased approach.”

“You would start to rely on alerts and monitors and sensors, rather than the end user,” he said. “That’s the first thing: Take the user out of the equation from reporting tickets.”

In working to help clients manage IT problems, Nexthink has found that employees avoid reporting issues, Lovewell said. They simply expect their tech to work, and are reluctant to take the extra step of creating an IT ticket. So it’s on IT pros to gather that data themselves to get a complete view of the organization’s most common friction points.

From there, develop solutions that can scale across the organization, and automate as many as possible.

“You don’t want to boil the ocean,” Lovewell said. “You really want to focus on the things that are impacting either the most critical part of your business or the largest population and percentage of your business.”

Another area to evaluate? Your organization’s runbook. Totenberg noted that, in many workplaces, this guiding document is often outdated.

“There is this runbook that has been documented, and we all have to do this dumb thing that doesn’t matter. Nobody knows why it still exists, except that it still exists in the runbook,” he said. “A lot of organizations don’t actually take the time to reevaluate that. ‘We’ve got the next quarterly deliverables that we have to focus on. We don’t have time for tech debt.’ So some of those minor, annoying things end up building up over more and more time.”

Totenberg also emphasized the need for quicker, tighter feedback loops, with ample opportunities for employees to provide input on IT processes and tools.

“If you’re introducing this friction and people don’t have the power to change it, even if they’re the ones experiencing it every day, that inevitably will lead to people quiet quitting, and there will be turnover,” he said. “You’re not going to get as good a talent. They’re not going to refer their friends. All of those things compound into a personnel problem, which is a self-reinforcing loop of degrading performance for the organization.”

Immediate input also helps cut down on the context switching that comes when software engineers finish a project but don’t get feedback until much later—forcing them to revisit code they haven’t touched in months.

IT pros should carve out dedicated blocks of time to tackle “tech debt,” Totenberg argued, to reduce long-standing friction points. He also suggested scheduled “innovation days” when employees have opportunities to weigh in and develop solutions.

“Especially in the age of agentic coding, [leaders] should be able to submit [pull requests],” Totenberg said. “They should be able to review PRs. They should understand what this process actually looks like. They should take rotations in support. They should take rotations being an on-call engineer.”

“Don’t get so separated from what it’s like in the day-to-day that you forget,” he added, “and [also] trust the people who are living that day to day, and allocate structural time for them to be able to give that feedback.”