Presented by TeamViewer
Business technology failures are largely invisible. TeamViewer investigationBased on a global survey of 4,200 managers and employees, it finds that most digital dysfunctions never reach the IT help desk.
Employees troubleshoot slow apps, failed logins, and intermittent failures instead of reporting them, leaving organizations without an accurate picture of their technology performance. The cumulative cost is significant: employees lose an average of 1.3 work days per month due to digital friction, with impacts ranging from project delays and lost revenue to increased employee turnover.
The research, which surveyed managers and employees in nine countries, confirms what many have long suspected: Productivity loss due to digital friction is significant and most of it never shows up in an IT support queue, says Andrew Hewitt, vice president of strategic technology at TeamViewer.
“Business disruptions are visible because they trigger clear system-level failures,” Hewitt says. “But much of the real disruption happens earlier, in the form of digital friction: slow apps, login issues, or intermittent crashes that don’t cross alert thresholds. These minor problems often go unreported or are normalized by employees, even though they silently drain productivity.”
What is digital friction and why is it not reported?
The most common sources of friction (connectivity failures, software failures, hardware problems, and authentication problems) are not extreme scenarios, but rather everyday experiences that employees have learned to absorb without escalation. Connectivity issues were the most widespread, with nearly half identifying them as the top factor affecting productivity among common technology issues.
This tendency to absorb instead of inform is fundamental to the problem. Many workers don’t trust their IT team to resolve issues quickly or effectively, so when a login fails or an app stops mid-task, the path of least resistance is to reboot the device, switch tools, or use a personal phone.
“Employees are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate their performance,” says Hewitt. “When reports appear unlikely to result in a quick resolution, a false sense of stability is created at the system level, while the employee experience quietly deteriorates.”
How much productivity does digital friction cost organizations?
The commercial consequences go beyond the inconveniences. 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 improvements, citing the increasing complexity of technology in the workplace as one of their main concerns.
The human cost runs parallel. Workers link digital friction to frustration, decreased motivation and burnout, and many believe it contributes to turnover, with the onboarding of replacements extending to eight weeks or more.
"Employees are happier when they feel productive and fulfilled at the end of the day." Hewitt says. "When people cannot make progress in their daily work, frustration increases and burnout follows. Good technology may not be the main draw for talent, but bad technology can certainly play a role in scaring 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 find alternatives, with a substantial proportion of respondents admitting they use personal devices or unauthorized apps as solutions. That’s the entry point for shadow IT, or the use of unapproved hardware, software or cloud services outside of IT visibility and control. While employees turn to these tools simply to stay productive, they introduce security vulnerabilities, data leak risks, and compliance gaps that IT teams may not discover until a breach occurs.
“Simply put, it shows that the IT environment is not meeting the needs of employees,” Hewitt said. “While this helps maintain short-term productivity, it introduces significant risks and leaves work outside of IT visibility and control.”
TeamViewer ONE addresses this by combining remote connectivity with real-time endpoint monitoring, giving IT teams the ability to detect and resolve device and application issues before employees look for an alternative. When the underlying environment is stable and support is rapid, the impulse to avoid decreases.
How fragmented IT infrastructure creates blind spots between devices, applications and networks
Addressing digital friction at scale requires more than just faster help desk response times. Traditional metrics, such as mean resolution time and ticket volume, capture only a fraction of real problems. To get a more complete picture, you need to measure lost time, interrupted workflows, and employee sentiment across devices, applications, and network environments.
“Leaders must go beyond measuring performance solely through IT tickets,” Hewitt said. “Performance must be viewed through the lens of employee experience and real-time digital workplace data.”
Fragmented infrastructure makes this difficult. When devices, applications and networks operate 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 close that gap, integrating employee digital experience analytics, remote support and device management into a single platform. Instead of gathering signals from disconnected tools, IT teams get a consolidated 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 progression: starting with endpoint management and security, moving toward 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 designed to support each stage of that progression, using continuous monitoring to detect anomalies and correlate signals across the digital environment, identifying patterns of bad experience before they escalate. When problems are detected, it suggests solutions, generates troubleshooting scripts autonomously, and handles routine tasks, such as common problem resolution, without requiring IT intervention, shifting the workload from reactive firefighting to proactive monitoring.
And while the effectiveness of AI depends on the integrity of the data it works with, consolidation on a platform like TeamViewer ONE eliminates that limitation by giving AI a complete, real-time database to work with.
How system performance lays the foundation for productivity, retention and competitive advantage
TeamViewer ONE is not a total replacement for existing IT infrastructure, but rather a unifying layer that connects knowledge with action, enabling organizations to increase productivity, improve retention, and ultimately gain a significant competitive advantage. It starts with visibility into what is really causing friction in your environment. From there, leaders can use that data to prioritize solutions and then scale remediation through automation as confidence and capability grow.
"Reducing digital friction is not about reviewing everything at once," Hewitt said. "Leaders need to start small, gain visibility into what is really causing friction, address the biggest pain points, and then scale those improvements through automation and artificial intelligence. Even incremental progress can have an impact on employee engagement and productivity."
Go deeper: Fix it before they feel it from TeamViewer.
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