Part 2 – The top digital friction blockers killing employee productivity and how to spot them | Scalable Software

In the first of this two-part blog series, we explored some of the challenges enterprises face when it comes to identifying, measuring and assessing the impact of digital friction.

Digital friction plagues modern day businesses. Gartner reports that 47% of technology users experience high digital friction, and 34% experience friction several times a week. These pain points contribute to poor digital employee experiences (DEX), silently eroding productivity and leaving employees frustrated and burnt out. In fact, our recent research found that knowledge workers are forced to work an additional 3.1 weeks a year due to a lack of access to the right technology, or struggling with technology that doesn’t work.

In this second blog, we discuss five of the most common digital friction blockers that are killing employees’ productivity, and how to spot them:

1. Applications crashing:

   Our research found that 47% of knowledge workers suffer from applications that repeatedly freeze, crash or load slowly. These experiences not only frustrate employees but slow them down and hurt their productivity.

2. Application toggling: Workflows that involve multiple programs leave workers having to switch between apps repeatedly to find information or complete a task. When you consider that employees spend four hours a week reorientating themselves after toggling apps and then having to refocus – there’s a lot of room for lost productivity.
3. Complicated workflows: Badly designed processes mean workers must follow overcomplicated workflows that require extra steps to complete, even for routine tasks completed every day. Every workflow that doesn’t follow the optimal route represents a loss of productivity.
4. Notification overload: Workers are overburdened by too many communication channels – including email, phone, video, instant messaging and dedicated collaboration apps. The subsequent notification storm leaves employees feeling overwhelmed and increases the risk that important updates are missed. In our research, notification overload was the third most cited type of digital friction experienced by knowledge workers.
5. Inefficient collaboration: Beyond the issue of notification overload, too many communications channels cause a host of other issues for workers – including creating silos of knowledge and causing conversations to be fragmented. This leaves workers having to search multiple platforms to find the information or discussion points they need and slow decision making.

Spotting digital friction

Luckily, help is at hand. Sophisticated digital employee experience (DEX) analytics provides a layer over all endpoints in an organization, so decision makers in HR and IT teams can gather intel on digital friction. This highlights where more training is needed, identifies trends in crashing or slow software, and even alerts IT teams to security risks.

DEX analytics use task mining to capture user journeys and interaction data, enabling businesses to analyze how employees complete tasks. The click-by-click journey through a workflow, coupled with detailed insights into hardware and software performance, allows digital friction points to be identified and flagged for resolution.

With DEX analytics, businesses can understand what is slowing them down. Data-driven insights allow HR and IT leaders to address these issues at the root and unleash the workforce’s productivity.

Learn more about Scalable Software’s Acumen platform here.