What is Digital Friction? 5 signs your team is suffering

Blair Williamson

7 minute read

Have you ever found yourself switching between tasks at your computer, trying to work on two applications, but struggling to get them to communicate with each other? Or endlessly searching, trying to find that piece of information you used in your meeting earlier in the day? That’s digital friction, and it's a growing problem in workspaces around the world.

Gartner defines digital friction as "the unnecessary effort an employee spends to use data or technology at work." Did you know that the average company uses as many as 88 different applications to get work done? With all that application sprawl, it’s not surprising that close to 70% of employees rate the user experience at work as simultaneously not productive, not empowering, and not easy.

This is especially the case when users compare their experience on their personal devices with their experience on their office's intranet. For a modern, hybrid digital-first workforce, digital friction causes a huge drain on productivity and the overall employee experience.
What are the signs of digital friction? How is it impacting the enterprise intranet experience for workers? How often does it get in the way of collaboration and productivity across your teams?
Here are five telltale signs that digital friction is impacting the workflow, morale, and productivity of your workforce:

Technology that doesn't address worker needs

If staff are raising issues about the quality of the technology they're using at work, it's time to be concerned. For a hybrid workforce, enabling technology is at the heart of the employee experience. According to recent research almost a fifth of home, office, and hybrid workers rate their digital employee experience as poor.

Over 35% identified the need to switch between different applications as a major problem. Faced with these kinds of significant digital friction issues, the workers surveyed said they spend as much as 5.5 hours per week working through technology concerns - either because the technology did not work as expected or wasn’t suited to the task at hand.

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Employee fatigue and burnout

The more hurdles team members face to get the job done, the greater the risk of low morale, reduced productivity, and inevitable fatigue and burnout. That's why it’s critically important to ensure employees have the right communication and productivity tools at their disposal.

Finding solutions (like enhanced AI capabilities) that limit friction can go a long way to improve the employee experience. A recent Gartner report shows that 76% of workers wished they had access to more AI features built into the technology they use at work.

The report suggests that leadership has to step up to the plate and integrate AI technology to address the changing concerns of their team. As well as being a critical element in workers' ability to address client concerns, more powerful and efficient technology solutions can positively impact employee engagement, profits, and long-term company success.

Lackluster Employee Culture

Today, remote-capable workers are spending 60% less time in the office. As a result, reaching out and bringing teams together is more complicated when solutions for connectedness aren't built into digital workflows or company processes. The legacy intranets that companies used in the past are simply not designed for the needs of a digital-first hybrid workforce.

A modern intranet solution like LumApps provides a range of AI-supported features and tools. These help employees benefit from mobile capabilities, push notifications, and easy synchronization across their internal communications network.

Powerful technology solutions make collaboration and information exchange easier and more efficient across platforms and devices. Besides enhancing productivity, they also help teams build meaningful connections between employees, management, and clients. The result? A more meaningful and engaging company culture.

Insufficient support and training

While remote work is helping enterprises move quickly into new business areas and regions, ensuring that staff have the support and training they need can be an ongoing challenge for management. Digital friction in this context results in more time spent on everyday tasks because employees are simply not prepared for some of the challenges they may face.

With digital-first employees, onboarding, training, and upskilling opportunities must be delivered in a way that suits the needs of a busy and flexible workforce. That means offering educational opportunities at a time and place that suits the schedule of employees working at the office, from home, or on the road.

Research shows that reskilling and up-training are essential elements in holding onto and retaining employees on your team. One way to reduce app switching and meet your training goals is to include personalized learning paths directly within your intranet.
This technology delivers relevant content to individuals on your team flexibly and innovatively. Plus, integrated video be used to deliver key messages and video content in a way that is informative and engaging.

To cut through the friction that can make onboarding and upskilling a challenge, make learning opportunities available through your enterprise's LumApps Intranet and on the employee's device of choice.

Inability to personalize a digital workspace

Cutting through application sprawl is one of the best ways to limit digital friction. Providing a personalized employee dashboard, supported by LumApps AI technology, lets every team member create a personalized one-stop shop for displaying mission-critical data.

Not only can employees complete tasks without leaving their dashboard, but the wide range of integrations makes it easy to surface specific dynamic information from third-party business applications. Most importantly, it enables specific transactions and operations without forcing staff to switch between applications or interfaces to complete the action.

How streamlining your apps can increase productivity

According to McKinsey, there's a clear link between keeping employees connected and increasing productivity. Ultimately, it is all about improving efficiency, speed, and convenience. Limiting digital friction and creating the touch points that generate the opportunities to discuss projects, share ideas, network, mentor, and coach are critical to the equation.

With a host of features like proactive nudges and an AI-powered conversational interface and content generation tools, LumApps Companion helps teams improve workflow and reduce digital friction. Our solution helps eliminate the frustration and loss of time that ultimately leads to worker disengagement and decreased productivity.

Leaders in the Forrester Wave: Intranet Platforms for 2024 and a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, LumApps is the leading modern and effective intranet that centralizes and powers communication for all employees. It creates a space where you and your teams can learn, grow, and generate meaningful and productive results – improving the employee experience and fostering a more dynamic workplace culture.

For more information about eliminating digital friction, improving the employee journey, and our LumApps Companion AI intranet solutions, book a demo today.