Presented by Teamviewer
Enterprise technology failures are largely invisible. Teamviewer’s research, based on a global survey of 4,200 managers and employees, shows that most digital disruptions never reach an IT help desk.
Employees work around slow applications, failed logins, and intermittent errors instead of reporting them, leaving organizations without an accurate picture of how their technology is performing. The cumulative cost is significant: Employees lose an average of 1.3 workdays per month due to digital friction, with impacts ranging from delayed projects 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 from digital friction is significant, and most of it never makes it to the front of the IT support queue, says Andrew Hewitt, vice president of strategic technology at Teamviewer.
“Enterprise outages are visible because they trigger obvious, system-level failures,” Hewitt says. “But most of the real disruption occurs first in the form of digital friction: slow apps, login problems, or intermittent glitches that don’t cross the alert threshold. These small issues often go unreported or normalized by employees, even as they quietly sap productivity.”
What is digital attrition and why is it underreported?
The most common sources of friction – connectivity failures, software crashes, hardware problems, and authentication issues – are not edge-case scenarios, but everyday experiences employees have learned to internalize without exaggerating. Connectivity problems were the most widespread, with nearly half identifying them as the top productivity killer among common technology issues.
The tendency to absorb rather than report is the heart of the problem. Many employees don’t trust their IT team to resolve issues quickly or effectively, so when a login fails or an application freezes in the middle of a task, the path of least resistance is to restart the device, switch tools, or use a personal phone.
“Employees are under more pressure than ever to prove output,” says Hewitt. “When reporting doesn’t seem likely to result in a quick resolution, it creates a false sense of stability at the system level while the employee experience silently deteriorates.”
How much productivity does digital friction cost organizations?
The business consequences go beyond the inconvenience. Many organizations report delays in critical operations, revenue loss, and lost customers as a result of IT dysfunction. Most respondents report time lost each month, and few expect improvement, citing the increasing complexity of workplace technology as a primary concern.
The human costs run parallel. Employees link digital friction to frustration, decreased motivation, and burnout, and many believe it contributes to turnover, with onboarding replacements stretching to eight weeks or more.
"Employees are happiest when they feel productive and accomplished at the end of the day," Hewitt says. "When people are unable to make progress in their day-to-day work, frustration sets in and fatigue sets in. Great technology may not be the primary attractor of talent, but bad technology can certainly play a role in driving talent away."
Why do employees access personal devices and unauthorized devices instead of reporting IT problems?
When workplace technology consistently fails to meet employee needs, employees look for alternatives, with a large portion of respondents admitting to using personal devices or unauthorized applications as solutions. This is the entry point for shadow IT, or the use of unapproved hardware, software, or cloud services outside of IT’s visibility and control. While employees turn to these tools simply to stay productive, they introduce security vulnerabilities, data leakage risks, and compliance gaps that IT teams may not be aware of until a breach occurs.
“Quite simply, it shows that the IT environment is not meeting the needs of employees,” Hewitt said. “While this helps maintain short-term productivity, it brings significant risk and takes work out of IT’s visibility and control.”
TeamViewer One solves 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 have access to the option. When the underlying environment is stable and support is fast, the motivation to work around it is reduced.
How fragmented IT infrastructure creates blind spots in devices, apps and networks
Addressing digital friction at scale requires faster help desk response times. Traditional metrics like average time to resolution and ticket volume capture only a fraction of the real issues. A more complete picture requires measuring lost time, disrupted workflows and employee sentiment across devices, applications and network environments.
“Leaders need to move beyond simply measuring performance 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 detect root causes or identify systemic issues before they spread, often reacting to symptoms rather than underlying problems.
TeamViewer ONE is designed to bridge that gap, unifying digital employee experience analytics, remote support, and device management into a single platform. Instead of piecing together signals from disconnected tools, IT teams get a consolidated view of endpoint health, application performance, and network conditions across the entire organization.
How organizations can move from reactive IT support to proactive systems monitoring
Achieving proactive IT is not a single-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 AI to resolve issues before they reach employees.
Teamviewer AI is built to support each step of that progression, using continuous monitoring of surface anomalies and correlating signals across the digital environment, identifying patterns of poor experience before they escalate. When problems are detected, it suggests solutions, generates scripts to fix problems autonomously, and handles routine tasks like general troubleshooting without the need for IT intervention, shifting the workload from reactive firefighting to proactive inspection.
And while the effectiveness of AI depends on the completeness of the data it works with, integration into a platform like TeamViewer One removes that limitation by giving AI a full, real-time data base to work from.
How systems performance lays the foundation for productivity, retention, and competitive advantage
Teamviewer One is not a wholesale replacement of existing IT infrastructure, but rather an integrated layer that connects insight to action, enabling organizations to increase productivity, improve retention, and ultimately realize a significant competitive advantage. This starts with visibility into what is really causing friction in their environment. From there, leaders can use that data to prioritize improvements, and then make improvements at scale through automation as confidence and capability grow.
"Reducing digital friction doesn’t mean changing everything at once," Hewitt said. "Leaders should start small, gain visibility into what’s really causing friction, fix the biggest pain points, then amplify those improvements through automation and AI. Even incremental progress can have an impact on employee engagement and productivity."
Digging Deep: Fix it before they realize it with TeamViewer.
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