Presented by TeamViewer
Business technology failures are often invisible. Research from TeamViewer, based on a global survey of 4,200 managers and employees, finds that the majority of digital inefficiencies never reach the IT help desk.
Employees react to slow requests, failed logins, and occasional errors rather than reporting them, leaving organizations without an accurate picture of how their technology is performing. The accumulated costs are significant: employees lose an average of 1.3 working days per month due to digital friction, with impacts ranging from delayed projects and lost revenue to increased employee turnover.
The study, which surveyed managers and employees in nine countries, confirms what many have suspected for a long time: the loss of productivity due to digital friction is significant, and most of it never appears on the IT support line, said Andrew Hewitt, VP of strategic technology at TeamViewer.
“Business outages are visible because they cause a clear, systemic failure,” Hewitt said. “But most of the real disruptions happen earlier, in the form of digital crashes: slow applications, login problems, or some problems that do not exceed the warning thresholds. These small problems are often not reported or normalized by the employees, even though they destroy the product silently.”
What is a digital conflict and why is it not reported?
The most common sources of conflict – connection failures, software crashes, hardware problems, and authentication problems – are not critical situations, but everyday experiences that employees have learned to absorb without growing. Connectivity issues were the most prevalent, with nearly half identifying themselves as the top productivity killers among common technical problems.
That tendency to absorb rather than report is at the heart of the problem. Many employees don’t trust their IT team to solve problems quickly or effectively, so if a login fails or an application freezes during work, the path of least resistance is to reboot the device, change tools, or use a personal phone.
“Employees are under more pressure than ever to deliver results,” Hewitt said. “When reporting feels unlikely to result in a quick resolution, it creates a false sense of stability at the system level while the employee experience quietly deteriorates.”
How much does the product cost organizations?
Business results go beyond disruption. Many organizations report delays in critical operations, lost revenue, and lost customers due to IT inefficiencies. Most respondents lose time each month, and few anticipate improvements, citing the increasing complexity of workplace technology as a primary concern.
Human costs are associated. Employees link digital friction to frustration, decreased motivation, and burnout, and many believe it impacts pay, with on-boarding changes lasting eight weeks or more.
"Employees are happiest when they feel productive and accomplished at the end of the day," Hewitt says. "When people cannot progress in their daily work, frustration builds and burnout follows. Great technology may not be the biggest attractor of talent, but the wrong technology can play a role in driving it away."
Why employees are using their personal devices and unauthorized tools instead of reporting IT problems
When workplace technology consistently fails to meet employee needs, employees find alternatives, with a large portion of respondents admitting to using personal devices or unauthorized applications as workarounds. That’s an entry point for IT security, or the use of unauthorized hardware, software, or cloud services without IT’s visibility and control. While employees are turning to these tools just to stay productive, they present security risks, data leakage 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 the workforce,” Hewitt said. “While this helps maintain short-term productivity, it introduces significant risk and pushes work outside of IT’s visibility and control.”
TeamViewer ONE addresses this by combining remote connectivity with real-time endpoint monitoring, giving IT teams the ability to identify and resolve device and application issues before employees reach for another solution. If the substrate is stable and the support is fast, the pressure to work around it is reduced.
The disparate nature of IT infrastructure creates blind spots across devices, applications, and networks
Dealing with digital friction at scale requires more than quick help desk response times. Traditional metrics such as minimum time to resolution and ticket volume capture only a fraction of the actual issues. The complete picture requires measuring lost time, disrupted workflow, and employee experience across devices, applications, and network environments.
“Leaders need to go beyond measuring performance on IT tickets alone,” Hewitt said. “Performance should be monitored using employee information and real-time digital workplace data.”
A fragmented infrastructure makes this difficult. When devices, applications, and networks operate in disparate silos, IT teams struggle to trace root causes or identify system problems before they spread, often responding to symptoms rather than root problems.
TeamViewer ONE is designed to bridge that gap, integrating digital workforce experience analytics, remote support, and device management into a single platform. Instead of aggregating signals from disconnected devices, IT teams get a unified view of endpoint health, application performance, and network conditions across the organization.
How organizations can transition from proactive IT support to proactive system monitoring
Achieving effective IT is not a one-step transformation. Hewitt describes it as a continuum: starting with endpoint management and security, building to real-time visibility into digital employee information, and finally using automation and AI to solve problems before they reach employees.
TeamViewer AI is designed to support each stage of that progression, using continuous monitoring to uncover anomalies and correlating signals across the digital landscape, identifying patterns of negative experiences before they escalate. When problems are detected, it suggests solutions, automatically generates troubleshooting scripts, and handles routine tasks such as routine troubleshooting without requiring IT intervention, shifting the workload from firefighting to proactive monitoring.
And while AI’s effectiveness depends on the completeness of the data it’s working with, integration into a platform like TeamViewer ONE removes that limitation by giving AI a complete, real-time data base to work on.
How system performance lays the foundation for productivity, maintenance, and competitive advantage
TeamViewer ONE is not a large replacement for existing IT infrastructure, but a unifying layer that combines insight and action, allowing organizations to increase productivity, improve retention, and ultimately gain a greater competitive advantage. It begins with an appearance of what is actually causing the conflict in their universe. From there, leaders can use that data to prioritize corrections, and scale corrections automatically as confidence and capacity grow.
"Reducing digital friction is not about fixing everything at once," Hewitt said. "Leaders should start small, gain visibility into what’s actually causing the friction, fix the biggest pain points, and then measure that improvement using automation and AI. Even incremental progress can impact employee engagement and productivity."
Dig deeper: Fix it before they hear it in TeamViewer.
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