What's digital friction & how can it impact your business?

Even if you're unfamiliar with the term “digital friction,” you’ve likely experienced it. Gartner defines digital friction as any unnecessary effort an employee must exert to use data or technology to complete a task. It can appear as slow or crashing applications that disrupt your workflow. It can also mean juggling incompatible digital tools, or fielding so many alerts and notifications that the "digital noise" pulls you away from deep work.

That frustration doesn't stop with employees. It affects your business on multiple levels. Let's look at four of them: technology, operations, finances, and customer experience.

Technological impacts: Data silos and security risks

Digital friction frustrates end users, and it can also signal problems on the back end. Poorly integrated business systems create data silos and can lose or fail to pass along critical information. That raises security risks and makes errors more likely.

When approved tools slow them down, employees often turn to apps and personal devices that IT teams haven’t sanctioned. Security teams call this “shadow IT.” Shadow IT widens your attack surface and puts intellectual property at risk. In fact, the Omnissa State of Digital Workspace 2026 report found that employees who adopt AI apps on enterprise-managed devices often use unsanctioned ones. Those apps fall outside IT’s ability to monitor, support, and fix issues quickly.

Operational impacts: Lost efficiency and missed deadlines

"Friction" describes two things working against each other. It suggests wasted energy, wasted resources, and the frustration of not making progress. When business tools don’t work, employees often can’t work either. In "Digital Friction Holds Back Today's Businesses," a report from CIO sponsored by OpenText, employees ranked decreased efficiency as the top impact of digital friction. As small delays snowball, you might start to see missed deadlines, compressed workflows, and carefully designed plans thrown out of whack.

Financial impacts: Productivity, morale, and turnover

If time is money, lost productivity hits your bottom line. In the same report, 40% of employees reported lower satisfaction because of digital friction. Poor employee morale can create tense working environments where collaboration gets harder, projects stall, and business outcomes slip. Low morale can also drive up turnover, draining the knowledge and skills your workforce has built, which can take months or even years to replace.

Poor employee experience can also spill over to customers, especially in service industries, where employee experience is customer experience. Take the retail industry. The right technology should be easy to use, up to date, and built for staff on the move, so employees can focus on giving customers the best possible experience.

How to start reducing digital friction

Where does friction hide in your organization? Start with these three steps:

1. Measure experience, not just uptime. Track app crashes, slow logons, and device performance to find friction your dashboards miss.

2. Find the issues nobody reports. Many employees work around problems instead of filing tickets, so look at telemetry, not just ticket volume.

3. Fix problems before employees feel them. Use automated remediation to resolve common issues at scale and free up IT for higher-value work.
    

Learn more about preventing digital friction

Digital friction affects employees, operations, and customer experience, and it ultimately hits your bottom line. Fixing it isn't just an operational necessity. It's a business imperative.

Want to eliminate digital friction in your organization? View our guide, “Eliminate digital friction,” to explore what DEX tools can do, which features to look for, and how they can improve the employee experience across your organization.