Digital friction is quietly draining productivity

The UK is in the eye of a productivity storm. A lower productivity growth forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility is likely to shape the Budget and increase taxes. We already trail the United States by about 20% on output per hour, and our growth rate sits below most other G7 countries.

 

National productivity reflects what happens inside firms, so the question for business leaders is, “where is time being lost during the working day?” These losses aren’t for a lack of effort: UK staff put in an estimated £31 billion of unpaid overtime last year.

 

Part of the productivity issue is the everyday friction that gets between people and their work. A new Workplace Productivity Report shines a light on one of the reasons for this. It finds that frequent, digital disruptions interrupt workflows, frustrate staff, and lead to errors. Identifying this relationship between the digital experience of staff and productivity, the report estimates the impact on an average organisation with 13,500 employees to be equivalent to 470,000 hours of lost time a year.

 

 

Disruptions across the board

Tech frustration is nothing new, but the research highlights the frequency of interruptions. Employees experience about 14 digital disruptions, including application crashes, slow load times, and login errors, each week. Each negative event lasts just under three minutes, and research referenced in the report shows that even a delay of under five seconds can triple error rates for knowledge workers. Small interruptions add up into real output loss.

 

Leaders often underestimate the problem because much of this friction is never logged internally. Fewer than half of IT issues are reported, so the view from dashboards can be incomplete. In practice, leaders at a 13,500-person organisation estimate around 198,000 hours lost each year, but the data points to about 470,000 hours. That is an undercount of nearly 58%, equal to roughly 131 full time roles worth of output.

 

 

When tech gets in the way

The benefits of cloud services, business applications, and collaboration tools for modern organisations are clear. However, when performance slips, productivity slips with it.

 

Across 14 common work apps, slower load times are linked with higher user frustration. For example, PowerPoint’s load time is nearly three times the average, and Excel, Word, and ChatGPT also create short delays that break concentration. Even before work starts, slow devices can set the tone, with average boot times of over 50 seconds.

 

There is also avoidable spend tied up in the basics. In the study month, only about 20% of installed software was used by employees. On hardware, just 2% of older devices actually need replacing, while one in ten devices are overpowered for the user’s needs. New hardware and a vast array of apps do not necessarily lead to faster, or better, performance.

 

With greater visibility into how the tech is performing, software updates and configuration changes can make all the difference. This creates an opportunity to simplify, right-size technology across the organisation, and redirect hardware budget elsewhere, such as targeted training to aid productivity gains.

 

 

From friction to focus

The national productivity picture will be shaped in Westminster, but quick progress can happen within firms. Removing the everyday barriers that waste time should be a leadership priority for 2026.

 

This is where a Digital Employee Experience (DEX) model helps. A DEX strategy helps organisations ensure technology serves employees in a positive way. Leaders can start by getting a clear picture of how apps and devices perform for employees so that invisible friction becomes visible. Building on this, the moments that most often break focus, whether they are technical issues, adoption gaps, or training needs can be identified. The focus can then turn to fixing the high impact basics first, measuring the time saved and refining this process over time.

 

If productivity is the priority, begin by removing the digital friction already built into the working day. Leaders can then count the minutes back and turn the tide on falling productivity.

 

---

 

Jon Cairns is Chief Customer Officer at Nexthink

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and FG Trade