New research suggests that poor digital employee experience (DEX) is costing global businesses hundreds of thousands of hours in lost productivity annually, making digital friction a vital and underreported element of the global productivity crisis.
Analysis by DEX management leader, Nexthink, of nearly 500 digital workplaces suggests that unresolved IT issues are having an immense cumulative impact on enterprise performance and staff morale.
The True Cost of Digital Disruption
The report, based on data from over 20 million employee endpoints, quantifies the extent of the problem in clear terms:
- Lost Time: Poor DEX directly costs the average global business 470,000 hours per year. This is the equivalent of losing 226 full-time employees annually to technology issues.
- Frequent Frustration: The average employee suffers 14 negative digital experiences a week, including application glitches, slow load times, or device crashes.
- Productivity Loss Multiplier: Employees with consistently frustrating digital experiences suffer eight times the productivity loss compared to those with consistently good experiences.
Pedro Bados, CEO and Co-Founder of Nexthink, commented on the findings, calling the loss of millions of hours every year “unacceptable,” and arguing that it should no longer be regarded as “just another cost of doing business.”
The Psychological Price of Poor Tech
Beyond the sheer volume of lost time, the research highlights the compounding psychological effects of digital disruption:
- Error Rates: While the average negative event lasts a little under three minutes, studies show that delays of even less than five seconds are enough to triple people’s error rate.
- Loss of Flow: When employees are taken out of a flow state by a disruption, it can take around 23 minutes for them to fully return to productive work, significantly increasing the total amount of time lost.
This creates a serious challenge for the quality of work produced and pushes employees “to boiling point because they feel stuck and abandoned,” Bados added.
Recouping Productive Time
The data indicates a strong inverse correlation between an organisation’s overall DEX score and its productivity loss. For HR and business leaders, the research provides a clear metric for justifying investment in the digital experience:
For every 10-point increase to an organisation’s DEX score, employees would recoup an average of 22 productive minutes each week.
The study also found significant variation in time loss by sector, with retailers, healthcare providers, and financial service companies suffering 1.7 times the time loss of the tech industry. This suggests that while disruptive events occur at a similar frequency across sectors, the severity and impact of those events differ significantly. Ignoring these fundamental issues risks a business falling behind in the innovation race and losing talented people to competitors.