Poor DEX directly costs global businesses an average of 470,000 hours per year, equivalent to around 226 full-time employees, according to a new report from Nexthink, Cracking the DEX Equation: The Annual Workplace Productivity Report. This indicates that digital friction is a vital and underreported element of the global productivity crisis.
The report finds that the average employee suffers 14 negative digital experiences a week. These include device crashes, application glitches, or slow load times, and can reduce productivity and collaboration while also increasing employee frustration and stress. Crucially, the research also indicates a strong inverse correlation between an organization's DEX score and productivity loss. For every 10-point increase to the overall DEX score, employees would recoup an average of 22 productive minutes each week.
"Quantifying the immense cumulative impact of bad DEX is truly eye-opening," commented Pedro Bados, CEO and Co-Founder of Nexthink. "Employees who constantly have frustrating digital experiences suffer eight times the productivity loss compared to those who have consistently good experiences. All told, enterprises are losing millions of hours every year because of malfunctioning technology. This is unacceptable, yet it's regarded by many as just another cost of doing business."
The research also suggests that these consistent disruptions are not just a threat to enterprise productivity, but also to the quality of work employees produce. The average negative event lasts a little under 3 minutes (167 seconds), yet research from the American Psychological Association suggests that even delays of less than 5 seconds are enough to triple people's error rate. Moreover, research from the University of California has shown that if when employees are taken out of their flow state it takes around 23 minutes for them to return, further increasing the amount of lost time.
Averaging lost time by industry shows significant variation with retailers, healthcare providers, and financial service companies suffering 1.7x the time loss of the tech industry. The number of disruptive events per week was almost identical, regardless of industry however, suggesting that the variance in time loss is down to the severity of events rather than the volume.
"Even small digital disruptions can cascade into hours of lost productivity," added Bados. "But often these incidents are much bigger with employees losing whole days as a result. This isn't just about overall enterprise productivity, it's also about digital friction pushing people to boiling point because they feel stuck and abandoned — a feeling that is being turbo-charged in the AI era. If IT departments don't address these fundamental issues, the business will lose talented people to competitors, become less collaborative, and fall behind in the innovation race, all of which will inevitably have serious implications for their bottom line."
Methodology: Nexthink's analysis is based on proprietary data from more than 20m endpoints across 474 global businesses. The figures in this report are derived from aggregated, anonymized telemetry from organizations largely in the early stages of DEX management.