IT issues cost 100s of 1,000s of hours in lost productivity
A new report shows that poor digital employee experience (DEX) directly costs global businesses an average of 470,000 hours per year in lost productivity, equivalent to around 226 full-time employees.
The study from Nexthink, based on analysis of data from more than 20m endpoints across 474 global businesses, finds 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.
The research also indicates a strong link 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,” says 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.”
It’s not only productivity that suffers, the quality of work is an issue too. The average negative event lasts a little under three minutes (167 seconds), yet research from the American Psychological Association suggests that even delays of less than five seconds are enough to triple people’s error rate. Moreover, research from the University of California has shown that 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 1.7 times the time loss of the tech industry, although the number of disruptive events per week was almost identical.
“Even small digital disruptions can cascade into hours of lost productivity,” adds 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.”
You can get the full report from the Nexthink site.
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