Organisations have increasingly turned to technology to make work faster, easier and more productive. New tools promise better collaboration, quicker access to information and more efficient ways of working.
But adding more technology hasn’t always made work simpler. For employees, the growing number of platforms, channels and systems can create a new set of problems: switching between tools, searching for information and working out where things live. Instead of saving time, technology can sometimes create more work.
Haiilo’s latest research, reported in the State of the Employee Experience 2026, revealed an uncomfortable number: 60 per cent of people are losing at least half a day every week dealing with disconnected tools and processes. This is an experience failure that leadership tracking and measurements aren’t bringing to light.
Here are five things every leader needs to understand about digital friction in the workplace.
1. Digital friction is real, and it's everywhere.
Digital friction is the time and effort people lose navigating the tools they use at work.
This can mean switching between apps to find information, working out where things are stored or moving between platforms to complete a single task – all time that could otherwise be spent doing their jobs.
None of this feels dramatic in the moment, but when 67.5 per cent of employees switch between multiple tools to complete a task, it quickly adds up. What looks like a series of small interruptions can become a significant drain on employees’ time, attention and capacity to get work done.
2. More technology has made the experience worse, not better.
When we keep trying to solve broken work by adding to it, such as introducing another channel or platform, psychologists have a name for it: additive bias. This is the instinct to fix problems by piling on rather than stripping back.
This results in fragmentation and shifts the burden to people when systems don’t connect.
Employees often become the translators, taking on more work to remember where things live and patch the gaps, so the momentum of their work doesn’t stall.
AI will not rescue scattered information on its own, and when handled poorly, it risks becoming another place where information is stored. However, when organisations get the foundations right and invest time in the robust adoption of AI tools, they can be valuable for speeding up processes and freeing up employees to focus on the work itself.
3. Adoption metrics are hiding the real problem.
At board level, the picture can look reassuring when tracking the usage of digital tools. When adoption curves point upwards, organisations often assume that this is boosting productivity.
But adoption tells you almost nothing about how work feels and hides the fact that, even when tools are implemented, they can still cost people hours every week.
The metrics that prove the effectiveness of tools are different:
- How many tools do employees juggle in a week?
- How often does a task demand cross-tool switching?
- How long do people spend searching?
- How much capacity disappears into fixing fragmentation?
Focus is now the scarcest resource in the workplace. Until leaders measure digital tool accessibility and productivity, they end up paying for time drains that they can’t see.
4. Invisible 'glue work' is quietly draining your organisation.
There is a category of work that officially doesn’t exist.
Glue work is the work that needs to happen before an employee can complete the work on their list, such as chasing updates across tools, reformatting information so it can travel and reconciling versions of information that nobody is responsible for. Sixty per cent of employees lose at least half a day a week to it, and roughly 15 per cent lose a full day.
Because glue work never shows up in a report, it is rarely addressed in strategy. But it slows execution and masks deeper issues. When most of your workforce is fixing system-level problems, leaders are facing a design issue rather than a behavioural one.
5. Simpler, more connected experiences are the fix.
Achieving a more valuable digital workplace doesn’t have to be complex – it should help to reduce the number of places people are expected to check. By making the ownership of information clearer and ensuring communication reaches the right people without forcing them to hunt for it, time spent switching and searching between tools should be reduced.
This is where connected communication is most valuable. When updates land reliably in one trusted place, employees don’t miss what matters, and their day-to-day experience feels supportive rather than demanding.
More than one in four respondents (28.3 per cent) say poor workplace tools have made them consider leaving a job. To avoid this, there are three things organisations might want to consider:
- consolidating scattered channels into one coherent home for communication
- measuring time-to-information and friction, not just adoption
- simplifying before augmenting, especially with AI.|
The leadership imperative
The way we work is changing, but the measures we use to understand productivity have not always kept pace. For leaders, this creates an opportunity to ask a different question: not simply whether technology is being used, but whether it is helping people do their best work.
As organisations continue to invest in AI and new workplace technologies, that distinction will become increasingly important. The challenge is not to keep adding to the digital workplace, but to make sure every addition has a clear purpose for the people expected to use it.
