Almost a third of employees have given up reporting when they have IT issues, with more than half resorting to using their own, or unauthorised, tools to get their jobs done.
This is according to a new report by Altron Digital Business, which found that IT leaders may not have a full picture of the support their unit provides, with anything in the workplace technology environment that slows people down, interrupts their work or makes it harder to do their job costing companies millions a year.
The Employee Technology Experience Index shows employees lose an average of 76 minutes a week to technology disruptions – the equivalent of 7.6 working days a year – while an employee disrupted multiple times a day is estimated to cost an organisation R143 000 a year.
Claimed to be the first-of-its-kind benchmark study focused on how employees experience technology across eight major institutions in the financial services industry, the index is based on input from 385 employees and was conducted by Lightspeed, part of the Kantar Group, during April.
The report also found a 235-fold difference in the cost associated with the most disrupted employees compared with the least disrupted. “The data suggests tech-related friction and disruption is estimated to cost institutions between R3.2 million and R30 million per 1 000 employees per year,” it says.
Craig Stewart, MD of Altron Digital Business, says the biggest productivity losses tend to occur higher up the organisation, where managers and senior executives who oversee teams are disrupted. Because these employees command higher salaries and their work affects more people, technology downtime has a disproportionate impact on the business.
BYOD with a twist
IT leaders may have an incomplete picture of technology performance because employees increasingly stop reporting problems and instead find workarounds, leading to what it terms a “visibility problem”.
More than 28% of employees said they had stopped raising technology issues because nothing changes, while 52% admitted using personal devices, personal e-mail or unofficial tools to get their work done. This, the report finds, leads to slower or worse customer interactions, with almost half of all respondents indicating this was their experience.
“Tech-related friction is not just an IT problem. It is a productivity and revenue risk that compounds with disruption frequency,” the report states. Stewart says just over half of respondents found that a slow network was a common cause of friction.
Deloitte’s Digital Workplace Productivity+ Series, published in October 2024, found that 34% of workers are not satisfied with their workforce experience, with 89% believing that being happier and more satisfied at work would make them more productive.
Sneaky IT
Among employees with the poorest technology experience, 72% used so-called “shadow IT”, while employees who experienced frequent technology disruptions were five times more likely to become regular shadow IT users, Altron Digital Business says.
This causes security issues, with Stewart saying employees who use hardware, software, apps or online services without their company’s permission could place data at risk.
Stewart tells ITWeb that technology workarounds create practical security risks, from employees switching to personal hotspots – bypassing the company’s managed network and security controls – and using their own devices, to storing company or customer information outside approved systems as well as uploading confidential data to unauthorised tools.
These shortcuts create governance, cyber security and Protection of Personal Information Act compliance risks because they bypass company-approved technology, making it harder to protect, monitor and control sensitive data.
Throwing money at it
However, employees that have good IT environments are happier and more productive, says Stewart. “Obviously, what we found was that just having really good, really proactive IT support is very positively correlated with a strong employee experience on the back of that.”
Stewart says developing this environment is “not about pouring money into technology and expecting employee sentiments, employee productivity, and by virtue of that customer experience to improve” as this is “just a hygiene factor”.
The answer is investing more strategically, says Stewart. “These days, there are proactive AI operations, where you can start to monitor degradation in certain areas of that network.
“You will see indicators that start to give you a sense that there’s going to be an issue. So, if your proactive monitoring is in place, you can pick those issues up.” He notes that AI can be used to monitor network degradation, for example.
“I think what’s been lost a little bit is the value of the employee and the impact of technology on the employee experience, specifically, in a market and in an industry where skills are really valuable.”
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