Editorial
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is finally being recognized as a strategic lever for business performance. According to the IDC 2025 CEO Priorities Report, CEOs are aligning technology investments with employee experience and trust outcomes, making DEX a core part of digital transformation strategies. This shift means that measuring how people experience their work environments should not only account for they feel but also uncover the hidden signals that reveal how work actually flows.
Alongside traditional engagement surveys, exit interviews and cost per head KPIs, organizations need to define a new value metric tailored to their unique context. This metric should reflect how time, energy and attention are consumed across the digital workplace. Such a metric looks beyond the obvious and surfaces the hidden inefficiencies that quietly weaken productivity, morale and the bottom line.
Sound familiar? A task that requires one too many clicks. A report that takes hours to compile but is barely read. It’s often not the major workflows that compromise excellence. It’s the subtle friction that drains value.
Identifying Digital Friction and Waste
Once you start looking for it, waste in the digital employee experience becomes hard to ignore. These aren’t just annoyances — they’re signals of misaligned value that erode time, energy and focus. Chances are, you’ve experienced some of these yourself:
- Inefficient Approvals: Multi-step approval chains that delay decisions, often involving stakeholders who add little or no value to the process.
- Unnecessary Meetings: Recurring meetings with no clear agenda or outcomes, held out of habit rather than need.
- Shadow IT: Employees adopting unsanctioned tools to bypass friction in systems, creating risk and fragmentation.
To uncover hidden friction and waste in your organization, you need to understand how work gets done. This means combining behavior analytics, digital friction scores and employee feedback loops to capture the full picture of how the digital employee experience is both provided and consumed.
Behavior analytics track how employees interact with tools by capturing system and data touches, time on task, workflow drop-offs and tool switching frequency.
Digital Friction Scores quantify the effort required to complete digital tasks. Metrics such as click counts, navigation depth, system response times, error rates and repeated actions help pinpoint areas for improvement.
- Employee feedback loops provide qualitative context through timely pulse surveys, open text sentiment analysis and ratings of perceived ease, satisfaction and effectiveness.
By integrating these data streams, you can identify inefficiencies, quantify their impact, and take action to improve business outcomes.
Addressing Digital Friction and Waste
Organizations can act through two coordinated strategies to address any friction: redesigning work for flow and building a culture of continuous optimization. Together, these strategies ensure that digital friction isn’t just identified — it’s continuously reduced through intentional design and sustained action.
Use Data-Driven Insights to Simplify Work
Simplifying work steps include reengineering high-friction workflows, automating repetitive tasks, reducing tool-switching and eliminating unnecessary approvals or meetings. The goal is to restore focus, reduce cognitive load and improve the overall flow of work.
These actions directly support Principle #3: Unifying Workflow Silos, which highlights the need to “design for the full journey of work, not just isolated tasks.”
It also echoes Principle #4: Connecting Platforms for Humans, which reminds us that “integration isn’t just about systems talking to each other — it’s about making work feel intuitive and human.”
Build a Culture of Continuous Optimization
Treat digital experience as a shared responsibility that evolves with the needs of the workforce. Provide teams with visibility into their digital behaviors and the autonomy to improve them. Acknowledge and act on employee feedback by initiating targeted improvements. Establish cross-functional governance to bring IT, HR, Operations and business leaders together to collaboratively prioritize initiatives and track progress. The culture must support systematic and candid calibrations where people can surface and address friction openly and iteratively.
Principle #2: Bridging Business and User Context, which calls for “balancing organizational goals with the lived reality of employees,” aligns with this.
It also reinforces Principle #1: A Blueprint That Binds, which advocates for a shared reference architecture to guide digital decisions. As that article notes, “without a unifying blueprint, digital experience becomes fragmented and inconsistent.”
Organizations like People First Technologies (PFT) are already putting this experience-centric approach into action. PFT partners with companies to identify and reduce digital friction while boosting employee engagement and wellbeing. Their approach combines AI-powered insights with the proprietary 5R framework, developed by renowned researcher and innovator, Cécile Dejoux.
Dejoux’s “Care Management” model optimizes team and individual employee engagement through five dimensions: roles, rules, routines, respect and recognition. By focusing on these experiential elements, companies can more easily uncover inefficiencies and shift their organizational mindset from culture to care.
I see human beings as a source of strength, capital and success.
CEO, People First Technologies
Defining Value Together
A meaningful reduction of digital friction requires organizations to align on a common definition of value for their unique context. Stakeholders must agree on a shared metric that reflects how time, energy and attention are consumed and what value is generated in return across the digital workplace.
Just like a reference architecture provides a shared blueprint for digital systems, a well-defined value metric acts as a north star for teams. It calibrates teams, informs priorities and keeps everyone working toward the same outcome. The right metric will be relevant, measurable and actionable. For example, tool adoption and usage rates can reveal whether employees are engaging with the platforms provided or bypassing them and creating financial waste due to friction or lack of perceived value.
But alignment is not always easy. Bias and subjectivity can easily creep into the process, especially when different teams have competing priorities or operate in silos. To counter this, organizations can adopt structured and equitable decision-making practices such as blind or independent peer reviews to evaluate proposed metrics and ensure they reflect a balanced view of value.
Scenario testing, which simulates how different metrics would perform across departments or roles can also help uncover unintended consequences and ensure the chosen metric works equitably across the organization.
This process requires cross-functional teams to come together to define what “good” looks like, not just from a systems perspective, but from the lived experience of diverse employees. When teams co-create the value metric, they’re more invested in achieving it.
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Key Steps for Core Principle #5
- Define Value in Context: Align on a shared, relevant metric that reflects how employees’ time, energy and attention are consumed and what value they create in return.
- Diagnose Friction with Insight: Use behavior analytics, digital friction scores and employee feedback to uncover hidden inefficiencies in how work gets done.
- Redesign and Optimize Continuously: Streamline workflows, reduce cognitive load and empower teams to make systematic, candid improvements over time.
- Ensure Fairness and Alignment: Use blind peer reviews, scenario testing and cross-functional collaboration to reduce bias and ensure the metric works equitably across the organization.
By measuring what truly matters, organizations can transform invisible inefficiencies into visible opportunities, unlocking the full potential of their digital workplace. Together, the five DEX principles offer a blueprint not just for better technology, but for meaningful work — and stronger business outcomes.
Editor's Note: Missed the previous principles? Catch up on all five principles of digital employee experience.
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