Feature
Software complexity costs the U.S. economy nearly $1 trillion annually. Employees lose seven hours every week — almost a full workday — navigating fragmented tools and duplicated workflows. And systems meant to help are driving people away: 38% of workers cite organizational complexity as a reason they're likely to leave within a year, with another 17% pointing to poor or difficult software, according to the recent Freshworks' Cost of Complexity report.
Despite record investment in workplace technology, employees remain frustrated, distracted and overwhelmed. New tools promise seamless collaboration and higher productivity, yet everyday work is increasingly defined by app sprawl, constant interruptions and processes that feel misaligned with how work actually gets done.
The financial evidence is stark. According to Freshworks' report, which surveyed 700 professionals across IT, customer experience, finance and operations, organizational and software complexity drains an average of 7% of annual revenue — a loss roughly equal to the size of a typical R&D budget.
More than half of companies admit they haven't received the return on investment they planned from their software, while a third cite lost revenue from software delays and missed business opportunities.
Workers contend with 15 software solutions and four communication channels on average, while almost half say their team works in silos and nearly 40% report their organization lacks a single source of truth.
"For years, companies have been conditioned to believe complexity signals sophistication," said Dennis Woodside, chief executive of Freshworks, in the report. "The very tools meant to help businesses move faster are now holding them back."
Table of Contents
- Tools Built for Vendors, Not Workers
- Where Friction Kills Productivity
- The Cost of Employee Surveillance
- When Complexity Drives People Out
- Who's Accountable for the Digital Employee Experience?
Tools Built for Vendors, Not Workers
The cause is a misalignment between how tools are designed and how work flows.
Friction results when tools are not aligned with employee needs, said Daniel Burrus, a technology futurist and strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies. The biggest slowdown, he said, isn't bandwidth — it's wasted knowledge, talent and technology that already exists inside organizations but goes unseen or unused.
"All too often, tools are built around vendor features rather than the reality of actual workflows," Burrus said. "Real transformation comes from aligning technology with how employees want to work and not how a vendor thinks they might work."
Nik Kale, principal engineer at Cisco Systems and founder of the company's Digital Adoption Platform, said he sees this play out daily. Most tools are designed around product features and roadmaps, not end-to-end work, he said. Employees adapt their behavior to the tool, rather than the tool adapting to how work flows across teams.
In many enterprises, even a basic task spans five to 10 systems, with each additional system adding cognitive load, delays and opportunities for error.
"Friction shows up at handoffs and context switches—moving between tools, re-authenticating, re-entering the same information or figuring out where a task actually lives," Kale explained. "The work itself is often simple; navigating the systems around it is not."
Most friction points employees face are relational rather than technical: insufficient collaboration, unclear expectations, interdepartmental silos and feelings that individual contributions don't matter, said Alexandra Suchman, chief executive and co-founder of Barometer XP, which helps teams address workplace dysfunction.
"It's very tempting to believe that an out-of-the-box technology can solve these problems, but the technology doesn't fix the underlying root causes," Suchman said. "People who usually make decisions about new tools are not the ones who will be using them daily, nor are they the ones experiencing the problems most acutely."
Where Friction Kills Productivity
Take multifactor authentication (MFA), said Ryan McElroy, vice president of technology at the consulting firm Hylaine. Many organizations have adopted multiple tools that require repeated MFA checks to log in and get work done.
"Every time an employee has to stop, search for their phone, wait for a cycle and then enter their code, they're destroying any flow state they had," McElroy said. "Pulling hands and eyes from the computer back to the phone is a major attention and workflow interrupter."
Some salespeople working with convenience and discount retailers needed four systems to enter a typical order, each with unique interfaces, authentication mechanisms and even physical hardware.
Meanwhile, well-intentioned controls backfire. Web blockers that restrict access to platforms such as Reddit or YouTube may help employees doing rote work, but restrict knowledge workers who research as part of their job.
David Radin, who works on AI and expert systems at Confirmed, identifies two causes more frequent than all others combined: poorly executed systems and aversion to change.
Most often, when a new system frustrates users, decision-makers didn't think through its effects or create an effective change management plan.
"When it comes to large-scale implementation of almost any technology, even the simplest, it requires a strong objective, implementation and often customization to meet that objective, communications, training, support and caring for the system," Radin explained. "When any one of these aspects is either non-existent or poorly designed, the system will underperform, it will not be adopted as easily as expected and it will cause anxiety on the intended users."
The Cost of Employee Surveillance
Another factor is employee monitoring. When productivity tools prioritize monitoring over functionality, employees experience it as surveillance rather than support, which erodes trust and often leads to workarounds that defeat the original intent.
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Burrus called this a "soft trend” that organizations don’t have to accept as inevitable. More often than not, such surveillance creates fear rather than performance, while in an anticipatory culture, trust should be the foundation, he said.
McElroy sees it differently, noting he hasn't seen monitoring as a major factor in reducing trust, with data showing similar patterns even in organizations with mature tracking systems.
Either way, the point stands: technology meant to boost productivity may undermine the trust required for that productivity.
When Complexity Drives People Out
All these consequences waste more than time. According to the Freshworks research, 60% of surveyed employees said they are at least somewhat likely to leave their organizations within the next year, with primary reasons including organizational complexity, complicated processes and burnout. Nearly 20% of workers said someone on their team quit or burned out because of a software implementation in the past year.
This isn't just turnover statistics. When employees are burned out by complexity, they don’t show up for each other or their customers. Morale plummets, collaboration suffers and innovation stalls. Every departure disrupts momentum, weakens creativity and erodes the institutional knowledge that helps a business grow.
Who's Accountable for the Digital Employee Experience?
The accountability gap makes things worse. Ownership of the digital employee experience is usually fragmented across IT, HR, security and product teams, which means the experience between systems falls through the cracks, Kale said. While enterprise architects would ideally be accountable, even the best people in this role are often far from the frontline, McElroy said.
Burrus blames leadership. Creating a smooth digital employee experience requires breaking down silos and understanding employee needs across all departments, he said. Many rules and controls today were created for a world that no longer exists, he said. "Rules should be created to increase speed, insight, or trust — otherwise it's just noise.”
Measurement is also an issue. Organizations excel at tracking deployment and adoption but struggle to determine whether work is easier.
Kale advocates measuring friction directly: task completion paths, time spent navigating tools, number of handoffs and how often employees need help to get unstuck. McElroy suggests monitoring employee satisfaction, combined with adoption data rather than self-reported usage.
"Is this technology giving my people more time to think, to create and solve problems we are facing today?” Burrus said. “Or is this technology just pushing them to do more?"
As hybrid and remote work gets added to the mix, the gap between technological capability and human experience continues to widen. Organizations mistake deployment for progress, measuring adoption while ignoring whether work feels easier.
Ironically, companies spend billions on tools to make employees more productive, then watch those same employees spend nearly a full day each week just trying to use them. The future, as Freshworks' Woodside noted, belongs to those who remove friction. But getting there requires acknowledging that in the race to digitize everything, complexity isn't sophistication, but is holding everyone back.
Editor's Note: Read more on how to improve the digital employee experience:
- Unifying Workflow Silos: The Third Principle of Digital Employee Experience — Efficient, end-to-end workflows are strategic levers for productivity, employee experience and sustained business performance.
- A Comprehensive, Actionable Model for Employee Experience — A common approach to employee experience tells you to improve the "moments that matter." I suggest you should pay attention to the other 90% of employees' time.
- Too Many Collaboration Apps Are Bogging Down Employees — Growing evidence shows the proliferation of collaboration apps is harming productivity. But is the problem the technology or the process?