Is Your Technology Slowing You Down? Understanding Digital Friction

What is Digital Friction?

If you’ve never heard the term digital friction, you’re not alone—and that’s okay. At its core, digital friction is the unnecessary effort your team has to undertake to use technology, data, or digital workflows to get work done.

Here are a few concrete ways it shows up in real workplaces you may recognize:

• Your team member opens one app, then another, then a third, searching for the right file or piece of information instead of just getting on with their task.

• Someone is waiting on an approval or sees a notification buried so deep they miss it—and the project gets delayed or blocked.

• A process that should take minutes instead takes significantly longer because systems aren’t integrated, or people are switching context too much.

• Switching between 5+ applications just to complete a task.

In short: the promise of technology is to make work easier, but when there’s digital friction, it actually makes work harder.

Why It Matters for Business Owners

For business owners like you—especially if you’re less technical—the implications of digital friction may feel subtle or indirect, but they are real:

• Productivity loss: Research shows employees can lose 5 + hours per week due to poor digital experiences.

• Employee frustration + turnover: If your team feels their tools slow them down, you risk talent loss.

• Hidden costs: Time spent context switching, searching for info, dealing with overlapping systems adds up to real dollars and lost opportunities.

• Strategic drag: When digital friction exists, your team is less able to focus on high-value work—innovation, customer service, growth—and more on just keeping up.

In short: reducing digital friction isn’t just an “IT issue.” It’s a business issue.

What Causes Digital Friction?

Here are some of the key drivers—again, explained in plain business-owner language:

1. Too many tools, not enough coordination
   Your company has apps for files, apps for chat, apps for projects, overlapping systems—and people waste time trying to know which one to use. This “application overload” is a major cause of friction.

2. Poorly integrated workflows
   Even when the tools “work,” they don’t talk to each other. Someone might have to manually update multiple systems, duplicate data, or wait for someone else. That makes simple tasks clunky.

3. Information & digital noise
   Think of searching for a document, digging through chat threads, missed notifications. When your team can’t find what they need quickly, or gets interrupted constantly, friction eats away at focus.

4. Legacy tech / missing visibility
   Older systems, slow devices, limited visibility into how tools are performing—these make life harder, especially when employees are hybrid or remote.

Where This Connects with What We Do at Salient7

At Salient7, our mission is to help growing companies (roughly $1M-$500M in revenue) clarify priorities and build a strategy that aligns people, process, and technology. Reducing digital friction is a core part of that because when digital tools choke productivity, it undermines strategy execution.

Here’s how we approach it:

1. Discovery — let’s uncover where digital friction lives

• We run workshops and diagnostic sessions (like our whiteboard half-day with a CEO) where we map the major workflows your team uses (sales, operations, finance, service).

• We ask: Where are the handoffs? Where are the delays? Which tools are used for which task—and are people toggling between multiple systems?

• We also align tech questions with business priorities: “Does this tool enable our growth strategy, or simply maintain the status quo?”

2. Quantify the pain and get executive alignment

• With the diagnostic results, we show business owners: “Here’s where your team is spending time, attention and money on friction – instead of on your growth agenda.”

• This creates urgency: when executives see that strategy is being held back by unseen friction, the tech becomes a strategic priority rather than an afterthought.

3. Architecture of solutions — aligning tech to strategy

• We often recommend leveraging a platform like Microsoft 365 (M365) as the backbone. Why? Because it gives you:

  • AI for your internal M365 data (Copilot), as well as combining it with external AI knowledge sources

  • A unified collaboration environment (Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive)

  • Power Platform tools (Power Automate, Power Apps) to connect and automate workflows

  • Enterprise-grade security/control, memory which supports scale.

• Rather than adding more point solutions, the goal is simplification + integration: fewer systems, better workflows.

• Example: If your operations team currently is using a mix of spreadsheets, emails, and chat messages to approve service deliverables, we’ll map a streamlined process in M365: a Power Automate workflow triggers an approval request, data lives in a SharePoint list, notifications in Teams, records automatically archived—reducing toggling, miscues, and delays.

4. Adoption & change management

• Tool implementation without adoption means friction remains. Salient7 ensures you have the people side covered: clear role definitions, training, governance of what tool to use when, and a roadmap for solution launch and continuous improvement.

• We help embed digital dexterity (the flip side of friction) so your team becomes fluent in the tools, rather than constantly fighting them.

5. Measure & iterate

• Post-implementation, we set metrics: time saved, number of tool switches reduced, number of unresolved tickets, approval delays cut.

• We monitor and adjust. Digital friction isn’t “solved once” – as your business changes (growth, hybrid work, acquisitions) new friction points may emerge—and the system must adapt.

What You Can Do Right Now (Actionable Steps for Business Owners)

Even if you’re not ready for a full strategy overhaul, here are three steps you can take this week:

• Ask your team: “What tools/processes frustrate you most? What are the most repetitive tasks?”
  Encourage candid feedback. The pain may be hidden but it’s costing you.

• Map a core process (e.g., new customer onboarding, service delivery, or billing) from start to finish, and count how many systems your team must touch. If it’s more than 2-3, there’s likely friction.

• Inventory your tech stack: how many apps are in use? Which ones overlap? Do people know which tool to use when? If you have overlapping systems, duplicated data, or multiple places to check, you’ve got a friction hotspot.

Final Thoughts

In a world where your competition, customer expectations, and employee experience are evolving rapidly, digital friction is the drag you can’t ignore. It’s subtle—but it’s real. Investing in clarity of tools, processes, integration, and adoption isn’t “just IT” — it’s strategic.

At Salient7, we help business owners cut through the clutter, make technology work for you, not against you—so your team is enabled to focus on growth, your strategy is executed with excellence, and you get more time back to lead rather than manage.

If you’re ready, we’d be happy to help you map where your digital friction is and craft a plan to remove it.