Ivanti’s new 2025 Digital Employee Experience Report suggests that many organisations may be overestimating their success in delivering effective digital experiences for staff, even as employee frustration, tech-related interruptions and stalled integration efforts continue to mount.

According to the report, organisations think they’re winning at digital employee experience (DEX) – but employee frustration and stalled progress tell a different story, with Ivanti arguing that digital friction at work leads to lower productivity and sinking morale – with many organisations slow to address the problem.

The findings are based on a global survey of more than 3,300 IT professionals and end users, administered by Ravn Research, with panelists recruited by MSI Advanced Customer Insights. Ivanti says the study was designed to understand what organisations are doing to enable positive digital employee experience (DEX) and the significant barriers organizations face in delivering frictionless experiences.

Business value recognised, but DEX stalls

Ivanti positions digital employee experience as a core business issue, not just an IT concern.

The report notes that “every time an employee opens their laptop, signs into the company network, uses IT systems or tools, or calls the help desk, they’re having a digital employee experience (DEX). And those daily interactions shape everything from employee satisfaction to operational efficiency to innovation.”

The report says the business impact of effectively managed DEX is substantial, with IT professionals overwhelmingly linking strong DEX to positive outcomes. According to the survey, 87% of IT teams say strong DEX positively affects productivity, 85% say it positively affects satisfaction and 77% say it improves employee retention.

Ivanti adds that DEX has implications for security posture as well as engagement, stating that its influence extends beyond employee performance and attitudes. 89% of IT professionals say prioritising DEX has a positive impact on security efforts because improving digital experience disincentivizes unsafe workarounds.

Ivanti’s chief executive officer, Dennis Kozak, says: “By investing in DEX, CIOs can enhance their role — from being seen as primarily focused on mundane operations, to being strategic contributors and business accelerators.”

However, despite this recognition, Ivanti reports that both adoption and integration of DEX-management strategies have stalled.

In 2025, 77% of IT professionals say their organisations measure and manage DEX, up just two points since 2023, and only 50% call DEX a “high priority” or greater.

Enterprise organisations are singled out as finding DEX particularly difficult to operationalise, with ageing legacy platforms and complex ecosystems cited as constraints. In that group, 67% report they measure and track DEX, compared to 81% of mid-sized companies.

Leadership buy-in and the confidence gap

The report highlights leadership support as another weak point, with only 41% of IT professionals saying they have ‘high buy-in’ from their company leaders (down 3 points since last year). And the majority (57%) report their company leaders say they value DEX management, but in reality, do little to support it.”

Ivanti also points to a disconnect between IT’s confidence and the underlying maturity of their DEX programmes. It says “IT professionals report a relatively high level of confidence about their own organisations’ DEX achievements even while Ivanti’s research points to multiple areas of underperformance. For example, 77% say they measure and track DEX, and 85% say DEX is a high priority.”

At the same time, few organisations (23%) report their use of DEX strategies and tactics is ‘advanced’ — i.e., includes comprehensive DEX monitoring, measurement and automation. And many (42%) say they’ve invested in DEX solutions but still struggle to automate processes and monitor endpoints.

“The cost of getting DEX wrong keeps rising,” Ivanti warns, as digital friction “throws sand in the gears of the modern enterprise.”

Digital friction, productivity loss and generational pressure

Ivanti says office workers now give their workplace tech tools only a “B-” grade, with older workers expressing even less satisfaction than their younger colleagues. The report quantifies the impact of repeated tech issues and security updates on productivity.

The report states that employees report being interrupted by tech problems 3.6 times per month on average, plus another 2.7 interruptions from mandatory security updates.

Assuming each interruption takes at least 15 minutes to resolve, that’s 1.6 hours of lost productivity per employee per month. For a company of 2,000 employees with an average fully loaded hourly cost of $100, this translates to $320,000 in lost productivity monthly — nearly $4 million annually.

Slow network connections, and poor application and device performance are identified as typical pain points, with the report stating that “these problems aren’t trivial. Nearly 2 in 3 office workers tell us negative experiences with tools and apps actually affect their mood at work.”

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Ivanti says demographic shifts are raising expectations further.

Younger employees enter the workforce with fundamentally different relationships with technology — they expect seamless, intuitive experiences and have little patience for clunky systems or workarounds.

As these digital natives become a larger portion of the workforce, organisations that fail to prioritise DEX will find themselves dealing with increasingly frustrated employees who simply won’t tolerate the friction that previous generations accepted.

At the same time, digital friction is “creating upstream challenges for IT professionals”.

Tech stack complexity is cited as a growing barrier: Some 41% of IT professionals cite complexity as an issue that prevents their organisation from prioritising DEX — up 7 points in just one year.