5 Ways to Reduce Digital Friction in your Team

Blair Williamson

4 minute read

Leadership and staff are increasingly focused on enhancing work processes and productivity. Yet teams are still switching between apps to get work done.
Digital friction is defined as the unnecessary effort an employee spends trying to use data or technology.

Digital friction runs the gamut. It might mean an overflowing inbox or juggling multiple communication channels. You may need to switch between applications and software platforms to complete basic tasks. If this sounds familiar, you’re experiencing digital friction. And for most of us working in hybrid digital-first workspaces, it is a daily problem.

What if the tools we use daily could work together, simply, and smoothly? How can we streamline processes that are both frustrating and time-consuming? How can we create more human-centric tools that help rather than hinder the hybrid digital workforce?

Turn Your Intranet into the Place to Get Work Done

Download our free guide to learn about LumApps' AI-powered features that help turn your intranet into a destination workplace.

At LumApps, we design intranet tools to help improve productivity and the employee experience. Crafted to evolve and align with the needs of a changing digital workforce, our AI-based technology is a powerful resource in the fight against digital friction.

Here are five ways that an AI-powered intranet like LumApps can help your team reduce digital friction:

1. Implement a Personalized Employee Dashboard

Research on workplace productivity points to the high cost of wasted time and labor when teams aren't able to work efficiently. Nearly 20% of home, office, and hybrid workers rate their digital employee experience as poor. Worse, over 35% identified the need to switch between different applications as a major problem.

It’s no surprise that workers spend up to 5.5 hours per week dealing with technology concerns. Whether that’s because the available tools didn’t work as expected, or they just weren’t right for the job, the result is digital friction.

LumApps’ employee dashboard technology helps cut through digital friction and application sprawl. It brings the technology and tools that workers need all in one place. It provides each employee with a personalized 360˚ view of their workspace and integrates resources from third-party apps & services.

LumApps makes it easy for employees to complete tasks without leaving their dashboards. It serves as a complete destination for company information, data, and services.

2. Use AI-powered text-to-speech and robust search features

By combining generative AI with natural language processing, the Ask LumApps feature simplifies the search.
The feature automatically indexes all company content sources, searching these knowledge bases to empower employees to solve problems independently across various platforms and devices, delivering valuable and actionable insights.

LumApps AI also has a built-in text-to-speech feature. By letting employees listen to articles, this functionality supports visually impaired team members and benefits on-the-go employees who don’t have time to read full-length reports. It’s especially useful for frontline workers who prefer to listen while managing other tasks.

3. Enable nudges and prompts

Our powerful AI technology uses proactive nudges to remind employees and catch their attention about important updates they should read. Push notifications help users with friendly prompts, and time-consuming tasks like reminders and calendar invites are automatically generated.

The AI “nudges” can also be used for content gardening to help eliminate the content graveyards that are so common on legacy intranet systems. The system can prompt users to keep content as current as possible by identifying old content that should be updated or if there’s duplicate content that should be validated.

The proactive nudges can be personalized, with each employee able to set up their own preferred notifications and prompts. The technology, tailored to each employee’s specific context, directs them to adjacent and complementary tasks and content.

4. Integrate important business apps into your intranet

The most direct way to reduce digital friction is to reduce the number of times an employee has to switch apps. Instead, integrate your business apps into your intranet so employees can get more done directly from the intranet dashboard. LumApps comes with pre-built integrations for many popular apps, or you can build your own micro app.

Our micro-app technology expedites custom micro-app development and makes it easy to leverage a host of popular business apps like CRM, ERP, SCM, and more.

The beauty lies in the fact that employees can carry out these tasks without switching to the third-party interface. or navigating through additional menus. This streamlined approach not only enhances efficiency but also boosts productivity among employees.

5. Simplify access to data and tasks

Wondering about holidays or about paid time off (PTO)? LumApps AI understands your query using its powerful natural language processing capabilities and third-party integrations. Don’t have time to read a full article? LumApps can generate a text summary or transform text into speech.

Offering a powerful AI-powered digital front door, our technology centralizes tools and communications for all team members. It offers adaptable and quick access to services, streamlines information display, and allows each employee to personalize their work environment.
Our seamlessly integrated AI solutions empower individual workers and their teams. Improving processes and helping businesses and their employees grow, our technology reduces digital friction and streamlines time-to-task effort.

Leaders in the Forrester Wave: Intranet Platforms for 2024 and a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, LumApps creates a human-centric space where you and your teams can learn, grow, and generate meaningful and productive outcomes. Our Companion AI technology helps our clients improve the employee experience and reduce digital friction – providing a personalized work experience and delivering the right message to the right people, through the right channel, at the right time.