Do passwords impact productivity?

They do. With 60% of US workers surveyed saying passwords stop them from doing their jobs, passwords impact productivity significantly.

Today we released the results of our new Axiad Fall 2021 Passwords & Productivity Survey providing insight into behaviors and attitudes on identity and authentication.

Survey Results

We analyzed responses from 2,000 office workers in the US to learn how identity credential management issues are impacting productivity, and found that:

● 60% admit that authentication processes have stopped them from doing their job

● 59% have had to contact the IT department at their workplace because they were locked out of their computer, with almost half (48%) saying they’ve been locked out of productivity and communication apps like Slack

● Just under half of all respondents (48%) have forgotten their passwords at some point

● On average, it takes almost 5 hours (4 hours 43 minutes) to fix authentication issues at work, with 15% admitting it that it takes 9 hours or longer to fix authentication issues at their workplace

● While 67% of respondents said they are aware of multi-factor authentication as an alternative to passwords, 46% said their own IT departments had never asked them to use anything other than passwords.

Respondents also reported the challenges of using passwords, including:

● 63% of US office workers surveyed consider passwords to be a problem

● Over two fifths (43%) say this is because they are annoying and more than a third (35%) believe passwords are a problem because they are a security risk

● Almost half (46%) agree that creating passwords tests their memory

● 45% feel that creating passwords is frustrating, and 35% say creating passwords is stressful because they can’t find one strong enough

Conclusion

The survey results prove that current approaches to authentication are failing employees. Frustrations are high when so many password-based authentication issues get in the way of employees doing their job.

The good news is that with Axiad, IT leaders can and must take more initiative to move away from passwords and transition to a user-centric passwordless authentication that reduces these frustrations. The Axiad Cloud platform provides easy support and management of all the credentials you need, all in one place.

The Fall 2021 Passwords & Productivity Survey was conducted on behalf of Axiad by OnePoll in September 2021 with 2,000 workers at companies with 1,000 or more employees.

**Update: View Axiad’s 2022 Survey results.