Job Crafting in Low-Usability Automation Situations: Sustainability through Human Work Interaction Designs

A worker-centric approach to automation is important to the wellbeing of the workforce [2] and hence to socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable work practices [3]. Job crafting promises to deliver sustainability through design, that is, to influence workers’ (users’) decision-making and attitudes to work. Thereby, it will foster more sustainable work-lifestyles [1, 4] and create sustainable human work interaction designs. Job crafting supports workers in the bottom-up design of their own work to achieve work engagement [5, 6] and wellbeing [7–9]. By prototyping possible changes in work practices and worker-technology relations, job crafting can be a strategy for empowering the individual worker [10]. In contrast to top-down job design by management, job crafting is often union-supported [7]. It emphasizes workplace innovation over standardization [7] and has received increasing attention in small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) challenged by robotics and automation [11]. Job crafting shares some resemblance with notions like job design, job enrichment, and work customization that all aim to create wellbeing at work [7]. In this study, we report from a manufacturing company with low-usability automation (legacy, non-interoperable stamping machines), in which we aim to foster job crafting with a digital peer-tutoring training program [12]. The low-usability automation, combined with a high demand for digitally skilled workers [13], makes job crafting difficult in this situation. However, such a situation is not unusual because many companies have not designed their automation as a resource that facilitates job crafting [14]. Instead, many manufacturing SMEs use legacy and non-interoperable automation in their factories [11]. The usability of these systems may be quite ordinary [15, 16], though with variations depending on the task, the work shift, the people with whom the task is done, and other situational factors [15]. We ask the research question: Is job crafting possible in a situation with low-usability manufacturing automation?