Author: Will Blackshaw

Dr Robert Stewart (University of Strathclyde)

We often speak about how new industrial digital technologies (or IDTs – e.g. Smart, AI, robotics and algorithms) will reshape the future content of tasks, jobs and careers in manufacturing without fully appreciating that the future is already here. These IDT technologies have already started to change the landscape of people’s experiences of manufacturing work in some quite fundamental ways.

Views about the impact of IDTs on working in manufacturing can often seem extreme or hesitant and uncertain. In some media, IDTs are portrayed like a proverbial comet, a harbinger of malign portent that will lay merciless waste to our industrial legacies of factories of jobs, tasks and skills. Many workers many not like this kind of change and it’s not surprising that for some, resisting technological shifts to well established patterns of working will seem ‘hard-wired’, while for others their fast emergence and adoption creates job performance pressures and uncertainty about their future security.

While Industry 4.0 technologies will inevitably continue to auto-pilot and eliminate dull, dirty, risky and repetitive (especially manual) tasks, the better (and more mundane) news is that digital technologies will be a co-pilot for most manufacturing workers, augmenting and supporting their daily tasks and workloads.

Picking up on this latter theme, surveys that we conducted through InterAct clearly show strong beliefs that manufacturing futures will be technology-led with important implications for working in the sector.

When we ask about jobs, most people and employers believe in augmented more sustainable technological futures: more upskilling than down skilling, cleaner jobs that are more interesting and rewarding for workers, and that technologies will enable more creativity. However, our survey findings are not all good news. A significant proportion of people are very uncertain about the impact of technology for manufacturing workers, and a good few employers think there will be fewer jobs available. Perhaps not surprisingly, young people in Gen Z are more positive about future technology and jobs than older cohorts.

This highlights a recuring feature in wider research. The more positive people are about technological change, the more likely they are to use it as an opportunity to improve their job quality: modifying their tasks, making efficiencies, developing their digital skillsets and feel more engaged at work. This is one way in which IDT technologies are very likely to make manufacturing jobs more interesting, rewarding and creative as workers start to learn new ways to make them useful.

Many workers after all have already blended social media apps with their working practices to better organise individual and team working. Recent research also shows that workers can allay some of their tech fears by changing: the task boundaries of their jobs to focus more on the bits that people do well such as problem solving, quality control, process improvement and innovation, and customer service; by building deeper relationships, expanding their social networks with colleagues, supervisors, suppliers and customers; and, interestingly, by reframing the tech problem as a developmental opportunity that will also help them and their companies with performance and productivity.

We call this process of how workers adjust to and cope with technological change at work, job crafting. The rationale for crafting is that in a changing world of work, with more diverse workplace settings, people and emerging new technologies, workers are better able and placed to make changes to their job demands and resources beyond their core tasks and still achieve company goals and outcomes.

Companies can build job crafting into their practices and recent research suggests that interventions – skills and training programmes, career development pathways and even something as simple as upping the quality of a line-manager’s performance feedback – can enhance employees’ engagement with job crafting and facilitate technology adoption. By incorporating job crafting into their people strategies, companies can create and support environments that enable individual employees and teams to proactively shape their work and successfully integrate digital tools into their workflows.

So, what is ‘job crafting’?

Job crafting refers to discretionary behaviours aimed at making work resources and demands better aligned with people’s talents, skills and capabilities. As a process, job crafting is where workers try to balance otherwise challenging and stressful job demands (e.g. high or intense workloads, difficult team members or customers) with job resources that allow them to better cope with these demands and/or promote personal growth or skill development (e.g. training, supervisor or peer support). Worker’s ‘craft jobs by:

• Seeking resources (actions to increase resources through for example, mentoring and coaching, supervisor and peer supports, learning and training, performance feedback, more task autonomy and improvements in workspaces, software’s and equipment)
• Seeking challenges (actions looking for additional job demands that are in alignment with their interests and/or career aspirations through for example, proposing improved ways of working, taking on new projects/activities, supervisor or leadership roles, and expanding professional networks)
• Reducing and/or optimising demands (actions designed to reduce job demands by task swapping with colleagues, streamlining efficiencies in tasks and processes, and suggesting improvements to team leaders, supervisors and managers).

In short, job crafting is a positive response by individuals and teams to job design with the aim of making work more engaging and meaningful.

Job crafting has also been applied in team-based collaborative settings. Not every team member has to craft the same aspects of their jobs; instead, it is the process of collectively synergizing efforts and deciding together what and how to craft towards team goals. Where teams have clearly defined shared goals and support each other, they are more motivated to craft their team’s daily workloads.

Sounds great, but is it applied in manufacturing?

Job crafting techniques work in practice and have been successfully applied in many sectors, including manufacturing. They have been shown to have positive outcomes for individual workers in terms of increased job satisfaction and lower levels of burnout, and better organisational outcomes in terms of performance and less turnover. In manufacturing, studies have linked job crafting with better work engagement, more autonomy, improved innovation performance and more effective change management in relation to working practices around IDT’s. Job crafting can provide the bridge between more engaged workers and better performance. It seems to work particularly well with getting more out of highly motivated, committed workers and those who feel they are under-utilised. And in manufacturing, the benefits of job crafting don’t just apply to the usual suspects – knowledge workers and those in leadership, managerial and administrative positions – it also works for production workers. Recent international research shows that job crafting is strongly associated with positive outcomes for production and non-production workers in places such as China, India, Japan, South Korea and Poland.

What does research show?

Job crafting is a key part of helping to solve the bigger productivity puzzle and achieving performance and other gains for companies.

Here are a few examples of recent research that demonstrate the reach and power of job crafting, and how manufacturers can capitalise on job crafting strategies:

• Rafiq et al (2024) in a study of nearly 500 workers in three manufacturing companies in Pakistan found that job crafting was strongly directly linked to better innovation performance and indirectly to better career satisfaction. Stimulating workforce-wide job crafting helps stimulate innovation behaviours.
• Jindal et al (2022) in a study with over 300 knowledge workers in non-production roles in an Indian manufacturing company, showed that high levels of autonomy are strongly associated with better performance in highly motivated workers. They advise employers (where they can) to review their constraints on employee autonomy because this helps to foster ways in which knowledge workers can better shape their own jobs and maximise performance.
• Guo et al (2023) in a study with around 350 workers in a manufacturing company in China, showed that supervisor developmental feedback in performance reviews helped to stimulate job crafting behaviours and better employee job performance. Where managers (in performance feedback) can support the better use of workers preferences, skills and competences this stimulates greater self-motivated behaviours, task autonomy and performance.
• Turek et al (2024) argue that job crafting is essential for managing changing job demands in response to new technological change in manufacturing. In a small survey of senior and middle managers in Polish manufacturing firms, they found that job crating was effective in moderating the greater job demands placed on managers by new IDT resources.

Are there lessons for UK manufacturers?

Yes, there are several lessons for UK manufacturers arising from the research on job crafting:

• The simple and practical utility of the approach for understanding how workers adjust and adapt to change, for example in relation to new IDT’s
• The benefits of the approach for companies in key areas such as employee engagement, performance, productivity and retention.
• Generating greater employee engagement and capturing the talents and energy of committed workers, particularly those who feel under-utilised.
• Flexible application and use with targeted groups of key individuals (e.g. leaders, managers and supervisors, in digital product design and R&D) and teams.

Join one of our two interactive workshops on Thursday 25 September (Glasgow) and Wednesday 22 October (Birmingham).

The National Manufacturing Institute Scotland, Glasgow
Thursday 25 September

Conference Aston, Birmingham
Wednesday 22 October