Job Crafting to Improve Low-Usability Automation: Sustainability Through Human Work Interaction Designs

In industry 4.0 manufacturing, workers experience a variety of old and new automation and adopt and adapt to this automation to the best of their ability. This paper contributes a design case in which we aimed to support workers’ job crafting with a four-week, peer-tutoring training program to create sustainable human work interaction designs. The peer-tutoring program facilitated job crafting by training the workers in identifying problems in their work and proposing solutions to these problems. We find that the peer-tutoring program enabled conversations among the workers about recurrent work problems and their solutions. This finding was achieved despite the low experienced usability of the automation in the case company. In terms of job crafting, the workers focused on their enjoyable tasks and invested in their relationships with their favorite colleagues but did not put a lot of effort into seeing their tasks as important and meaningful. We also encountered a tension between job crafting and management’s view of the peer-tutoring program as a means of supporting standardization.