Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgments
This study was conducted in the context of the regional development project KomDigital, which facilitated the contact to the case company. Special thanks are due to the management and employees of the case company. The four-week, peer-tutoring training program was run by project assistants Latife Jawhar and Magnus Stidsholt Buus.
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Clemmensen, T., Hertzum, M., Nørbjerg, J. (2024). Job Crafting to Improve Low-Usability Automation: Sustainability Through Human Work Interaction Designs. In: Bramwell-Dicks, A., Evans, A., Winckler, M., Petrie, H., Abdelnour-Nocera, J. (eds) Design for Equality and Justice. INTERACT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14535. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61688-4_37
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