Barriers and Enablers of Workforce Adoption of Digital Transformation in a Modern Manufacturing Environment

Productivity growth in the UK is at historically low levels and lags behind its European counterparts. The opportunities presented to solve this productivity puzzle through harnessing digitisation are met with adoption barriers and have yet to be fully realised. With a focus on the manufacturing sector, we seek to understand the barriers and enablers for employee engagement and adoption of new workplace technologies to support the development of practical strategies for digital transformation. Using the Theory of Planned Behaviour as a theoretical framework we will identify the beliefs, attitudes and social norms associated with adoption and usage of new technology. The co-design of the project with industry stakeholders from a large manufacturing company and their supply chain provides the opportunity to identify specific industry problems and provide divergent possibilities to reduce barriers to digital transformation. Embracing Industry 4.0 will provide the manufacturing sector with the potential for long-term growth and we argue this can be best achieved by taking a more people-centred approach to understand productivity.