Beyond productivity: Digital transformation and workers’ well-being in warehouse operations

The digital transformation and automation phenomena of logistics workplaces, particularly in warehousing, are posing growing attention to the human element of operations. From a people-centric perspective, while such investments may enhance logistics performance, they may also affect the well-being of logistics workers. Understanding the implications of digital transformation and automation for workers, therefore, remains a crucial issue for logistics research. Despite growing interest in this topic, we still know little about whether and why the same technological intervention may simultaneously reduce workers’ physical effort and increase productivity, while also weakening other aspects such as perceived work meaningfulness, social relationships at work, or engagement with tasks. This highlights the importance of examining workers’ well-being from a multidimensional perspective. This short paper aims to develop a series of experimental studies (scenario-based and on-field) focusing on a specific warehouse digitalization intervention: the introduction of sensor-enabled vehicle systems designed to guide and partially automate pickers’ activities. Semi-structured interviews with managers and logistics workers will first be conducted to inform the design of the experimental studies. This research aims to contribute to the socio-technical systems theory by demonstrating how the technical subsystem of a digitally-transformed warehouse interacts with the social subsystem, represented by pickers’ perceptions of their well-being at work. In addition, the study seeks to provide practical managerial guidance on how digitalization initiatives can be implemented while considering their implications for workers’ well-being.