Inc.
Workers rarely resist robots simply because they’re robots; they resist what automation might mean for their jobs.
Robots Are Here. The Real Challenge Is Getting Workers to Trust Them
Author: Bradley Akubuiro
Bring a robot onto the floor and your workers will ask one question you can’t avoid: is this being done for us or to us? For thousands of workers, the robots are already here. And for many more, they are coming.
The economic case isn’t hard to understand. Manufacturers are struggling to fill jobs. Companies need more productivity. Some of the work is repetitive, physically demanding or dangerous. Yet, none of that means workers will welcome the machine rolling onto their floor.
The revolt probably won’t involve pitchforks. It’ll look more familiar: eye rolls, passive resistance, quiet quitting, employees finding reasons the technology won’t work or deciding that if the company is planning for a future without them, they should start planning one without the company.
Most of that backlash is avoidable because the robot isn’t the thing workers are deciding whether to trust. You are.
Don’t let the robot announce the strategy
Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, told me executives generally aren’t shopping for robots. They’re looking for solutions to work they can’t reliably staff.
Workers know the difference. Their wariness isn’t always misplaced. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu has shown that companies sometimes automate not because a machine does the job better, but because replacing workers lowers labor costs even when it delivers little productivity gain.
Workers who suspect the machine is aimed at them, rather than at the work, are sometimes reading it exactly right.
There’s an almost painfully simple way to put this: Bad automation starts with, “Which workers can we remove?” Good automation starts with, “Which work can we improve?”
Is it hokey? My wife laughed out loud at me when I said it to her, so yes. But hey, it’s a useful test.
If the work you’re trying to improve involves people walking six miles a shift moving materials, lifting heavy objects or doing repetitive jobs the company struggles to hire for, say that. Then explain what changes for the people already doing it.
If someone will stop moving boxes and start overseeing a robot fleet, explain that path. If operators will need new skills, tell them what training comes with it. Don’t tell people nothing will change if you know it will.
Employees can handle change. What they hate is being played for fools.
If workers first learn what automation means for them by watching the machine show up, leadership is already behind.
Don’t promise workers a future the tech can’t deliver
What you do next matters more than the speech. Justin King, a vice president at automation company OMRON, told me the biggest challenge he sees in deployments is overpromising. A robot is brought in to solve X. Then the people actually doing the work discover it does half of X, gets stuck constantly and requires someone to babysit it.
Now the machine isn’t making work easier. It’s created another job no one asked for.
Researchers at MIT’s Industrial Performance Center documented an Ohio aerospace manufacturer where an early robot deployment ran into exactly that problem.
Some workers saw the machine as a threat to skilled work. Others simply found it worse than doing the job themselves.
The company eventually pulled it. A later, better-specified automation effort at the same company succeeded.
Same employer. Same labor pressures. Different result.
A bad deployment does more than waste money.
You told workers the machine would make the job easier. They watched it make the job harder. Now the next robot arrives carrying the credibility problem created by the first one.
Promise less. Prove more.
Make the first win one nobody can dismiss
King’s advice is simple: start small. Pick a painful, clearly defined task. Pilot the technology where people will actually use it. Train the employees working around it. Let them see that it performs the job, stops when someone steps in front of it and doesn’t require a full-time “robot wrangler” to keep it moving.
Then expand. The first win tells workers whether your promises are worth anything.
I’ve spent enough time inside manufacturing companies to know that people on the floor are extraordinarily good at separating corporate rhetoric from operational reality.
If the robot makes the work safer, easier and more productive, they’ll see it. If it doesn’t, they’ll see that too.
A good deployment can do more than preserve morale. Workers stop fighting the last automation decision and start helping identify the next problem worth solving.
The goal isn’t a workforce that tolerates the robot. It’s one that starts pointing out where the next one can help.
Credits: TCA, LLC.