Manufacturers face diverse and demanding challenges. These include the need to fulfil the demand for more customized products, to overcome skills gaps, and to respond to demographic trends such as ageing workers. In this context, companies are increasingly introducing advanced technologies, such as extended-reality headsets, exoskeletons and cobots to support their employees.

As the process of augmentation accelerates, and the need for effective human-machine interaction becomes more critical, businesses face the urgent need to identify and adopt reliable strategies that enable them to introduce new technologies successfully.

Research to date has responded to this challenge mainly by developing adoption frameworks that primarily take into account the management perspective. Though obviously helpful, these strategies are, by themselves, incomplete – and need to be supplemented by the perspectives of workers on the shop floor, who are the end users of these technologies.