People-Led Digitalisation (P-LD) Metrics in UK Manufacturing: An Analysis of Workforce Impact Assessment

Key Points  People and Culture are critical: The UK government‑backed Made Smarter Innovation programme notes that one of the major barriers to adopting digital technologies is “people and organisational culture.”  People-Led Digitalisation Metrics are not widely used: Based on responses by 410 professionals within UK manufacturing, most companies either do not use or have not considered using people‑focused metrics for assessing the impact of digitalisation on their workforce.  Unwillingness is not about data collection: Low use of people-led metrics is not related to data collection. Our survey revealed metrics where data was easy to collect were assessed as ‘modest’ in terms of Usefulness. The same results were found for difficult to collect metrics.