An Examination of the Limited Adoption of Personalized Work Instructions in Assembly to Accommodate Individual Worker’s Needs

Creating a good fit between an individual’s information needs and the information provided in work instructions by personalizing its content and form facilitates allocating a more diverse group of operators to a particular assembly task, stimulating the labor force participation rate and inclusiveness. While ongoing technological development should make the personalization of work instructions easier, adoption in practice is still limited. Analyzing nine companies through a multiple case study approach, this paper investigates the challenges organizations face when creating, maintaining, and using personalized work instructions in practice. Overall, organizations struggle to adopt personalization due to its demanding nature, involving complex and time-consuming maintenance to keep personalized, and thus a large number of instructions, up-to-date. Personalization found in the cases mainly involves the use of a personal mentor to adapt the information detail to the characteristics of the worker, as well as allowing employees to conduct minor edits or to create their own instructions. Despite its possibilities, technology hardly played a role in creating and communicating personalized work instructions. To facilitate a more inclusive work design in practice, creating, implementing, and maintaining work instructions must become more accessible and manageable.