Using an 18-month study of the roll out of a digital platform on a Chinese construction site, Jinbo Song and Lingchuan Song show why digital transformations fail on the frontline. Initial excitement from executives meant that workers tolerated the tool at first, but actually using it meant that enthusiasm withered into frustration and avoidance.
As a groundswell of digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), sweeps across industries, executives have shown an eagerness to embrace innovations and implement digital transformation initiatives to capture the potential of technological change.
Yet, a set of sobering statistics throws cold water on the current digital hype. Most digital transformations fail: McKinsey reports a failure rate of more than 70 per cent; Gartner finds that nearly 60 per cent of employees are not supportive of organisational change; and Boston Consulting Group indicates that only 30 per cent of transformations meet or exceed their target value and result in sustainable change. Perhaps most daunting, recent research from MIT suggests that 95 per cent of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact. A recent article in Forbes argues that “Companies already struggle to keep their arrows pointed in the same direction. Strategy lives in PowerPoint while marketing runs in one lane, sales in another, and operations somewhere else entirely”.
Our goal here is to temper the starry-eyed momentum toward digital transformation. While we have witnessed continuous reminders to focus on relatively abstract yet neatly-packaged issues, such as culture, leadership, interpretation or system integration, to improve the consistency and coherence of digital transformation across departments, the flesh-and-blood reality of the workplace – including, in blue-collar jobs especially, physical pain, harsh environments and emotional distress – has long been downplayed. This creates usability frustrations once the digital transformation initiatives encounter day-to-day operational realities, especially in settings such as construction, manufacturing, logistics, and utilities, where frontline employees depend heavily on physical routines, tacit skills, and hands-on interaction with tools.
According to a report, 65 per cent of employees face significant frustrations with the digital tools provided by leadership. It would be easy to treat such a statistic as the result of a poorly designed system that is unsuitable to the actual workflow in practice. However, this conclusion is somewhat coarse, as it leaves us with several puzzles: How exactly does such a system trigger failure? And why can these issues not be mitigated by the storytelling or remedy offered by executives. Against this background, our recent research displays a process of how the bodily and emotional reactions of frontline employees can trigger an inversion of their perceptions toward digital transformation.
The initial adoption
Our research is based on an 18-month field study of a major construction project, which was developed by one of the largest Chinese property developers, ranked in the 2021 Fortune 500. (In our paper we give the firms the pseudonym “PCorp”.) In 2018 executives at the firm introduced a digital platform called Digital Engineering, which incorporates progress tracking, quality control and basic management operations. The system was designed to update project schedules, visualise predetermined tasks, and produce reports on work statistics. Our target project was designated as a pilot for implementing digital transformation.
Initially, the frontline employees’ basic understanding of Digital Engineering was built on executives’ colloquial words and glamorous slides detailing its benefits, as they had not yet been told to use it at scale in practice. In other words, leadership recognised the significant role of storytelling and its accompanying materials. While some reserved their opinions, most frontline employees were supportive of this technology.
The burst of resistance
Since December 2018 the executives repositioned Digital Engineering as a loftier, more strategic initiative. They began to employ increasingly abstract language to describe how the platform fit into their strategic vision. Meanwhile, they also mandated that frontline employees at our target project engage in daily in-app operations, such as filling out forms, uploading photos, updating schedules and monitoring camera feeds on the tower cranes. At this stage, frontline employees felt a tension between their expectations and the realities of the work, as digital tools intended to increase productivity added to their daily workload instead. However, their initial perception of Digital Engineering had not yet completely crumbled.
The turning point occurred when frontline employees were required to conduct on-site measurements of wall verticality, smoothness, slab thickness and window sizes for every room, subsequently inputting this data into Digital Engineering.
As an illustrative vignette shows in our research:
“Mr Zhang and Mr Yang carry a toolkit and move toward the ninth floor with me [Lingchuan Song]. They huff and puff when climbing the stairs, and their backs are soaked with sweat. Later, they gingerly traverse the interlacing pipes on the way to a reinforced concrete column, and Mr Yang wipes his brow: “Totally impossible! They [the senior management of PCorp] even require us to measure the key indices for all walls and columns at the end of each procedure. What are we? Robots?” Meanwhile, Mr Zhang measures the verticality of the reinforced concrete column and replies as his arm begins to shake, “I can’t feel my legs and waist…I’d rather spend a whole day supervising the concreting work than measure one more stupid dot.”
Frontline struggles: Fieldwork photo displaying the physical demands of on-site measurements. (Photo: Lingchuan Song)
The fatigue and frustration arising from this intensive physical labour led to a fundamental subversion of their understanding of the technology. This shift sparked broad discontent with nearly all executive mandates and strategic rhetoric. Simply put, both the expectations of digital technology and trust in leadership were fractured.
This pronounces a decisive, yet used to be neglected, role of bodily experience and emotional feelings in upending established perceptions of digital technology. While professional reports from consulting institutions often prioritise rational, easily quantified metrics over seemingly superficial biological senses, we must reiterate the profound power of disruption residing in our intuitive and physical bodies. This power, more importantly, possesses the capacity to subvert rational expectations and strategic visions.
The creation of workarounds
In August 2019 executives began hearing voices of discontent from frontline employees regarding the digital transformation initiative. But they had poor motivation to investigate the causes. These grievances were dismissed as resistance “normal” for any large-scale strategic transformation. Perhaps the most telling response was the reduction in manual measurement requirements in a subsequent amendment, a gesture that frontline employees in our target project viewed as perfunctory and lacking in genuine sincerity.
In consequence, we have witnessed a typical trend where frontline employees revert to their old work routines after creating a series of workarounds to make symbolic compliance. Interestingly, the development of workarounds for these low-stakes, administrative activities fuel the motivation for creating workarounds for more labour-laden activities as well.
Lessons from this case study for all businesses
To prevent digital transformation from becoming symbolic acts, executives must ground their strategy in the physical realities of the frontline.
Conduct an assessment of “bodily cost”. Before a rollout, executives must evaluate the bodily cost of a digital tool. If a digital task requires a worker to stop their habitual physical momentum or work in high-stress environments, it creates bodily cost. If such fatigue emerges without a proportional reduction in manual labour, the technology should be viewed as an untenable burden rather than a productivity tool.
Reposition the function design for labour saving. Executives must recognise that people, rather than efficiency or profits, must be placed at the forefront of any digital transformation. To build trust and foster adoption, leadership must ensure the first move of any rollout includes features that solve a genuine physical pain point for the worker, such as automated reporting, before asking them to perform additional data-entry tasks.
Bridge the empathy gap with lived experience. Executive storytelling often fails because it is too abstract. To bridge this gap, leadership should mandate that the designers and executives responsible for the digital initiative spend a full shift using the tool under the same conditions as the frontline. When leadership experiences the physical toll of their own mandates, their responses shift from perfunctory gestures to sincere solutions. This direct exposure ensures that future iterations are grounded in reality rather than envision.
Recognise workarounds as telltale signs for disfunctions. When frontline employees create workarounds, they are not being lazy but identifying design flaws in the digital tools. Instead of enforcing compliance through penalties, leaders should encourage employees to discuss these workarounds and treat them as a learning opportunity. These informal shortcuts provide the most honest feedback on exactly where the digital vision is failing to meet the flesh-and-blood reality of the job site.
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Image credit: chinahbzyg provided by Shutterstock.
Jinbo Song
