Operationalising People-Led Digitalisation: Evidence from an Industry Workshop on Workforce Metrics

A case study conducted with the Environment Agency

Case Study Authors

Louise Every, Environment Agency, Dr Fortune Nwaiwu (University of Bath)

Context

Organisations increasingly recognise digitalisation as a strategic priority; however, many struggle to assess its impact on the workforce. Existing measurement frameworks tend to prioritise technological and financial indicators while giving limited attention to issues such as the impact of digitalisation on the workforce of companies, employee engagement, organisational readiness, and human capability development. This creates a critical measurement gap that can undermine the effectiveness of digital transformation initiatives.

Objective

The opportunity therefore lay in developing a structured mechanism capable of capturing workforce-related outcomes and enabling organisations to make more informed, evidence-based decisions regarding the human dimensions of digitalisation.

Approach

To address this challenge, the People-Led Digitalisation Metrics Checklist (click here to view the tool) was developed to help organisations understand, measure, and assess the impact of digitalisation on their workforce. The tool is grounded in a rigorous development process involving the identification of over 100 candidate metrics, refinement to 40 workforce-focused indicators, twenty-three professional interviews, and survey feedback from 410 respondents across UK manufacturing sectors.

The checklist was evaluated during an industry workshop conducted in partnership with the Environment Agency, where organisational stakeholders interacted directly with the web-based tool, reviewed analytical outputs, and provided qualitative feedback. The workshop functioned as a co-development environment, where practitioners were able to provide valuable feedback in terms of what they think about the tool, the use cases it could be applied to and what they would like to see, for example in how results from the tool are presented (bar charts, pie charts, etc.)

Insights

Feedback was provided by workshop participants. Analysis of the feedback was done using reflexive thematic analysis, and it revealed four key insights:

Workforce metrics were widely perceived as valuable for supporting structured organisational discussions and enhancing strategic visibility.

1 The tool demonstrated good usability, suggesting that technological accessibility is not expected to be a barrier to adoption.

2 The importance of contextual adaptability, noting that metric relevance varies across organisational roles, programmes and use cases.

3 There was strong demand for decision-oriented visual analytics, including dashboards and comparative views, reinforcing the need for cognitively accessible outputs.

Collectively, these findings highlight that effective digitalisation requires balanced alignment between technological systems and human factors, consistent with socio-technical perspectives.

Impact

“As a large public body, digitally enabled transformation of our services is a high strategic priority for our organisation.  Our focus is rightly on putting users at the centre of our services, and this includes our staff as well as external users.  This framework provides a helpful and easy to use tool that lays clear the range of metrics we could and should consider in how we think about the needs of and impact on  ‘people’, especially our staff (present and future) as we look to transform how we deliver our vital work.

To test the app we pulled together a group of people whose roles focus on digital, data and transformation. As we tested it, we particularly valued the tool’s ease of use and the clear metric descriptions. We discussed how some metrics were more relevant to digitalisation than others, and the tool prompted us to think hard about the ease of getting the data.   We discussed how the tool could be used for many different sorts of change programmes and projects and how it’s use could lead to improvements in how we deliver change, how change is experienced and provide vital benefits measurements that could be tracked and compared over time or across programmes and projects.”

Louise Every - Digital Strategy Manager (Environment Agency)

For further information on this case study please contact the P-LD at P-LD@bath.ac.uk

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Innovate UK led Made Smarter Innovation Programme: People-Led Digitalisation Engagement and Impact Acceleration [Grant Reference UKRI1436] Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, at the University of Bath, University of Nottingham, and Loughborough University.