New technologies are influencing today's work and change social attitudes towards the organization and design of work. Against this background, the question arises as to how human-centred work design has to be in the digital age. In order to derive indications for work design, first it is necessary to find out which work conditions actually are present for different tasks and what their level of digitization is. This article focuses on the working conditions and the level of digitization of object-related tasks. These tasks are characterized by the fact that objects are processed or handled. In particular, it includes the task groups manufacturing, transporting and cleaning.

For these three groups, current working conditions of N = 6.435 employees with object-related tasks were analyzed based on the BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey. Furthermore, the current state of digitization of N = 411 employees with object-related tasks was analyzed based on the survey Digitization and Change in Employment (DiWaBe). The results show, that a high proportion of physical work requirements and physical-chemical environmental conditions have an impact on object-related tasks. Furthermore, the results indicate tendencies towards monotonous work processes. Object-related tasks show a rather low degree of digitization. However, especially in manufacturing and transport, detailed instructions are often given by means of various technologies.

Based on the data analysis, a structured literature analysis was conducted about the current state of research on new technologies in object-related tasks. It was found, that research and practice is concerned with technologies that meet the high physical demands of object-related tasks in particular (e.g. HRC, exoskeletons). In addition, there are many approaches to support employees cognitively with digital assistance systems. This article present the results of the data and literature analysis.

This article is published in the Journal "Procedia CIRP", Volume 107, Leading manufacturing systems transformation - Proceedings of the 55th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems 2022, pp. 302-307.