IN Brief:
- ProGlove surveyed more than 200 warehouse workers and managers in the UK and US.
- Operators report missed shifts and fatigue linked to repetitive, tool-heavy workflows.
- Measurement gaps around RSI and MSK injuries are leaving preventable absence unpriced.
Warehouse operators are increasingly treating discomfort as a resignation trigger, rather than a nuisance to be managed. Research from industrial wearable provider ProGlove, based on feedback from more than 200 warehouse workers and managers across the UK and US, points to a retention problem tied directly to physical strain and tool design.
More than 73% of warehouse operators surveyed said they have considered leaving their roles because of discomfort or injury concerns. The same research found 36% of workers had missed shifts in the past year due to work-related pain or exhaustion. Where fatigue drove time off, the disruption was not marginal: 50% of those taking time off missed between four and six days a year, while 15% missed between one and two weeks of a working year.
The reported cause is not dramatic, one-off incidents. It is cumulative load — repetitive motions, awkward grip, and the compounded effect of equipment that is not designed for sustained scanning and handling. ProGlove describes this as “ergonomic debt”, and the survey suggests the term is still not widely understood on the management side. Two-thirds of warehouse managers surveyed had not heard it, and that visibility gap shows up in what is, and is not, being measured on site.
Tooling is one of the more blunt indicators. In the survey, 53% of workers said they still use pistol-grip scanners, with operators rating their tools as non-ergonomic more often than managers (81% versus 73%). Despite that, only 22% of organisations were said to measure RSI or musculoskeletal injuries, based on operator responses. Warehouse managers also acknowledged process design as part of the issue, with 37% saying workflows in their facilities were not designed to prevent RSI or musculoskeletal injuries.
Konstantin Brunnbauer, managing director at ProGlove, said: “When I speak with operators, they often describe strain as simply ‘part of the job.’” For operations teams, that “part of the job” framing is a practical problem: fatigue raises absence, slows pick rates, and forces managers into daily rebalancing of labour and cut-off times.
In the UK, this sits against a national backdrop where work-related musculoskeletal disorders remain a major driver of lost time. Health and Safety Executive statistics for 2024/25 put work-related musculoskeletal disorder cases at 511,000, with 7.1 million working days lost to musculoskeletal disorders during the same period. The US picture is different in reporting structure, but the underlying exposure categories — overexertion and repetitive motion in particular — remain among the biggest sources of days-away and restricted-work cases.
The immediate operational takeaway is that ergonomics is being treated as a comfort programme in too many buildings, when it functions more like maintenance: deferred investment shows up later as unplanned downtime. With only a minority of sites reportedly tracking RSI and MSK injury data in a structured way, the first step is less about new hardware and more about establishing whether the current workflow is already spending labour days that the WMS never records.
