Beyond Efficiency: Understanding the Well-Being of Warehouse Workers

An Caris and Katrien Ramaekers
Hasselt University, Belgium

Warehousing sits at the heart of modern supply chains, yet the human experience within distribution centers remains persistently underexamined. Our research group Logistics has built up a research agenda around logistics and warehousing, informed by the regional presence of numerous European distribution centers and a continued focus on practically relevant questions. This keynote offers an overview of that work, with a particular focus on the well-being of warehouse workers. This large and diverse workforce operates under considerable physical and organizational demands. Two themes are addressed in more depth. The first disentangles antecedents which determine warehouse worker well-being.  The second concerns frontline management, exploring how the leadership behaviours of direct supervisors influence the day-to-day well-being of warehouse employees. Finally, we conclude with some perspectives on the growing role of technology and its relation to well-being in a warehousing environment. Collectively, these findings underscore the importance of integrating worker well-being as a core consideration in warehousing innovation, rather than treating it as a secondary outcome of operational performance.

An Caris is a Full Professor at the research group Logistics, Faculty of Business Economics, Hasselt University (Belgium). She holds a master’s degree in Business Engineering and obtained her doctorate in 2010 on the simulation and optimisation of intermodal barge transport networks. Following a postdoctoral fellowship with the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), she joined Hasselt University as a faculty member in 2012. Her research spans a broad range of logistics topics — including synchromodal transport, urban logistics, warehousing, health care logistics, and humanitarian logistics — with a shared ambition to generate societal impact. A recurring theme across her work is the development of realistic decision support models that bridge the gap between theory and practice, an objective she pursues in close collaboration with industry and societal partners. Beyond research, she teaches Operations Research and Logistics courses at both bachelor and master level. She serves as Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Business Economics and is vice-chair of the Hasselt University Research Board.

Katrien Ramaekers is a professor in the research group Logistics of Hasselt University (Belgium). Her research interest goes to the application of Operations Research techniques in the field of operations management and logistics, with a focus on warehousing and health care logistics. In both research domains the aim is to make OR models more realistic, e.g. by integrating practical and human factors in the models, by integrating different planning models to obtain a more efficient planning or by rethinking the process flow to make it more efficient. Like this, she aims to reduce the gap between theory and practice and to provide more accurate decision-support models to practitioners.

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