FINANCIAL TIMES: Wanted: workers willing to defy their robot bosses

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However, companies hiring staff to work alongside robots will have to think not just about what they want from their staff but also how they can protect them from the potential downsides of the job. Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Alliance Manchester Business School, is concerned that employees working with robots will miss out on social interaction at work.

“People will not have their social needs met by [robots],” he says. “How can they?” He adds that with limited social interaction, employees are likely to “have less job satisfaction, be bored and maybe get ill”. Companies should design their systems so that employees working with robots spend as much time as possible with other people, he says.

How companies and their staff adapt to the use of robotics will depend on a range of factors, including, crucially, whether the machines are thought to threaten jobs. But Prof Cooper says employers’ first step in integrating the two should be to acknowledge the scale of the change it represents.

“Human resources teams know how to manage man-to-man,” he says. “But managing man-to-machine is going to be a different era.”