The Hidden Line Item in Your Supply Chain: What the Research Says About Uniform and Productivity

Independent research commissioned by Murray Uniforms with Coventry University, covering 2,500+ employees, found that a well-designed uniform functions as a productivity tool, not just a compliance requirement and that poor uniform design carries a measurable cost in engagement, retention and even sustainability credentials. For component manufacturers and supply chain businesses under margin and ESG pressure, that makes uniform a lever worth reviewing, not a line item to minimise.

For component manufacturers and supply chain businesses, uniform is usually filed under cost control: buy it once, replace it rarely, keep it compliant. That instinct makes commercial sense in a margin-sensitive industry but it overlooks what independent research says uniform actually does for a manufacturing workforce.

Murray Uniforms commissioned Coventry University to study whether uniform genuinely affects wellbeing and productivity at work, surveying more than 2,500 employees across sectors. The findings are directly relevant to any business managing a manufacturing, warehouse or logistics workforce where turnover, engagement and increasingly ESG performance are all under scrutiny from customers further up the automotive supply chain.

Uniform as a productivity tool, not a compliance cost

The study’s clearest productivity signal: employees rate having a uniform that enables them to do their job at 9.20 out of 10 – one of the highest-scoring measures in the entire research. That finding sits alongside separate University of Warwick research (Oswald, Proto and Sgroi, 2015) establishing that happy employees are 12% more productive at work. The Warwick study didn’t identify what makes employees happy; the Coventry University research fills that gap, and uniform is a measurable part of the answer: 85% of employees say their uniform affects their happiness at work, with happiness rising by up to 21.6% when uniform is designed well.

For manufacturing and logistics environments specifically, this reframes uniform away from PPE-plus-branding and towards a genuine operational input, something Murray’s Science of Uniform^® process is built around, mapping over 240 separate factors that determine whether a uniform actually helps someone do their job, rather than just meeting a spec sheet.

The cost of getting it wrong

The flip side of the productivity finding is a retention risk most supply chain businesses aren’t measuring. Despite 86.9% of employees saying they actually like wearing a uniform (worth noting given how much scepticism uniform programmes tend to attract internally) 28.6% report a sense of dread wearing their current uniform, and a meaningful share actively avoid interactions they don’t have to have because of how their uniform makes them feel.

In a sector already managing tight labour markets and high turnover costs on warehouse and production floors, that’s an expensive gap. Coventry University’s research found 70.5% of employees say uniform influences their decision to stay at an employer. A retention lever that’s entirely within your control and doesn’t require a pay review to act on.

The sustainability pressure moving down the supply chain

Sustainable uniform sourcing isn’t only a compliance question, it’s something your own workforce already expects and not just its younger employees. Coventry University’s research found 87% of employees say it’s important their uniform comes from a sustainable source, and separately, a global IBM Institute for Business Value survey of over 16,000 employees and job seekers found 71% across all age groups want to work for an environmentally sustainable employer, with nearly half saying they’d accept a lower salary to do so. For a workforce where uniform already measurably affects happiness and confidence, sustainable sourcing is one more factor shaping how people feel about the company they work for.

On top of that internal expectation, automotive OEMs are under increasing pressure to report and reduce Scope 3 emissions (the emissions generated by their supply chains rather than their own operations) and that pressure is moving downstream to component manufacturers and suppliers whether or not uniform seems like an obvious place to look.

It’s a more material issue than it first appears. Murray’s carbon footprint analysis, conducted in partnership with Climate Partner, found that raw material production accounts for 79% of a uniform’s total carbon footprint, the single biggest lever available for reducing emissions. Available sustainable measures can reduce a uniform’s footprint by up to 52% across its full lifecycle. At the other end of the lifecycle, WRAP data shows 90% of end-of-life corporate workwear is still sent to landfill or incineration, with just 9% currently recycled for reuse, despite viable circular-economy alternatives existing.

A circular-economy approach, designing for recyclability and routing end-of-life garments away from landfill, can put a uniform programme on a path to net zero within three to five years, meeting the OEM reporting requirement and the sustainability standard your own workforce already holds you to.

What this means for your uniform programme

For component manufacturers and supply chain businesses, the research points to three practical questions worth asking of a current uniform programme: 

1. Does it function as a genuine productivity tool for the roles it’s issued to
2. Is it contributing to turnover you’re not currently attributing to it
3.  Does your uniform’s carbon footprint and end-of-life route hold up against what your own employees expect from a sustainable uniform.

Want a uniform programme that holds up against both productivity and ESG scrutiny?

Murray Uniforms works with manufacturing and supply chain businesses to design uniform programmes around retention, performance and sustainability, backed by independent research and carbon footprint analysis, not assumptions.

Sources: Murray Uniforms x Coventry University research (2,500+ respondents, 2019–2021); Oswald, Proto and Sgroi, University of Warwick (2015); IBM Institute for Business Value; Murray & Climate Partner Analysis (2024); WRAP.