By Mark Griffiths, Head of Social Impact at Collective Benefits
Imagine you want to improve the amount of learning that takes place in a school classroom.
Ultimately, there are only three ways of doing this. You can increase the difficulty of the learning content, improve teacher instruction, or encourage students to be more engaged.
That’s it. Everything else — from how much teachers are paid, new textbooks or tastier school meals — are only means to influencing these factors. And, if they don’t positively influence them, then learning simply won’t get better.
It’s the same for the goal of creating high quality work in the platform economy.
If you want to improve worker well-being — and I think we should, as an ongoing mission — then you need to influence the core drivers of this.
Some of these will be the baseline protections that employees take for granted — for example, financial support in the event that you are sick, injured, or need time-off work because of a family emergency.
Other drivers will be aspects such as finding meaning and value in your work, feeling that your skills and achievements are put to good use or having control over how work is done.
Everything else — from organizational forms such as Co-Ops, or topics such as worker representation and classification — are only relevant if, in some way, they influence these for the better.
To shed much needed light on this topic, Collective Benefits have just completed a survey of 1,000 independent workers in the UK who find work through platforms. Our objective was to better understand what their experience of work is like, and to compare that with their non-platform working peers.
The survey adds to the accumulating findings that platform economy workers value flexibility over when they work, and enjoy high levels of job satisfaction. For example, in our survey the number one reason that independent workers cite for choosing to work on the platform they do is flexibility over hours, time or location. This was cited even more than pay, or the ease of use of the platform.
Moreover, 44% are mostly or completely satisfied with their work (compared to 45% of their non-platform peers) and 66% would recommend the platform they work through as ‘a great place to work’.
Platform workers are the people who get us safely to an important meeting, they care for our loved ones and deliver our medicines, presents and treats. Indicative of this value in their work, in our survey 64% of platform economy workers say they find their work meaningful.
This is all welcome news, and offers a useful corrective to some of the overblown rhetoric.
Alongside this, the survey also points to the need for more innovation in how tasks are designed and managed in the platform economy.
For example, when we asked survey respondents to think about the control they personally have over the way they do their work, 66% said they would like some, or much more.
Relatedly, when asked to compare how well their skills match the demands of their work, 69% of platform economy respondents said their skills were a bit, or much, higher. Only 26% said their skills were about the same.
The evidence suggests that even small changes here can make a difference. This will require a willingness to form new partnerships (for example, between organizational psychologists and app. designers), some experimentation, and a willingness to re-imagine aspects of platform economy work that may seem like immutable laws.
It’s my hunch that this effort will be worthwhile. Getting better at worker wellbeing is core to the ongoing sustainability of the platform economy. It also drives metrics such as recruitment, retention and job performance. Above all, it is the right thing to do.
Work is too important to our lives — and wellbeing — for us to do otherwise.
The opinions and views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Reshaping Work.