A US-based food delivery app said that all its top executives are being asked to make deliveries – at least once a month. The delivery app is DoorDash and this policy includes the company CEO as well. This policy has not pleased some of the people that actually work for the company. In my view, however, this is a great idea – it should also be implemented in India – in fact especially in India.
This is a mandatory program called WeDash where every employee would have to deliver food once a month. This would be included in their performance reviews as well. this is part of the company’s philanthropic efforts and the money earned by employees for delivering food packets would be donated to nonprofit organisations.
According to reports, one of the company executives posted this on a social media platform for techies called Blind: what the actual f**k? I didn’t sing up for this. The exec who apparently has a pay-packet of $4K a year, complained that there was nothing in the job/offer letter about this.
Another employee expressed support for the program and said that he had signed up voluntarily for it. As a healthy young person, he was not at risk from COVID and he was happy to deliver food and other stuff to people stuck at home, he said.
I think this is an excellent initiative. It helps the decision-makers understand the stresses that delivery people face each day and puts them in a better position to make changes that can actually help. The fact is that delivery persons have a really tough job – battling traffic, heat and cold, rude and entitled customers while trying to make as many deliveries as possible. Working conditions are difficult and the delivery person often doesn’t have time to eat, their jobs constantly threatened by complaints from difficult customers.
Companies are forever trying to attract customers with offers such as the famous 30-minute guarantee from Dominos; something that has repeatedly attracted criticism. The fact that competition is cut-throat also means that companies are constantly trying to undercut each other by offering faster, yet faster deliveries. While this may benefit the company, this puts undue pressure on the delivery persons.
Witness the controversy around the 15-minute delivery promise that Grofers made some months back. Founder Albinder Dhindsa had responded by saying, "That's 3 minutes too long..." when someone tweeted to say that their Grofers order had been delivered in 13 minutes. Dhindsa defended this company policy by calling it a ‘daring innovation’ that was trying to break the status quo. This, according to him, was helping generate employment while ‘generating tremendous amounts of value for all stakeholders’.
There is nothing wrong with the profit motive. It generates employment and creates value for customers. However, the problem is that this often privileges profit over employee wellbeing. Poor working conditions, work pressures, inadequate remuneration, incentivising speed --- these are exploitative of workers. Here the workers earn a pittance when compared with the fat pay-packets of the company’s decision-makers and the value created for shareholders. We have seen how the whole ‘customer-is-king’ mindset results in the swift sacking of employees based on just a complaint. So the jobs of the employees are not secure; placing added pressure on them.
I think it would be a great idea for the top executives and decisions makers at companies like Zomato and Swiggy to step out of their (presumably) cushy offices and experience what others in their companies are subjected to each day. The bad roads, terrible congestion, overbearing customers and stress are a given; plus, pay is poor and little hope for career advancement.
Maybe everyone, from the CEO down should be made to make deliveries so they get a keener understanding of the demands being placed on their riders. And it would be a great idea for the Grofers founder to actually try and make a 15-minute delivery himself – before he gave out a ‘guarantee’ of this to customers.
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