A few years ago widescale surveys of gig workers were undertaken to understand whether they were happy in their work or not.  The results highlighted the key role autonomy and flexibility played in people’s happiness levels.

Indeed, one of the key criticisms tabled against Uber and other platforms that make heavy use of algorithmic “leadership” to cajole workers is that it strips them of the autonomy they so craved when they entered the line of work in the first place.

The importance of flexibility was underlined by recent research from Harvard Business School, which shows that when gig workers lose flexibility, they regard it as the equivalent of taking a 17% pay cut.

Proving value

With gig workers often not qualifying for the various state protections and benefits that come with salaried employment, the autonomy they get takes on even greater importance.

“Flexibility is extremely important to gig workers. Forcing the average driver out of their preferred shift is as bad as cutting their weekly earnings by more than 5 percent. For the California drivers that we study, the ability to start or stop working at any moment and the flexibility to change hours from week to week are particularly valuable,” the researchers write.

Taking gig employment boomed during a pandemic in which both traditional unemployment became highly uncertain and the desire for delivery drivers and other flexible workers boomed.  The researchers wanted to better understand how important areas such as quality-of-life and income were to these workers, especially given the paucity of benefits and other legal protections they enjoy.

The researchers looked at data from over 425,000 meal-delivery workers at DoorDash in the California region, with the analysis suggesting that the autonomy to determine one’s own schedule was hugely important in terms of their quality of life.

What’s more, this was especially important for the top 10% of drivers, for whom losing the flexibility they enjoy would be akin to suffering from an enormous pay cut.  Indeed, if drivers were assigned to specific times that they could work, many said this would be enough to make them quit the work.

The value of flexibility

The average driver in the study worked for around three and a half days per week, for a total of just over 9 hours per day.  This earned the drivers an average of $187.51, or the equivalent of $20.33 per hour.  This was the full-time job of just under 40% of drivers, with nearly all reporting significant variations in the times they worked from week to week.  All seemed to value flexibility, however.

“We find that assigning them to the shift they drive the least often is equivalent to a 24 percent pay cut for the median driver and a 36.9 percent pay cut for the average driver,” they write.

Interestingly, the researchers found that not all flexibility was valued equally, with some workers happy to work roughly the same schedule each week and others preferring to change their schedules at the last minute.

The flexibility was also evident during Covid, when the average driver responded to the surge in demand by working an extra 2.4 hours per shift on average, which saw their earnings rise by 26% compared to pre-pandemic levels.

“This suggests that the ability to scale working hours up or down in response to some macro-economic shocks is an important benefit for gig workers,” the researchers say.

Getting the talent

The researchers believe that their findings are important, as while there is not any real indication that the gig marketplaces are suffering from the “great resignation” in the way that other forms of employment are, there is still hopefully appeal in terms of attracting the best talent rather than assuming that talent can be churned through without end.

There are also lessons, perhaps, for more traditional employers, as the pandemic has driven home the importance people are placing on flexibility and autonomy, which has always been there but which has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The pandemic forces everyone else to think about flexible work,” the researchers say. “Can people change their work hours? Can they work from home? Can they take micro-vacations, taking off just a few hours from work? Flexibility is now a real parameter for [attracting] talent.”