🤐 Secret Lessons from Scaling Workforce @ Uber

Well before the word "marketplace" was codified, Vaibhav Rikhye was busy building frameworks for managing an on-demand workforce as one of the early employees at Uber. He hasn't been allowed to talk about his work publicly... till now.

I had a chance to sit him down on some top-of-mind things flex workforce operators are asking us, which he's agreed to let me share here.

1. Be Clear on Your Value Proposition to the Worker: It's not just about the money. Uber thought of its value proposition to drivers along multiple dimensions: high flexibility, earnings, experience, ease of use, support, and career progression. What's your value proposition to workers?
   
2. Good Segmentation of Your Workforce is Table Stakes: Uber segmented its workers into "full-time drivers," "part-time regulars," and "part-time inconsistent" based on how they worked. Each segment has a different value proposition, and it's important to understand these differences when developing compensation and incentives. Do you pay differently by segment?
   
3. Defining "Churn" Before You Fix Churn: Churn rates are high in the gig economy, with 50% of drivers churning in the first 30 days and 80-90% gone after one year. To retain drivers, it's important to provide incentives and solve for this, but you've got to have a strong perspective on how to measure churn. But what is "Churn", if someone can work- or not- whenever they want?
   
4. It's All About Maximizing Net, not Gross, Earnings: After many tries at throwing more money at its drivers, Uber started to think about their drivers' "P&L", all the things that cost them money to work, costs of getting benefits, all the opportunity costs of not saving and investing, especially as you factor in tax benefits that are available to the full-time worker. Do you have a well-integrated stack of payments, benefits and investment solutions to help workers manage their net pay?

OK, so what's this got to do with home healthcare? Make no mistake. Home healthcare is a logistics business.

Don't agree? Hiring, staffing, scheduling and incentivizing the right people to show up at the right place and the right time, and to deliver the right customer experience sounds awfully like a logistics business.

And so, it would behoove us to look at companies that have dominated logistics and find playbooks to consider implementing in our world.