I have been a bit quiet on the blog front for the past few weeks as we have had a lot going on at Sun Basket, including expanding both the volume we are pushing into our current CS “gig” pool, as well as developing some new opportunities to utilize the expertise of our customers in some new areas. This includes acquisition support, and crowd testing updates to our web and mobile functionality. Truly some exciting and interesting times.
As we build out these new opportunities, I have been ensuring that we do so in a way that continues to be good for our customers, our experts and our organization (following a similar CEO model we use internally with our Employees instead of Experts.)
To me this “E” element of the CEO philosophy is just as valid when thinking about our Experts as it is our Employees. This was reinforced to me today as I was doing my dive into news articles on the Gig Economy and came across this Vox article titled “The recession hasn’t ended for gig economy workers” which shares insights from the Federal Reserve’s latest report on economic well-being in the US.
One finding that was not totally surprising to me, as it represents what I know about the customer experts we use for Sun Basket is that “the vast majority of gig workers don’t make a living from it — they just do it to make some extra money.” However there are about 5% of the respondents that indicated they do solely rely on gig work for their main source of income, and that this “group was the most likely to report financial distress, and the least likely to have health insurance, paid time off, unemployment benefits, and basic labor protections.”
The next section in the article, “The gig economy is largely based on exploitation” is what made me take pause to think, am I doing right by my Experts? For all of us currently utilizing, about to utilize, or thinking about utilizing the gig economy, be they existing customers of your company or not, I challenge that we all need to make sure that the outcomes are favorable for our Customers, “Experts”, and Organizations.
#GigEconomy#Brett'sBlog