Customers have long expected service with a smile, which was a reasonable request before the pandemic radically altered the risks and rewards for frontline workers.
Now, those in customer-facing jobs have tough choices to make about how much danger they are willing to deal with in order to be seen as ideal workers devoted to their tasks. New research from Wharton management professor Lindsey Cameron and co-authors reveals the arsenal of tactics that gig workers are using to mitigate health risks while managing their reputation with demanding customers during the pandemic.
“When you have contingent work and don’t have the structure of an employment relationship, you are much more precarious,” Cameron says. “There’s heightened pressure on customer-facing workers during the pandemic because it’s not only that you need to be devoted and available all the time, but also how much risk you’re going to take on and how much you’ll be smiling while you do it.”
The study is titled “Risky Business: Gig Workers and the Navigation of Ideal Worker Expectations during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” and is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
The authors studied TaskRabbit, an on-demand platform that allows customers to hire independent workers to run errands, deliver items, and do household chores such as assembling furniture. They analyzed data from direct interviews with workers, postings from worker forums on social media, official company communications, and articles from major media outlets.
Similar to Uber and Lyft, TaskRabbit customers rate workers on a scale of 1 to 5. Workers who maintain a higher rating are featured on the site, which can lead to more bookings. But unlike ride-sharing companies, which saw a steep drop in demand at the start of the pandemic, TaskRabbit’s demand surged as consumers outsourced jobs with higher potential exposure to the virus—such as grocery shopping or standing in line.
The study finds workers engaged in four types of tactics: passing, revealing, covering, and withdrawing. Their behavior ranges from protecting themselves privately, unobserved by the public, or publicly protecting themselves, to simply dropping off platforms altogether.
Read more at Knowledge@Wharton.
