Maid-hiring system in gated societies
Probing into Service, System, and Infrastructure
This is the final output of the 5-week long studio “Probing into System, service, and Infrastructures”. Read out initial proposal (part-1) and process work (part-2) to know how our process led to this.
The system that we have envisioned tries to cater the needs of the residents that want to find new maids that can work effectively as per the residents’ needs.
We started by understanding the rating system and later, shifted to recommendation system as that was the most exercised form of interaction residents have when it comes to finding a maid. We also wanted to remove the system where the maids are judged by the number of stars they have and wanted a system that is transparent for them, at least to some extent.
Through our intervention, we also try to encourage maids to be more active in knowing who is recommending them and why.
Process
We started off by learning how the current recommendation system works, who are the people involved, and how is the flow of information happening. The actors involved are the residents, helpers, and the security guards.
Through our interviews, we came to know that most people rely on word of mouth recommendation or ask the security guard when they are in search of a maid. Various ways in which people recommend their maids are:
After learning about current system we tried to find possible areas of intervention. Some of our findings were:
- Both residents and helpers believe that security guards helps them better in finding a maid or a job.
- Some of the residents said that they only recommend their maids if they are sure there the maid’s quality of work won’t be compromised if she takes up extra house.
- It becomes a pain for a new resident to continuously ask for a maid if the maid that is sent does not work according to his needs.
We mapped out all the pain-points and proposed a maid-hiring system.
Proposed solution
We want to make it easy for the new residents to find a suitable maid or any old resident who wants to change their maid.
The main component of our proposed service is the maid-hiring app. The app allows the residents to browse through the maids that comes in the society and select a maid according to his needs. The process starts with entering all the details of the maid on the app. When a resident is looking for a maid, he has to enter his criteria for the maid on the app and select a time-slot when he wants the maid to come. The request is then sent to the system in the maintenance office (MO) and to the maid’s phone, if she has any. We want to encourage the maids to take initiatives to check their recommendations in the system by either providing it in their phones or in the MO.
Some of the features of the app are:
- Filtering maids based on their free time.
- Requesting maids depending on what type of chores they do.
- Seeing if the maids are open to negotiation (leaves, money, time, etc.)
- Ability to recommend maids.
Our outputs are the system flow and the system map for our service.
Scenario #1:
The resident finds a maid of his choice and selects the maid on the app. The request is then sent to the MO and to the respective helper if they have access to the technology. If the helper does not have any access to technology, the MO office informs the maid later on.
Scenario #2:
In case the resident does not find his ‘ideal’ maid, the MO stores their request, to be processed later. Whenever a match is found for the resident, the resident is informed about the possible choices of maid.
We also created a system map mapping the interactions between the components of our service.
Limitations
- Right now, only helpers that have access to technology will be notified if someone is asking for their services.
- Might increase the work-load for the maintenance office.
- Even though, this might increase employment opportunities for the helpers, it’s perpetuating that employment is a reward that you get when you behave good and listen to everything the employer says.
- Residents who don’t use technology might be left out of this system and will have to depend on the word of mouth recommendation system.
- The recommendations may not always be honest. Someone might leave negative feedback out of revenge.
We were also looking to make this platform accessible to the helpers. This idea had to be dropped because we could not gather enough insights from a helper’s view as it was difficult to get the employer’s permission for this task.
Learnings
- We figured that we cannot try to solve the problems of domestic workers and the residents both at once.
- Learned how to map interactions between actors by using system maps.
Team Night Fury
Saroj Tailor, Sindhu Neti, Vipul Negi
