Where do opportunities for impact with Workertech exist?
There are a wide range of opportunities for WorkerTech to create impact, and undoubtedly some that we can’t yet imagine. As outlined in the last post, technology creates room for innovation in information, connection and alternatives, and impact can be created through individual or collective change.
There are some parts of the labour market that have more low-paid or precarious work, where there are worse conditions and experiences for lower-paid workers, or where there is a greater opportunity for change (see the first post in this series).
This post highlights some issues and places where technology has the potential to be more impactful, from a combination of the scale and the nature of the existing issues and systems. This is not an exhaustive list, and we would like to hear from you whether you’re working on these problems or related ones.
INFORMATION: Give workers better information to support choices at work
Workers are often asked to make choices in the course of their working lives: choosing a job to apply for or take, which payroll company to use, whether to classify as self-employed or not, which shifts to take, selecting different training or career options. These choices are often constrained by the actual range on offer, or by lack of good information to compare options.
Collecting and sharing information about actual working conditions, including real incomes, predictability and variability of hours and what co-workers and managers are like can improve transparency and help people to better match their needs with the work on offer. This is the sort of information that Breakroom, backed by Resolution Ventures, is bringing to hourly work.
For some jobs, it is hard to work out how much income you are actually receiving, or what the marginal income would be from additional hours. Ways to understand and interpret this information, and connect it to financial and work decisions can improve people’s work choices and financial security. This is the sort of challenge tackled by the finalists of the Mayor’s Resilience Challenge for gig work.
In some of these areas, technology solutions that provide better, more appropriate or accurate information could create improvements based on better individual worker decisions, with some potential to change employer practices where those decisions are aggregated together.
INFORMATION: Make it easier to efficiently scan and select from a range of training and roles
Another way that choices can create a problem is with overwhelming amounts of information that are hard to interpret or organise — like selecting from the thousands of Further Education courses available across the UK.
Sometimes the problem is that past experience is not a good indicator of future success, where, for example, hiring decisions have been historically biased. This can be the case with adult education courses and training options; career choices; job applications; and mentoring or work experience.
Any form of the ‘search and match’ problem, where the challenge is to find a good fit between the searcher and the match has the potential to be improved with better data, better search tools and a broader definition of what makes a good match. When choice is overwhelming or unmanageable, careful customisation and filtering can be helpful.
Some forms of search and filtering can support ‘blinding’ and ways to remove human biases from the process. Ways of reducing the ‘who you know, not what you know’ factor can help to improve social mobility and career options for underrepresented groups.
When looking at new ways to aggregate and present data, what must be avoided is encoding historic biases in career choices and skills into these customised choices, perpetuating gender and ethnic stereotypes and limiting diversity.
CONNECTION: Create new communities where they are missing
Many types of jobs make it hard to find and connect with a community of people. Digital technology is an unparalleled communication tool, helping to find ‘people like me’, to share concerns, tips, and feel part of a broader group.
This might be a community of Starbucks workers with tattoos, who found each other through US platform, Coworker; it might be finding the other people at your workplace who are also struggling with caring responsibilities at home, as BGV portfolio company Curo Carers is doing; it might be a group of people spread around the world who are all learning the same thing, and supporting each other to complete a course.
An unmet demand can emerge from new types of work, or work that is undergoing rapid change — such as gig workers. It can also arise from minority groups who want to seek out others in their company or industry with shared interests and characteristics.
CONNECTION: Establish new forms of support and channels for worker voices
Some sectors have a strong history of trade union membership, and workers in those industries tend to have a good understanding of where to turn if they experience, for example, a health and safety issue at work.
Those in industries where there is lower membership of unions might seek other ways to have their voice heard, might need help with practical questions and support.
Large sections of the workforce miss out on employment rights that are provided to others, including statutory sick pay, parental leave, paid holidays.
Other groups are finding new ways in which work conflicts with their day-to-day lives: carers, disabled people, parents. And some groups of workers, including those working for gig platforms, or whose tasks are determined by algorithms, are navigating a world of work that regulation hasn’t fully caught up to.
New communities or services can help provide a place to turn, or a starting point and can offer help with the processes of redress or exercising existing rights. They might offer services or benefits that are particularly useful to a specific group, that might be too small to receive that support directly from an employer.
INFORMATION: Improve the information passed between workers and companies in a supply chain
For many employees the entity on their payslip is not the same as the company that ultimately determines their work and working conditions. Use of agency workers, sub-contractors, freelancers and other structures mean that the employer running the site or project may have only a distant relationship with the workers. This is true for industries as diverse as construction, film and television, manufacturing and food production.
Unequal access to information between companies and workers, as well as between different companies in a supply chain, creates power imbalances that can generate inequalities and hide problems. Earwig, backed by Bethnal Green Ventures and Resolution Ventures, is helping to bridge that gap for workers on construction sites with Worker Feedback Club.
Where this is the case, there is considerable scope for information to be lost from one company to another, for messages to be miscommunicated, for worker experiences to be hidden.
There is scope for technology and data to shorten the communication process, to give a better picture of what is happening, and to expose some hidden aspects of the nature of this work to employers, consumers and investors.
ALTERNATIVES: New employers and ways of working
In many sectors, progress in good work has stalled where employers hold significant power, and there are few channels for workers to create change. In some sectors, there is an opportunity to use technology to deliver work or services in different ways, with a different deal for workers. That might mean a different organisational and governance structure, like a cooperative, or it might mean just a different set of business principles, taking a more ethical approach to stand out in a sector. Where technology can improve efficiency and reduce costs or risks, that improvement can be put into better experiences for both customers and workers.
Part three of this short series on WorkerTech opportunities has given some more specific examples of where we think technology opportunities lie for improving the experience of low-paid work. But this isn’t an exhaustive list — we know that there are other ideas out there, and many that we haven’t thought of. But we hope that this serves as inspiration and encouragement that there are opportunities to build great Tech For Good ventures in this area, and to create real impact and change.
For investments at the very early stages (pre-product, pre-revenue), check out BGV’s 12-week Tech for Good programme (applications are open until 9th Jan 2022). For investments at the later stages, head over to Resolution Ventures’ website for more details.
This series is brought to you by Bethnal Green Ventures in partnership with Resolution Ventures, the venture arm of Resolution Foundation, a think-tank focused on improving the living standards of those on low-to-middle incomes.
