Shift Work Summit 2024 was full of inspiring and thought-provoking sessions with industry leaders who shared key insights on the trends and innovations that are guiding the future shift work. We were thrilled to have Jarah Euston, Co-founder and CEO of WorkWhile, as the keynote speaker. Her session The Flex Work Revolution: 2024 and Beyond set the tone for the summit’s discussions, as she delivered a fresh perspective on the factors driving the growth of flex work, how workers view shift work, and the intersection of AI and flex work. Watch the full keynote or the highlights below and take a look replay for Shift Work Summit 2024 here.
Key moments:
The Best Workers Desire Flexibility
Financial Empowerment through Flex work
How AI Can Attract and Match the Best Workers
Kashyap Deorah:
Very, very warm welcome to everyone for joining the keynote for Shift Work Summit 2024.
I'm Kashyap Deorah, I'm founder and CEO of HyperTrack.
I was in Dallas last week at the Staffing Industry Analysts Conference around collaboration in the gig economy.
Apparently there are now 72 million gig workers in America. And that's a number that's growing. Over 50 million of these, 72 million are delivering services at businesses as opposed to ride sharing and delivery drivers seen from the work workforce side of things.
2% of all staffing needs in America are now fulfilled by gig workers. This number is growing fast, and some estimates peg it at 10% by 2030.
I was in a session where, leaders of the top shift work marketplaces. Indeed Flex, Wonolo, GigSmart, Nowsta, and of course WorkWhile seemingly competitors, you know. They were in the same room and were openly collaborating with each other, comparing notes about growing the pie. here was a shared belief that, unlike the on-demand economy, this is not a winner-take-all market.
And this is the type of spirit with which we started this community. For Shift Work Summit. I'm thrilled to see it grow. So for our keynote this year, I'm delighted to welcome the co-founder and CEO of one of the leading workforce as a service platforms, WorkWhile.
She's a repeat entrepreneur. Repeat CEO and earlier this year she was recognized as one of the 50 leaders shaping the gig economy, an award brought to you by the same people for bringing your Shift Work Summit.
Most importantly, though for me she co-founded the Wharton Alumnae Founders and Funders Association, one of the fastest growing communities of women leaders helping other women leaders. She is especially relevant in a world where the American gig workforce has - can I say the lioness share of women?
And it's amazing to see a woman lead a company solving that problem. Before I steal any more of her thunder, please welcome Jarah Euston from WorkWhile over to you, Jarah.
Jarah Euston, Founder and CEO of WorkWhile:
Oh, thank you so much for that warm introduction and for having me here today, I'm excited to share with the audience some of the insights that we've seen at WorkWhile. And so, as a quick introduction to the company. WorkWhile is an hourly labor marketplace, we connect workers with shifts that fit their skill, schedule, and location. We started back in 2020, and have gone through the Covid pandemic crazy times. And now, on the other side of it. And one key thing that differentiates us in the space is, we have a worker-first philosophy.
Our whole reason for being is to put money in the pockets of the hourly wage earner in the United States.
My first job, ever in high school, was as a retail associate at Party City. The big box party supply superstore. I also worked at a fast food chicken restaurant called Kenny Rogers Roasters. If you remember the late great country music superstar, Kenny Rogers who sang The Gambler — you got to know when to hold them know when to fold them. He had a rotisserie chicken fast food chain, and I was one of their proud employees. So I grew up working hourly jobs.
I understand that if you're trying to make ends meet and raise your family, and your employer is giving you your schedule. Well, sometimes you're not going to make it to work.
Why Flex work is compelling
“The value proposition for the average American hourly worker to work on a platform, like WorkWhile that is flexible and they get to opt into their own schedule”
So our whole purpose is to create flexible work opportunities for responsible, hardworking individuals so that they can work while they're raising their families work while they're going back to school work while they're doing whatever it is they need to do to get by, and we try to support workers the best that we can by paying them as quickly as possible, offering things like free telehealth and upskilling opportunities that's really central to who we are.
And one thing that we do every year to get a better handle on how flex work is working for the workers that we care so much about is we do an annual survey.
And today I thought it would be interesting for this audience to learn some of the insights from that survey about who are gig workers and and what do they care about?
So let me go ahead and share a presentation here. If you'll give me one moment.Okay, great. So I'll just zoom in a bit here. And so the flex work revolution is what we're calling it right. The value proposition for the average American hourly worker to work on a platform, like WorkWhile that is flexible and they get to opt into their own schedule, it is incredibly compelling. It's a very strong value prop. And so what we're seeing is the sheer number of workers who join platforms like WorkWhile is increasing every year.
Shift Work - A $3.8 Trillion Opportunity
“this continued growth towards independent workforce is growing 2 times as fast as anything else in the market.”
And to set the stage of how big this market is. One thing that we heard last week at the Staffing Industry Analyst conference was the size of the contingent work market globally. Right? It's 3.8 trillion dollars.
And that's just gigantic. And what they also explained was that the platform piece of that is starting very, very small. Right? It's about 17 billion today. Out of this almost 4 trillion dollar pie.
And what that translates into is an insane opportunity for growth and expansion.
And it really made me think about one of my favorite blog posts ever from Mark Andreessen back in 2007. He talked about. What's the biggest predictor of a startup's success, is it the market, the team, or the product?
And his conclusion was, you can't beat the market. If you're trying to work in a very small market, it doesn't matter if you have the best team and the best product there just simply aren't enough people to buy what you're selling.
And so when I see numbers like almost 4 trillion dollars, contingent workforce opportunity, it just makes me really excited, because if you have a market that is that big and is growing that quickly, the best team is going to be attracted to it, and your customers are going to pull the best product out of you. And so it was just incredibly motivating to me to hear some of these high level stats and understand that we are all in the middle of this dramatic shift of what's happening in the labor market.
And so this continued growth towards independent workforce is growing 2 times as fast as anything else in the market. Even today, where the macroeconomy, it's very lumpy. Some sectors are doing great, some sectors not so much.
But the the shift to independent work is happening really, really quickly. And what we found in the course of our surveys over the last 4 years. We're getting ready to release the results from the 4th annual survey is that flex work? It's no longer a side hustle.
The Best Workers Desire Flexibility
“And sometimes the perception is that flexible work is for people who can't make it in the old-school way of hiring, and what we find is that couldn't be further from the truth.
The best workers want to work in a way that gives them more power and gets them paid faster. And we're actually attracting the best talent…”
We know that when Uber started and Uber's perspective and Doordash's perspective was folks aren't doing that full time, It's something you can do on the side. But what we're finding now is that for flexible work, especially if we're talking about shift work that's becoming the primary way that a lot of folks are earning their living, and what we found is that over half of the workers that we surveys they are making the majority of their income through flex work.
And the longer you're working flexibly, the bigger percentage of your income is coming from flex work which makes sense. If it's working for you, you continue to do it, and you do it more.
And so I want to spend a moment to talk about who is the flex worker. Because sometimes in the the marketplace for folks who maybe aren’t familiar with a digital platform or haven't themselves gone through the process of downloading an app and going through onboarding and actually working.
It seems very strange. It's not your traditional posted job Ad. Have somebody apply, have recruiters, screen resumes, schedule interviews, talk to someone, and then hire them right? That's still the frame of reference for a lot of employers.
And sometimes the perception is that flexible work is for people who can't make it in the old-school way of hiring, and what we find is that couldn't be further from the truth.
The best workers want to work in a way that gives them more power and gets them paid faster. And we're actually attracting the best talent. And so if we look at the demographics of flexible workers.
We find that, you know, they’re parents. Some are married. About 63% are single workers value flexibility. It makes sense that you're attracting a lot of parents.
Parents are the ones who need the most flexibility. They're looking to flex work because oftentimes it pays more, it pays more quickly, and they can find work close to them.
And these are all just basic. No brainers right? Who wouldn't want a job with a short commute that pays you well, and that meets your life scheduling needs?
And finally, the flex workforce is very diverse. It's a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, interests, and community belonging. And so it's a great way to tap into a new labor pool that sometimes doesn't come through your traditional job board apps.
And so I just want to highlight a couple of flex workers that we've spoken to to give you a sense of the variety of folks who are making their living working flexibly.
So Jennifer, in San Diego is actually a grandmother. Someone who is balancing her familial obligations and her retirement era with making more money through flexible work and being just out in the world talking to people. Maybe working event shifts and being hospitable.
Tiffany in Dallas is someone who I met when I was working a shift, and she was an amazing shift leader. She's a veteran. She was in the army. She has a sick child that she takes care of, and she works on work, while to make ends meet in a way that allows her to care for her family, and she's someone who, you know, our customers tell us is phenomenal. And she's on the platform.
So these are just 2 examples of folks who are making the choice to decide, not to work a traditional hourly job, but to work in a more flexible way.
I really do think that the double clicking on the importance of flex work to women with children is critical. Right? I'm a mom. I understand that you know your schedule can really be thrown out of whack when a child is sick, has some special needs, or just simply needs to go get a checkup right?
With traditional work, it’s hard to pop out. If you're if you're a warehouse associate, it's difficult to just pop out for a couple hours to take somebody to the doctor and we find that women with children greatly prefer flexibility and only about 5 and a half percent prefer a traditional job to flex work. If you have kids. That's astounding.
This is a model that works so much better for for moms. And it's 1 of the key reasons why we believe that we're going to see continued acceleration in this space. You know, there's a really great organization that's now out of Harvard. They started at Berkeley called the Shift Project, and they're a group of sociology professors, and they do their own surveying and research.
And what they find is that for parents who have shift-based jobs and they get their schedule with little notice. Their kids have a much higher incidence of being left home alone. On average, it was like 10 days left home alone. If you get your work schedule with something like less than 2 days, notice and it just makes sense.
Financial Empowerment Through Flex work
"If they're working an hourly job and getting paid every two weeks. That's effectively a free working capital loan to your employer and to the individual worker. "
If you're somebody who's making between 15 and $20 an hour, and you got to be at work, and you just learned about it in 2 days, and you can't find a sitter, you’re faced with a hard choice of losing your job, not making any money, or maybe leaving your kids home.
So I just want to highlight that stat, because it's just really critical for people to be able to raise their kids to have a little bit of this grace and a little bit of this flexibility.
And flex work is a really great way for people to get that. Another preconceived notion of flexible work that we think really doesn't stack up anymore is that you know, folks are just working shifts, and then they're never to be seen again.
It's kind of the modern version of day labor and what we find, especially with with folks who have families and who crave stability a lot of times. They become regulars, and they go back to the same companies in the same location to do the same thing over and over again, but they do it in a way that works for them, and it provides that layer of flexibility that they need to be able to help their families out.
And so a couple other things that we like to ask the workers on the platform is really about why is flex work important to you. We really want to understand why folks are making the choice to work flexibly, and we ask, you know, what has flex work enabled you to do in the last year or so.
And a shocking, you know, 59% of workers have said that flex work has helped them cover expenses.
Which is huge, right? This is directly related to somebody not going into debt, somebody not facing eviction, somebody not getting their car repossessed, which have just tremendous harms to the individual worker and to their families, and the other people in their community who depend on them.
And another one that we asked about was about was: If workers have long-term financial goals. And this one, I think, was pretty surprising, and when we share this with employers and with customers, who might think that because you're working flexibly, maybe you're just looking for some quick cash, and you don't have maybe a longer term plan. And I don't think that could be further from the truth.
So 86% of workers say they do have long-term financial goals and flex work is helping them progress towards those goals. And it could be things like buying a home, paying off debt, starting to save for retirement.
Another thing that was very interesting to us when we asked workers what things that they care about, it was credit building.The majority of workers are actually taking steps and are worried and monitoring their credit.
Everybody is working to improve their credit. And I think it just highlights how much workers are actually trying to get ahead.
Because let's be real — The American economy doesn't make it easy for them to do that. If they're working an hourly job and getting paid every two weeks. That's effectively a free working capital loan to your employer and to the individual worker.
What that means for you is you're not able to pay your bills as quickly as you might like to.and so that causes a lot of issues with credit. You'll run up credit card debt. You might not be able to pay that credit card bill on time.
And we know that that's something that really weighs on the workers on the platform because they care about this. Another important thing that I think a lot of folks don't recognize, iIf they don't spend a lot of time with people who work hourly is the cognitive load of being an hourly wage earner is quite high.
We talk to workers every day, and we know that from the moment they clock in. They're doing the arithmetic in their mind of how much money they're earning, and chances are before they clock in.
That money's already been allocated. They already know how much they need to spend on, their kid’s new sport, uniform or groceries, and I don't think it's appreciated by maybe the white collar workforce.
How much of their mental horsepower is really taken up by thinking about managing their finances. And we're really happy that flex work helps take a little bit of that load off because it's much more straightforward, and your access to cash is much faster, and, as we all know cash is king.
That's what's really going to help people get ahead.
So I want to spend a moment and talk about some forward-looking things that we're thinking about. At WorkWhile, we started with the notion of building machine learning and AI models that can predict the likelihood of worker reliability, because, as we know, for employers, one of the biggest challenges with hourly labor is call-outs, no call-no shows, perhaps people not staying the full shift.
How AI attracts and matches the best workers
“..if we're able to attract and then match the best workers with the best opportunities for them, we're going to be able to reinvest back into their workforce in order to attract other great workers.
So this piece around AI-driven matching and predictive models, is really critical for making a platform or a labor marketplace work at scale.”
And we thought from the very beginning, can we build a model that can help predict behavior?
And can we know with some level of accuracy, the likelihood of any given worker showing up to any given shift? Over the last four years or so we have built and refined that model to a place where we are extremely confident. We can know who's going to be reliable for any given shift based on location based on traffic patterns based on weather based on previous performance and a whole bunch of signals that we get through the WorkWhile app.
And this is something that's really central to our model, because if we're able to attract and then match the best workers with the best opportunities for them, we're going to be able to reinvest back into their workforce in order to attract other great workers.
So this piece around AI driven matching and predictive models, is really critical for making a platform or a labor marketplace work at scale. Earlier this week, I was at the World Economic Forum Meeting in New York. And one of the sessions and the conversations that I was in was around AI job augmentation, reskilling, upskilling, and recruiting.
What was so fascinating from this conversation with other, much larger company CEOs, was how much folks believe that AI will totally transform recruiting. That the number of recruiters will go down, but the productivity of each individual human recruiter is going to go way up because the amount of information and signals that artificial intelligence is able to glean and just the automation aspect of it.
It's really going to transform how we source recruit and hire in the future. And really the future is like 3 to 5 years. The future is not 20 to 50 years. It's happening so rapidly. And how do we make sure that as some parts of some jobs are replaced with AI, how do we help people learn new skills and upskill? And that's one of the reasons why in WorkWhile we think that it's so central to create what we would call snap snackable tutorials, snackable, content to help people understand and learn new things where they are when they're waiting for that school pickup, you can learn something and present it to them on their phone. It's in their pocket. You don't have to go to a classroom. You don't have to take more time out of your workday to do the training.
How do you automate more of that, and with AI and generative AI in particular, that's becoming increasingly popular and increasingly possible, and something that, like CEOs all over the world are thinking about.
We think that will drive the market growth in flex, independent work, especially for platforms that are digital first.
They're the ones who are going to be able to take advantage of advances in AI and deploy it to their workforce and their databases faster.
And the last stat that I'll leave you with as we kick off this really important conference today is the projection for next year.
So it seems like we might be out of the doldrums, and 2024 might be kind of the bottom, and the projected growth for next year is kind of a rebound of 5% overall increase for the larger staffing market, with, of course, more independent or flexible work growing twice as fast.
So I'll stop there and just say that in closing it's a very exciting time to be part of this 3.8 trillion dollar market. And I just want everyone to remember who we're all here because of, and that's the and that's the worker.
None of us would exist if the shift worker didn't decide to wake up and go work an honest day's work. And so just always try to keep that top of mind as we're building these awesome companies to capture this gigantic market opportunity.
Watch the replay of Shift Work Summit!
