Is Uber redefining the work week?

The 9-to-5 job has been out of popularity for several years. Employers who want to attract the top talent know — and they’ve known for several years — that they’ve got to offer flexible schedules as much as possible in order to retain the most in-demand workers.

But the Uber business model is ushering in a new era of flexibility in work schedules, one that is actually fundamentally different from flexibility.

This idea was new to me until a few weeks ago, and I was even more surprised to hear about it from the chief human resources officer for MillerCoors LLC, Michelle Nettles. How could Uber’s business model have any impact on a mega beer brewing conglomerate?

Nettles explained it this way. Uber’s ability to attract hundreds, or even thousands, of drivers in every city it operates in stems from the strong appeal of the opt-in work week. Drivers can choose to work whenever they want, and for as many hours as they want, and there’s no need to ask anyone for vacation.

“Talent wants to opt in and out at their leisure,” she told me in an interview for the Milwaukee Business Journal. “It’s the ultimate convenience. It’s something on the hearts and minds of every HR professional.”

Nettles prefaced her comments with the acknowledgement that MillerCoors is nowhere near this new model, and may not ever be.

With a flexible work schedule, you can be required to work about 40 hours a week, but on your own schedule, with an option to work at home. Or in some companies, working full-time as a salaried employee means you can work as few as 30 hours a week, or as much as 80 hours a week, if that’s how long it takes to meet your deadlines. I’ve seen many of my engineering friends in the private sector deal with the ugly side of that work-week model.

In that model, a few things change for the employer. They may not always be able to expect that you’ll be at your desk at any given time, and they may need to develop new requirements about cell phone accessibility, but ultimately, they can still develop job descriptions for the same number of people to accomplish the same amount of work.

With the opt-in work week, everything changes.

Say that my skill as a biochemist is so highly in-demand that a medical device manufacturer is willing to hire me, even though I only want to work 20 hours a week most of the time, but I still want to receive ample wages to fuel my activities for the additional 20 hours a week I now have to fill.

Someone else only wants to work 10 hours. And another worker has a highly specialized skill, but wants to spread her talent out among several ventures, so she only has five hours a week to spare.

Each of these employees now acts like their own consulting firm, and the employer has to adopt a new team-based model for ensuring the job gets done on time.

For Uber, the ‘job’ is picking up all of the passengers who request a ride at a given time, within a reasonable amount of time. It makes no difference to Uber if that is accomplished by two drivers or 20. If it can’t be done in a reasonable amount of time with only two drivers, Uber can offer additional incentives to bring in more drivers.

To match Uber, my fictitious medical device firm would need to adjust to a team-based deadline model, with incentives to make sure the job gets done on time by somebody, even if the 5-hours-a-week-employee and the 10-hours-a-week-employee both decide not to work this month.

In the past, this kind of flexibility has only been available in independent contractor jobs like tutoring, or appointment-only hair-cutting, or other self-employed gigs, where the only thing at stake was your own income level, not a company’s ability to make medical devices, or millions of cases of light lager beer.

Will the Uber business model actually drive this kind of paradigm shift in the work week? I’m not the first one to raise this question. Members of the media and politicians have been documenting the shift into the ‘gig’ economy with varying reactions from embracing it to eyeing it with caution.

In my case, I love the idea of only working when I want to work/need the money, but still having access to coworkers and collaboration and the resources of an employer. But I’m also cautious when I look at Uber’s plans for the future.

Uber’s endgame is a driver team entirely composed of robots. The company is at the forefront of discussions of the legal and logistical implications of self-driving cars, because if the company can cut out the cost of the driver, it can offer cheaper rides and earn more profits. The company is currently agnostic about the makeup of its workforce because it doesn’t foresee having one for much longer.

So this makes me wonder. Is the gig economy just an intermediate step in the progression toward a fully automated robotic workforce? And if it is, is there anything we can do to stop it? 

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Olivia Barrow covers manufacturing, travel and tourism for the Milwaukee Business Journal, and blogs on LinkedIn about life as a young journalist in a rapidly changing media landscape. Follow her personal blog for all career posts, along with posts on fitness and sexuality.