san francisco — On a recent afternoon in San Francisco, a DoorDash driver was circling the neighborhood—first in his car, then on foot—trying to find the restaurant from which he needed to pick up two orders. Finally, they Googled the location and realized that DoorDash’s app had sent them to the wrong address.
It’s an error he’s vowed to fix, and he probably will. Because that employee is Andy Fang, DoorDash’s chief technology officer and one of the company’s three co-founders.
“If it happens to one restaurant, it can actually happen to many other restaurants,” Fang said after taking the order and getting back in his car. “If we can see why this happened, maybe we can fix the other issues as well.”
Fang is one of a growing number of executives who sometimes work hourly hours that keep their companies buzzing. Starbucks’ new CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, is a trained barista and works half a day at a store every month. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Lyft CEO David Risher sometimes shuttle passengers. Air New Zealand CEO Greg Foran is seen serving drinks and snacks on a flight.
Amazon recently relaunched a program called Associate Experience Week, which encourages employees to shadow operations staff for a week to gain a better understanding of their work. For some managers the program is mandatory. A1 Garage Door Service, which operates in 16 states, encourages job-shadowing and requires all employees to learn skills outside of their immediate responsibilities. A1 CEO Tommy Mello says the policy fosters empathy and collaboration.
But few companies have a program as robust as WeDash, which requires thousands of salaried DoorDash employees in the US, Canada and Australia to complete at least four deliveries per year. Employees are strongly encouraged to make monthly deliveries. They can use the work time to cover those shifts, and keep any money they earn.
“We just want to make sure that the people who are working here, who are supporting our visitors, they understand what people are going through,” Fang told The Associated Press.
When he started DoorDash a decade ago while he was a student at Stanford, Fang and the company’s other two co-founders — CEO Tony Xu and Chief Product Officer Stanley Tang — did all the deliveries themselves.
“We had to. There was no one else to do them,” Fang said. “But we quickly learned that by doing these deliveries ourselves, we learned a lot about what it really takes to complete these deliveries. I learned a lot of insight.”
The company introduced WeDash in 2015 to make sure that every employee had access to these insights. Fang said there are exceptions; For example, if an employee cannot drive, he can go to merchants or work in a call center.
DoorDash has grown rapidly since then. In 2022, more than 6 million DoorDash drivers – all independent contractors – will fulfill 1.7 billion orders worldwide. DoorDash has expanded beyond restaurant delivery to convenience stores, groceries, pet stores, and pharmacies.
Fang, who makes deliveries for at least an hour each month — sometimes taking Xu and Tang along — says he’s made real changes to DoorDash’s app based on his experiences. When he was recently on the East Coast, he scheduled to make a delivery when he returned to California. But when he got home, he realized the time he had set was three hours short because the app assumed he was still on the East Coast. He fixed that bug.
Another new feature introduced this week originated from feedback from employees at WeDash. The feature, Dash Along the Way, lets drivers specify where they want to start a delivery and then assigns them orders that they can fulfill along the way.
Fang also experiences other frustrations of drivers. The wrong address in the DoorDash app caused them to waste time delivering orders from Korean fried chicken chain Bonchon. On the afternoon he drove with an AP video reporter, Fang earned only $15.50 for 51 minutes of work. According to Indeed, that’s slightly less than the $17.97 San Francisco DoorDash drivers typically make an hour.
It is also significantly lower than Feng as CEO. His annual compensation totaled $2.79 million in 2022 and Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.1 billion in the same year, reflecting the growing pay gap between those at the top and bottom of a company.
DoorDash and others recently protested a new rule in New York City imposing a minimum wage rate for app-based food delivery workers, which could nearly triple their average earnings in the coming years. DoorDash said it may take legal action.
Fang said he knows there are limits to how much he can understand the day-to-day work of the company’s drivers, which is why he seeks feedback from a council of drivers and other employees as well.
Dennis Russo, professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, said asking workers to do other things within their company is of great importance. Having senior leaders participate, as DoorDash does, sends an even stronger message.
“If you spend your time on it, it’s not a cheap thing anymore,” he said. “You’re trying to convey, ‘This is the focus of our business and we care about it.'”
Elizabeth Bitter, who makes deliveries for DoorDash in Broomfield, Colorado, didn’t know about the WeDash program, but she’s seen updates to the app that make her job easier.
DoorDash’s app asked after each delivery whether the delivery was good or bad and whether the driver felt safe or unsafe. Bitter appreciated the security concerns, but filling out surveys slowed delivery, so it was a relief when the app recently stopped requiring that information. A more recent update lets drivers unassign themselves from an order if they have to wait too long at a restaurant to get it.
“It makes me feel better knowing that the people I work for are getting to experience firsthand what it’s like to work for them,” said Bitter, who earns an average of $20 an hour at DoorDash.
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Durbin reported from Detroit.
