About once a month, Cody Aughney delivers for DoorDash. It’s not his usual job at the delivery company.
Most of the time, he’s the vice president of dasher and logistics for DoorDash. However, sometimes Aughney delivers coffees, salads, and other food through the company’s WeDash program, which requires DoorDash corporate employees to make deliveries at least four times a year.
WeDash has been a formal DoorDash program since 2015. It gives employees like Aughney on-the-ground insight into what gig workers, whom the company calls “Dashers,” face on a daily basis. Last year, about 8 million people made deliveries for DoorDash, the company said in its annual report.
The approach has become common in the gig work industry. Uber has a similar program, which puts corporate employees behind the wheel as ride-hailing drivers. The top brass at the major gig work companies have also gotten involved: The CEOs of Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash have all said they’ve driven or delivered food for their respective apps.
“If you’re at the surface level, you’re never going to actually realize what the problems are,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said on a podcast in 2021.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi even said he was tip baited, or offered a tip by customers who later took it back or reduced the amount of the gratuity — a common point of frustration among gig workers.
At DoorDash, the WeDash program has also become a key way to beta-test new features within the app and identify areas for improvement.
DoorDash employees become beta testers
Aughney has worked at DoorDash for nine years. When he started, he said, corporate employees stepping in to deliver orders was more about necessity. “We need to go dash now because we don’t have enough couriers,” he said of the company back then.
Roughly a decade later, WeDash provides feedback for the company on what’s working on the app and for Dashers, and what isn’t, he said.
On a lunchtime WeDash run last month in downtown Washington, DC, a DoorDash spokesperson showed Business Insider how employees make deliveries. Using the DoorDash app, WeDashers either wait to be offered a delivery, similar to how most Dashers work, or claim orders that are available nearby.
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The spokesperson claimed an order that contained several kinds of sushi tagged on the DoorDash app as a large catering order, despite the fact that the package was small enough to be carried to an office building several blocks away.
The order showed that DoorDash has room to improve its order tags, the spokesperson said — something the company said it’s working on.
One recent WeDash-inspired change, Aughney said, is a streamlined home screen on the app for DoorDash gig workers, which features a larger map and less clutter.
While going through comments from an internal Slack channel where DoorDash employees post about their WeDash experiences, Aughney said, his team found lots of complaints that the home screen was too cluttered.
After getting more feedback from some of DoorDash’s gig workers and making changes, Aughney said, WeDashers became beta testers for a revamped version before DoorDash started rolling out the new screen more broadly in September.
That way, “you can go out to Dashers and make sure that the product you bring out to them is polished,” he said.
WeDash has also caught smaller problems, Aughney said. While picking up an order at a restaurant last year, he said he received a message in the DoorDash app reminding him to wear a mask and socially distance — a prompt from earlier in the pandemic that DoorDash had since removed.
That message was something few Dashers would likely write in about, Aughney said.
“I like the little things that you would just never think of,” he said.
Do you have a story to share about DoorDash or another gig work company? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com.
