What if? Let's Find Out.
The ways in which we work today - weekends off, 8-hour shifts, overtime, employer-based health care - were structures fought for and imagined by workers from over 100 years ago. We need new solutions for 21st century work and modern workers.
Design sprints are "for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers now," explains Google designer Jake Knapp in his book, Sprint. At The Workers Lab, we make this Silicon Valley process our own. Once a year, we lead Design Sprints to explore ideas that can impact workers and the future of work.
Read about our most recent Design Sprint below.
We’ve adapted Google's Design Sprint methodology - an intensive, time-bound approach to solve problems that reduces risk when bringing a new product to market - in order to:
We tackled the issue of worker income volatility in 2017 with a Design Sprint focused on getting emergency cash to workers.
“What if,” we asked, “workers had $1,000 available - no strings attached when they needed it for unexpected expenses?”
In what we called our “Design Sprint for Social Change,” we partnered with thought leaders across the fields of financial inclusion, product innovation, and labor and employment policy to design and test an emergency cash delivery pilot.
Our team included:
Our goal: to gather evidence about how a cash benefit like this one could and would work best - for workers, employers, technology platforms and government.
Led by our partner, Commonwealth, we have to date:
For this pilot, we provided $1,000 cash grants to 350 lower-income gig workers in the Summer and Fall of 2019. The results of the pilot will be published in May 2020.
Stay tuned for updates!
Email Us: designsprint@theworkerslab.com