Andy Fang, DoorDashs co-founder and chief technology officer, picks up and delivers food orders to customers in downtown San Francisco on Saturday, June 15, 2023. Fang is one of a growing number of executives who work shifts on the front lines of the companies they run. All DoorDash salaried employees are required to make deliveries or work directly with customers or merchants several times a year.
Amazon recently re-launched a program called the Associate Experience Week, which encourages employees to shadow operations workers for a week to gain a better understanding of their job. The program is mandatory for some managers. A1 Garage Door Service, which operates in 16 states, also encourages job-shadowing and requires all employees to learn skills outside their immediate responsibilities. A1 CEO Tommy Mello says the policy promotes empathy and collaboration.
“We had to. There was nobody else to do them,” Fang said. “But what we quickly found out was that by doing these deliveries ourselves, we learned a ton of insights into what it actually took to get these deliveries fulfilled.” Another new feature, introduced this week, arose from employee feedback in WeDash. The feature, Dash Along the Way, lets drivers specify where they want to start making deliveries and then assigns them orders that they can complete en route.