Improving Gig Worker Performance and Retention on Staffing Platforms

Gig work, with its short-term nature, has reduced employers' interest in investing in workers' productive capacity. In contrast, online staffing platforms as intermediaries matching workers and employers have an interest in developing (and retaining) a high-performing worker base. We propose three easily implementable and low-cost measures that online staffing platforms can incorporate into their matching algorithms to improve on-site gig worker performance and retention on the platform. Testing these measures in a sample of 4,025 worker-gig matches of a major European staffing platform, we find that the combined effect of these measures can increase worker performance by 55.6 percentage points.