Healthy express couriers: Tackling stress at work in a digital era

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Evidence shows that digital surveillance for the purpose of performance monitoring at work can exert a negative health impact on the monitored workers. Nevertheless, workplace surveillance is becoming the norm in a fast growing new job sector called Online-to-Offline (O2O) that is closely associated with surging global online consumption. A prominent feature of this sector is a digitally optimised operation that sorts and shifts a massive amount of goods and services highly efficiently with each step timed and tracked. Express delivery, including express parcel delivery and takeaway delivery is the key to connecting the last mile between the online platform and actual delivery addresses. O2O is also loosely termed as gig economy or platform economy, typically structured as an online consumption platform employing a large, precarious workforce. The rising O2O sector has seen a significant increase in monitoring practices with new characteristics, e.g., tracking with wearable sensors that intensify the relationship between the system and the monitored. These features add up to a stressful working environment that contributes to physical and mental ill-health. Indeed, media reports on Amazon, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Eleme and Meituan continue to surface in many countries, revealing health implications due to excessive workload, work-related stress, which may also lead to injuries, suicide attempts and death. However, there is currently little or no evidence from observational and intervention research about the impact of workplace surveillance on occupational stress in this new sector to provide support to industry and policy makers. To understand and define the problem, we choose express couriers in China as the targeted population to develop a system-level intervention program. We do so for two reasons. First, China is the global leader of O2O e-commerce with $877.00 billion online sales in 2017, which grew by 28% compared with 2016. Industry evidence compiled by the largest online Chinese platforms Alibaba and Meituan suggests at least 6.5 million express couriers were employed in 2016. We conducted preliminary qualitative research in March 2019 in China and found that current working practice may present multiple health hazards; forcing young couriers to leave their jobs after only a few years due to stress and mental ill-health, musculoskeletal disorders, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, injuries and other chronic and acute conditions. They typically work to digitally optimized time and route schedules that are pushing human boundaries. Especially for takeaway couriers, with the expectation of 30 minutes lead time and route complication, e.g., high-rise building blocks, achieving optimised efficiency during peak hours is a particularly stressful task. In addition, the system in China include rewards and penalties for speed and quality of service. This has the potential to add significantly to the stressful nature of the job. Second, occupational health and mental health research have been identified by China's National Health Commission as two under-researched priority areas. Therefore, the main aim of this early phase project is to develop and pilot an intervention program to reduce work-related stress and associated health outcomes among express delivery couriers caused by surveillance systems to optimize delivery operation and monitor performance and record customer feedback. Our ultimate goal is develop protocols in the main study for workplace surveillance using wearable sensors to inform policy and practice in a way that it will ameliorate the long and short-term health consequences on monitored workers. It is undoubtedly a global and growing phenomenon and the outcome of this research will benefit working populations that are constantly tracked and monitored in both developing and developed countries, including the UK.