(Interim Report)

Motivation and work life balance in the lives of delivery personnel in Lucknow city
From our initial survey from the sample size of 38 employees from various food, courier and
e-commerce delivery services, we tried to observe and critically analyze the work condition of
delivery boys based primarily on the factors: work life balance, Stress and motivation.
Following are our preliminary findings
Demographics
Age: Majority of people were of age group 20-35 years
Family Condition: Most of them were married and bread-earners for their family.
Gender (Male)
Job

Nature of organization: Predominantly the respondents were from E commerce

companies. 10% were from food delivery services
Part time or full time: Most of the people were working as full time employees on
contract basis.

Job characteristics
Working Hours: Most of the employees had to devote 8-9 hours of their day to work and
work for 6 days a week for full time employees. Some even had to engage in overstay
because of heavy work load especially during festive seasons. Most of the companies
(30+) do not pay for overtime but companies like Grofers and Dominos offer
compensation for overtime.
Schedule flexibility: The schedule is very rigid for most of them and they had fixed
timings. Shift swapping was not allowed by any employer.
Provision for leaves: Most of them (78%) were penalized monetarily for taking more
than 2 leaves/month (Including Sick leaves)
Level of commutation: Generally, they have fixed areas to deliver goods but they need
to travel something upward of 60kms per day. This is not seen with hostility by most
employees (81%)
Analysis
Work life balance:
Ability to meet family commitments after work: Most of them agreed that they were able
to meet family commitments after work. But sometimes, during seasons of heavy workload
(sales and festivals) they had increased working hours and hence less time for family.
Spill-over of work life into personal life: The work does not bother them as of much
outside their working hours since job is not of take home nature.
Depression: Depression is not common place but happens sometimes in case of higher age
groups due to increasing monetary pressures and decreasing physical ability with age.
Health problems: Since they have to travel long distances during the course of the day and
so they have physical strain, especially problem of backache is a prominent symptom in the
higher age groups of delivery personnel (30+). One respondent claimed to spend upwards of
1000/PM on treatment of backache alone.

Motivation
Due to the less skill intensive nature of the the job, most contemporary theories of motivation
like self-determination, social learning, job engagement and expectancy were found to be of
limited use.
Goal Setting theory seemed to offer short term boosts to motivation (high bonuses during
festivals for good performance) but it offered no insights into job satisfaction which affect
long term motivation.
When specifically asked about the kind of changes they would desire for alleviation of their
present problems, most (67%) overwhelmingly rated promotion or growth as the biggest
single factor. It is of note here that high pay was excluded from the options as almost all the
candidates were not completely satisfied by their pay (97%)
Effect of externalities on motivation is shown in the pie chart included below.

Stress:
Sources of stress:
Environmental factors: Even though job doesnt require high skill, fear of layoffs due to
closing of operations was found very depressing to the morale of the workforce E.g.: Grofers
closing their operation in multiple cities.
Personal factors: Found very homogenous and not highly distinctive interpersonally.
Organizational factors: The dependency of their job on externalities like weather, roads
and poor customer behavior was found to be the biggest hindrance stressor.
Another problem is role overload, to reduce the operating costs many companies layoff
people and hence the employees are expected to do more work than time permits.
Organizational support in form of healthy employee-supervisor relationship was
found as one interesting highlight (62% positive reviews)

Caveat: Law of small numbers play a crucial role here, due to the extremely small sampling
size, any conclusion drawn cannot be considered particularly indicative.
Eg. Companies like Grofer and Dominos offer overstay allowance but their
underrepresentation in sample set primes one to conclude that most companies dont offer
overstay allowance. In a larger sample size with more respondents from the companies, same
survey might have yielded different results.

Further Plan of Action:

We will increase our sample size in range of 100-150. Our self-imposed target is 120 which is
slightly uphill. We have not included secondary research to augment our analysis yet which
might led us to assume causal relationship where there isnt any . So we will include some
secondary research. We also want to examine the relationship from employers perspective so
we plan to include an analysis on a startup Roadrunner in our final report.