Here's What Uber Is Doing For Its Very Best Drivers

Uber is the poster child for disruption and technological innovation. Yet with a new program meant to inspire its drivers, the startup is deploying a pretty old-school tactic: an employee-of-the-week award for drivers.

There's a bit of a twist though -- Uber drivers aren't technically company employees.

Each week, Uber awards two drivers a Sixth Star for exceptional service. Winners get a $1,000 American Express gift card, some corporate schwag -- hat, medal of honor, etc. -- and public recognition for being awesome.

“We want to recognize service for which our five-star rating system is simply not enough,” Uber vice president David Richter told The Huffington Post in an email, referring to how the ride-share app lets customers rank drivers on a scale of one to five stars.

Marketing and management experts said the program, which was just expanded globally, has the potential to inspire drivers, and signals to customers that Uber values drivers.

“It’s a nice way to say we care about high quality and we’re working on ways to reinforce it,” said Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Kellogg School of Management. Rucker said the program could also motivate Uber drivers to provide better service.

Yet some Uber drivers HuffPost spoke with hadn’t yet heard about the awards. A few said that adding a “sixth star” does little to alleviate problems they have with Uber’s five-star rating system, a source of anxiety.

Now valued at more than $41 billion, Uber is growing rapidly. It now operates in 300 cities across 56 countries. Slowly, Uber seems to be doing more for its growing fleet of drivers, who operate essentially as small business owners. Uber calls them "driver partners," and they don't receive benefits like health insurance, paid vacation or sick leave.

A month after starting Sixth Star this fall, the company also launched a rewards program that offers its drivers discounts on auto care and wireless services, as well as help finding health insurance. In March, the company launched an internal magazine to foster more community between drivers.

Launched in October and expanded globally last week, the Amex-sponsored program gives awards to two Uber drivers each week for exceptional service. One driver is chosen because she has the highest rating and number of trips in a given region. The other driver is nominated by an Uber passenger for doing something extraordinary. The winners rotate between six regions, in Europe, Asia/Pacific and three areas in the Americas. While the company has done things like this at the local level, the program is one of its first global marketing pushes. So far, 28 Uber drivers have won.

Edith Woodie, a driver in Atlanta, won a Sixth Star for voluntarily helping a man healing from amputation surgery do his grocery shopping inside the store -- instead of just dropping him off and leaving.

Ideen Barimani, an Uber X driver in Baltimore with the highest rating on the East Coast (4.96), told HuffPost that winning a Sixth Star was a “validation” of all the hard work he puts into the job. Barimani said he pulls in anywhere from $600 to $800 a week driving his grey Toyota Corolla for around 40 to 50 hours. The 35-year-old takes Uber’s advice on customer service -- keeping his car stocked with bottled water and Starbursts, Hershey miniatures and other candies. He also provides riders with chargers for their phones. And, as a self-professed animal lover, he’s totally cool with carting around passengers’ dogs. He’s open to conversation with passengers, if desired. “If riders want to be left alone, I get the hint,” he told HuffPost.

Sixth Star winner Ideen Barimani.

Giving workers prizes for doing their jobs doesn’t always work out the way business owners and managers plan. In close-knit workplaces, employee of the month awards can sow seeds of animosity, said Kellogg’s Rucker. “You create unnecessary competition in the workplace. Someone wins and everyone else is upset.”

But Uber’s program avoids some of the classic pitfalls, said Rucker. Uber has a huge and disparate workforce. It’s unlikely the program will foment jealousy of management “favorites” or some kind of worker revolt.

“Given it’s a rare award and a big workforce, it’s more like winning the lottery than a typical award,” said Timothy Gubler, a doctoral candidate at Washington University who has researched employee awards. "People don’t feel like ‘I should’ve won the lottery,'” he said.

Uber drivers had a mixed reaction to the program. “If you give me a thousand dollars, that means I’m doing my job right,” New York Uber driver Mina Morgan said.

Sixth Star winner Edith Woodie.

Others either hadn’t heard about it yet, or were more skeptical. “The award is a marketing ploy. It isn’t going to encourage drivers to do anything they weren’t going to do,” said Casandria Harris, a driver in San Antonio. “It might encourage passengers to acknowledge drivers who go above and beyond."

Beyond the Sixth Star, drivers said the ratings system can be unfair. Ratings can drop for reasons beyond their control -- like traffic, or if Uber raises its prices because of increased demand. Driving people around at night -- when they're more likely to be inebriated -- also puts the rating at risk. Uber said its system accounts for this, and notes that the more rides drivers give, the harder it is for one bad rating to knock them back. Still, it's nerve-wracking -- if the rating drops below a certain threshold, drivers could lose their job.

Over the past year, a few Uber drivers were charged with rape and assault, and there was a big dust-up last fall over the company’s interactions with journalists. Partly due to the bad publicity, the percentage of U.S. adults who’ve actually heard of Uber grew to nearly 60 percent from about 45 percent over the past four months, according to data from market research firm YouGov BrandIndex.

One big challenge for Uber is getting more people to sign up, said YouGov CEO Ted Marzilli. He noted the brand gets very favorable ratings from those who actually use the service. A program like Sixth Star, which personalizes drivers and tells their stories, could help gain more goodwill for the brand -- though it’s still in the early stages.

Uber customers will like knowing their ratings could help their drivers, said Uber user Erin Flior, a vice president at communications firm Levick who works on digital marketing campaigns. Flior doesn’t always take the time to rate her drivers, but now that she knows something positive could come out of it, she said she’ll be doing it more often.

--Timothy Stenovec contributed reporting.

6 Of The Fastest-Growing Jobs In America Pay Low Wages

Retailers and policymakers are finally hearing workers’ call for wage hikes, but it may be a little too late.

Low-wage industries in the United States are growing rapidly, but wages aren't. A new report from the National Employment Law Project, a wage advocacy group, found that six of the occupations that are expected to grow the fastest in the coming years are also jobs that pay a median wage of under $15 per hour -- which is barely enough to make ends meet.

These high-growth fields, according to the NELP report, include retail sales employees, food and service workers, nursing assistants, laborers and freight movers, personal care aids, janitors and cleaners (excluding housekeepers and maids).

“These are jobs that aren’t going anywhere,” said Irene Tung, one of the report’s co-authors along with Paul Sonn and Yannet Lathrop. “You can’t outsource fast food in China. You have to grapple with that. This is where we have to lift wages if we want to begin to rebuild the disappearing middle class in the country.”

Around 46 percent of workers earning less than $15 an hour are over 35 years old, the NELP's report found. “There’s a common perception that these occupations are for teenagers,” Tung told The Huffington Post. “But there are a lot of people spending decades in these jobs and supporting families. It calls into question the kind of economy we want.”

As the baby-boom generation ages, one of the biggest-growing sectors is personal care for the elderly. Wages there are stagnant and turnover is high. “It’s hard to retain good personal care aides because the wages are so low,” Tung said.

The report also notes that the percentages of women and African-Americans making less than $15 per hour are disproportionately large. Female workers make up 48 percent of the total U.S. workforce but represent 54 percent of those making under $15 an hour, per the NELP. African-Americans, who comprise 12 percent of the total workforce, represent 15 percent of those making less than $15.

Workers have become increasingly vocal in their fight for better wages, and they're gradually effecting change. McDonald’s bumped up hourly wages to $9.90 earlier this month, though this applied only to a fraction of employees.

Many workers called the raise insufficient and are continuing to call on McDonald's and other corporate giants to hike wages. On Wednesday, a strike organized by the group Fight for $15, which advocates for a minimum hourly wage of $15 for fast-food employees, began in cities across the U.S and expanded to include demonstrations for other low-earning workers.

In February, retail giant Walmart increased wages to $9 for its lowest-paid workers. Rivals such as T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and Target soon followed suit. But many of these low-income workers rely on government assistance programs, and $9 an hour still forces them to remain tied to Medicaid and food stamps, according to a study by the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness.

“Workers have been organizing, and they’ve been able to elevate the conversation about wages in this country,” Tung said. “But it’s still a drop in the bucket. Nine dollars an hour is less than $25,000 a year for full-time workers, and that’s nowhere near enough for them to survive.”

The public is responding in turn and putting pressure on lawmakers. Seattle is currently transitioning to a $15 minimum wage, a year after the city first announced its commitment to a living wage for workers. Voters in San Francisco, as well as Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, approved wage increases last year.

Protesters Take Part In Nationwide Rally For $15 Minimum Wage

Tens of thousands of protesters gathered across the country on Wednesday to speak out against low wages.

The demonstrations are led by the group Fight for $15, which seeks a minimum hourly wage of $15 for fast-food employees. Though McDonald's raised hourly wages to $9.90 for a fraction of its workforce earlier this month, workers say this is hardly enough and are demanding a basic living wage.

The movement has also grown to include protests for higher pay for adjunct professors, airport workers and employees at large retailers. Marches began Tuesday in Boston and Detroit, and soon expanded to more than 200 cities and college campuses on Wednesday.

Fast-food protests in over 100 cities last September resulted in dozens of arrests. This time, however, organizers are not looking to get arrested in order to make a statement.

"It's something different," says Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fight for $15, told USA Today. "This is much more of an economic and racial justice movement than the fast-food workers strikes of the past two years."

The Fight for $15 campaign first began in 2012 and is funded by the Service Employees International Union.

Protester rally outside a Burger King restaurant in College Park, Georgia, on Wednesday morning.

Protesters lead a demonstration in Miami Gardens, Florida.

Striking workers outside Madison Burger King to #FightFor15 @WiscJobsNow pic.twitter.com/7pM1AwGST6

— Will Kramer (@wnkramer) April 15, 2015

Taking over an intersection in NYC right now! #FightFor15 pic.twitter.com/tlqk13Wxd2

— Fast Food Forward (@FastFoodForward) April 15, 2015

Photos of Boston #FightFor15 march. http://t.co/D5KcP05mle @WageAction pic.twitter.com/uTUESwJu7z

— BNN News (@news_bnn) April 15, 2015

#FightFor15 protest inside @McDonalds in San Francisco @Demotix http://t.co/0ZB5vooOXL #RaiseTheWage #FastFoodGlobal #sfbos #McDonalds

— Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) April 15, 2015

#Miami fast-food workers strike today to demand $15 per hour wages. http://t.co/0NKQqx79Af #FightFor15 pic.twitter.com/P1KyiUjdsU

— Miami New Times (@MiamiNewTimes) April 15, 2015

BREAKING: Southside Chicago McDonalds CLOSED because of workers ON STRIKE! #FightFor15 pic.twitter.com/g1PpxoVRWB

— Fight For 15 Chicago (@chifightfor15) April 15, 2015

The movement has also gained international support, with workers leading protests in Auckland, New Zealand, and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Fastfoodworkers' strike in Amsterdam. @YoungUnitedNL #halfloon #FNV #FightFor15 #FastFoodGlobal pic.twitter.com/PbbAY0sG7m

— Ron Meyer (@MeyerRon) April 15, 2015

CEO Slashes $1 Million Salary To Give Lowest-Paid Workers A Raise

Three weeks ago, Dan Price took a $930,000 pay cut.

Growing income inequality had been on his mind for months. But as he went for a hike with a friend one afternoon and listened to her describe her struggle with rising rent prices, he realized he had to do something for his own employees.

So Price, the founder and CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, decided to raise the minimum salary at his 120-person payment processing company to $70,000. At a company where the average pay was $48,000 per year, the move -- which was first reported by The New York Times on Monday -- affected 70 workers, 30 of whom saw their salaries double.

Most of the money for these raises will come from cutting Price's salary -- which is now $70,000 per year rather $1 million. The rest will come out of the $2.2 million the company expects to earn in profit this year.

“There’s greater inequality today than there’s been since the Great Recession,” Price told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “I’d been thinking about this stuff and just thought, ‘It’s time. I can’t go another day without doing something about this.’”

The $70,000 figure is just below the $75,000 salary pegged in a 2010 Princeton University study as an ideal benchmark for achieving happiness. About 28 percent of Americans said they would feel successful earning at most $70,000 per year, according to a 2012 survey from the jobs site CareerBuilder.

The pay cut won’t affect Price's lifestyle much. He has saved a lot of the money he has earned since starting Gravity in 2004. He said he has no plans to replace his 12-year-old Audi, which has clocked more than 140,000 miles. And his new salary will still allow him to pick up the bar tab for his friends once a month, he said.

“There will be sacrifices,” said Price, 30. “But once the company’s profit is back to the $2.2 million level, my pay will go back. So that’s good motivation.”

In the U.S., the average CEO earns more than 350 times what the average worker does. Seattle has become a hotbed in the fight for higher wages as the city phases in a $15 minimum wage, one of the highest in the country. The city is also home to wealthy investor Nick Hanauer, a self-styled champion for higher pay who has warned his fellow billionaires that pitchfork-wielding mobs will follow them to their private jets if income inequality isn’t addressed.

Rather than see this as a charitable offer to his workers, Price sees the pay raises as an investment. In theory, workers motivated by higher salaries will ultimately attract more business and handle clients better.

“This is a capitalist solution to a social problem,” Price said. “I think it pays for itself, I really do.”

Uninsured Rate Gets Lower And Lower, Thanks To Obamacare

WASHINGTON-- The Affordable Care Act was designed to slash the percentage of Americans who lack health insurance, and it's working.

The uninsured rate fell to 11.9 percent during the first quarter of this year, 1 percentage point below the rate at the close of 2014, according to the findings of a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index poll published Monday. The decline coincides with the start of benefits for new Obamacare enrollees at the beginning of 2015.

The latest uninsured figure from the Gallup survey is the lowest since the polling firm began tracking the number in 2008, and contributes to a remarkable decline of 5.2 percentage points in the share of people without health coverage since the end of 2013, just before the first wave of Obamacare health insurance enrollees joined the ranks of the insured.

Source: Gallup

African-Americans, Hispanics and people with low incomes saw the greatest gains in insurance coverage, Gallup found.

Some of the increase in the proportion of Americans with health coverage likely is related to the improving job market, and the health benefits provided by employers, Gallup notes. But the pollsters conclude that Obamacare is mostly responsible for the current trend because the uninsured rate is lower than it was in early 2008, when the economy was in recession.

About 12 million people are covered by private health insurance obtained via the exchanges, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. A separate analysis published by the department last month estimates that 16 million fewer Americans are uninsured because of the Obamacare coverage expansion, including the exchanges and Medicaid.

Were more states to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, the uninsured rate would fall more sharply, as it did in Indiana earlier this year. Previous surveys showing state-by-state numbers illustrate that Obamacare's effect on the uninsured is diminished by states' refusal to expand Medicaid.

Although Montana appears poised to adopt the Medicaid expansion this month, efforts in states such as Alaska, Missouri, Tennessee and Utah this year have been stymied by Republican opposition. Almost 5.5 million people had enrolled into Medicaid because they qualified under the expansion in 28 states and the District of Columbia, the Department of Health and Human Services reported Friday.

The sharp reduction in the uninsured rate since Obamacare benefits began to take effect last year could soon be undone, however. The Supreme Court is slated to rule in June ona lawsuit, King v. Burwell, that claims the Affordable Care Act's subsidies can only be provided in 13 states and the District of Columbia, which operate their own health insurance exchange marketplaces, not in the federally run exchanges in the rest of the country.

A high court ruling for the plaintiffs would invalidate the subsidies received by more than 85 percent of exchange enrollees and destabilize the insurance markets in states with federal exchanges. The Rand Corp. estimates this would result in 9.6 million people becoming uninsured.

Paid Maternity Leave Could Be The Key To Making More Women Leaders

There are all kinds of good reasons for the U.S. to finally catch up to the rest of the world when it comes to paid maternity leave.

Here’s another: Giving parents paid time off after a child is born helps launch women up the corporate ladder and into the boardroom, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, commissioned by Bank of New York Mellon.

The report, presented at a conference this week in London, looked at the percentage of women on boards at 1,002 companies worldwide from 2004-2013. Unlike many other studies of gender in the boardroom, the researchers also considered how long women stayed on boards.

“Getting women on the board is very different from keeping them there,” lead researcher Sucheta Nadkarni, a management professor at Cambridge, told The Huffington Post.

The study looked across different countries to see what kinds of policies and cultural traits were linked to more women in the boardroom. They found that simply having a quota, requiring a certain percentage of women, doesn’t cut it when it comes to longevity. Quotas lend themselves to tokenism -- women for the sake of women.

Norway, which mandates that women make up 40 percent of a corporate board, leads the pack on gender diversity in the boardroom -- but is nowhere near the top when it comes to retaining women on the board.

The study found that the strongest driver of women in the boardroom was what the authors call “female empowerment” -- the percentage of educated and employed women in a country.

“If educated and employed women play a stronger role in the marketplace, there’s a strong incentive for companies to make a board gender-inclusive to better serve their markets,” Nadkarni said.

Procter & Gamble is a good example here. The company, which makes a broad array of household products, caters heavily to women. And it's made gender inclusiveness a priority. Right now P&G’s board is 50 percent female.

A higher percentage of working, employed women also widens the labor pool -- meaning there are more women with a shot at the top.

Here are the top 10 countries for female empowerment, according to the data:

1. Australia

2. Norway

3. Denmark

4. Finland

5. Ireland

6. USA

7. Sweden

8. Netherlands

9. United Kingdom

10. France

Not only do Australia, Norway and Denmark rank highest for female empowerment, they have better maternity and child-care provisions than the United States. The researchers also found that the Scandinavian countries on the list more strongly value gender egalitarianism, another key factor in getting women up the ladder.

The U.S. ranks sixth for female empowerment.

Part of the problem in the U.S. is the percentage of females who are in the labor force hasn’t budged much over the years. The percentage of U.S. women working has ticked up only one percentage point to 75 percent since 1990. We're held back, in part, by pitiful maternity leave and child-care policies. Without supportive policies, more women find themselves forced out of the workforce.

The authors of this report emphasize that to help keep women working (and get them onto boards), you need strong policies like paid leave for mothers and fathers, breast-feeding work breaks, the right to return to work and flexible hours. The more women who can stay in the workforce, the more likely it is that a few of them reach the boardroom.

The U.S. federal governmen offers new parents only 12 weeks unpaid leave -- if they work at a company with more than 50 employees. The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't require employers to offer workers some kind of paid parental leave. And until the 2010 passage of Obamacare there were no concrete federal protections for women to take lactation breaks at work.

The report found other societal factors and cultural proclivities that help get women in the boardroom -- including the number of women in politics and corporate governance guidelines that focus on gender (not quotas, but more general provisions).

Provocatively, the researchers found that the more assertiveness is valued in a country, the more likely it is that women who obtain board seats, keep them. The U.S. ranks high for assertiveness, and is among the most successful countries at keeping women in the boardroom.

If we could only get our act together on the policy side, we could really move the needle.

Why Walking Meetings Can Be Better Than Sitting Meetings

Walking meetings are a kind of a big deal at LinkedIn. On any given day you can find workers strolling and talking together on the bike path at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. The path takes about 20-25 minutes to circle -- perfect for a half-hour one-on-one with a colleague.

The walk and talks have obvious benefits. Desk-bound office workers can all use a bit more exercise. Sitting too much is killing us. Yet the walking meeting’s upsides go far beyond the physical. Walking helps break down formalities, relaxes inhibitions and fosters camaraderie between colleagues -- and less eye contact can fuel more personal conversation. Meeting on the go also minimizes distractions -- no phones, no email, no texts, no colleagues interrupting you.

Perhaps most intriguing, walking leads to more creative thinking, according to a recent study from researchers at Stanford University.

With sit-downs indoors, you face each other across a table. “You feel like you’re at the principal’s office,” Igor Perisic, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering told The Huffington Post. “That’s not what you want.”

Perisic recounted a time when he and a colleague were trying to solve an issue with LinkedIn’s search function. They spent hours in a room with a white board trying to work it out. Still he felt that he was missing something.

“So we went out on a walk and talked about it,” Perisic said. When they got back indoors, they had the solution. “And it seemed like the obvious choice.”

You can find many big-shot fans of the walk and talk -- including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and this guy named Barack Obama. There’s even a TED Talk devoted solely to the topic.

Obama (left) is reportedly a big fan of the walking meeting.

We all intuitively understand that it's nice to get some fresh air outside, but new research shines a light on why walking could be especially good in a work environment.

When we walk we let our guard down, said Marily Oppezzo, who researched walking and creativity, along with her professor Daniel Schwartz, when she was a doctoral student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Their paper was published online last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

“Walking releases your filter,” said Oppezzo, now a post-doc at Stanford’s School of Medicine. Ideas you hold back in a conference room come spilling out when you’re moving.

To gauge walking’s effect on creativity, Schwartz and Oppezzo had test subjects walk and sit, and then asked them to find alternate uses for everyday items like tires or buttons. One person suggested using a button as a doorknob for a dollhouse, a tiny strainer, something to drop behind you to keep your path, for example.

They found that people who walked were able to come up with more unique ideas, both while they were walking and immediately afterward. And, it didn’t matter much if they walked on a treadmill or outside.

“Walking opens up the free flow of ideas,” they write in their paper.

This doesn’t mean you should convert all your conference rooms into gyms. Sometimes you’re going to need to sit down.

The Stanford researchers found that sitting is the better option when you have to solve a problem for which there is only one right answer. For example, they asked test subjects to come up with a single word that combines with the words “cottage, Swiss, and cake.” The sitters were better able to figure out the answer: cheese.

LinkedIn’s Perisic said that sometimes he needs to be near a whiteboard to work on a project. For difficult conversations -- say, letting someone know their performance isn’t measuring up -- he likes to talk in a more formal setting. “It’s tough to have the conversation outside.”

Mark Zuckerberg (left) and Jeff Weiner are both big fans of the walk and talk.

Still, Perisic, who oversees about 220 people, can often be found walking with someone on his team. And his CEO, Jeff Weiner, has been positively evangelical on the subject.

“It's energizing to get outside for a 30 minute walk a few times a day,” he said in a recent interview published on LinkedIn. “[It] just changes the whole state of things.”

Other Silicon Valley companies get the whole walking thing, too. Facebook just put in a half-mile loop on the roof of its new headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and workers there do a lot of walking meetings.

LinkedIn’s walking tradition was born more out of necessity than a careful review of research. During the firm’s early days, when it was growing quickly, it was really hard to book a conference room, Weiner told Bloomberg recently. “We had a lot of people and not enough space.”

A colleague suggested walking meetings as a fix -- solve the space issue and get some exercise. “It was very practical,” Weiner said.

The company's expanded since then, and it now has more space. But no one’s going back inside.