How Upwork Drives Business Growth with a Flexible Workforce

The Upwork Research Institute’s annual survey of freelancers confirms that more and more professionals are looking for alternatives to the traditional 9-to-5 working model. Last year, 38% of the U.S. workforce—roughly 64 million Americans—freelanced, contributing $1.27 trillion to the U.S. economy in annual earnings. We expect this trend to continue to grow in the coming years, with an increasing number of professionals citing flexibility in their work arrangements as their top priority in seeking work.

Notably, these are people delivering skilled knowledge work: 47% of all U.S. freelancers, or around 30 million professionals, provided knowledge services such as computer programming, marketing, IT, and business consulting in 2023. The fact that freelancing remains strong among professionals suggests a significant cultural shift in the way people work now.

At Upwork, both a flexible workforce and independent talent have been at the heart of our business for the last 20 years. More than 70% of Upwork’s own workforce is independent talent sourced from our platform. These professionals help power every team within our company, including people operations, marketing, product, engineering, trust and safety, and more.

Working this way allows us to tap into a deep and broad network of highly skilled talent from all over the world. It also helps ensure that we have the right people in place when we need them, in work arrangements that both fulfill their professional needs and help fuel our business.

Adapt, scale, and innovate with independent talent

Upwork’s workforce model allows companies of all sizes—navigating a variety of business scenarios—to strengthen and support their teams without sacrificing quality or efficiency. This approach also works for highly skilled independent professionals, who increasingly want the flexibility and autonomy to work on their own terms.  

We take great pride in being the first and best customer of our own products, services, and solutions. Working with independent talent from our own platform provides a value-added feedback loop, through which we can identify areas for improvement and ultimately drive a better experience for our customers. At the same time, this workforce model enables us to make massive strides as a business in several different ways:

• Increasing workplace diversity. Upwork’s people operations team leverages our global talent pool to source independent talent. In doing so, we benefit from a range of beliefs, experiences, and innovative ideas that otherwise would have been difficult to access.
• Adapting to fast-paced industry shifts. As generative AI became one of the fastest-growing categories on Upwork’s marketplace, our product and engineering teams tapped independent talent on the Upwork platform to find the exact skills needed to rapidly prioritize and improve our product and offerings with the launch of our AI Services hub.
• Scaling quickly. Working with freelancers allows us to quickly ramp up and support our teams across the company. Because of this, our customer experience team is able to deliver support at a global scale with the help of worldwide talent, ensuring our customer base receives round-the-clock support. Similarly, our creative team can strategically grow to produce breakthrough work at scale, while driving speed and cost savings.

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Achieving optimal business growth with flexible workforces

Engaging independent talent to support our business has helped us adapt through significant changes—and has also been key to our success. As the world of work continues to shift, companies that leverage flexible work models over traditional hiring practices—relying on professionals who are within commuting distance to an office or only willing to work full-time—will be better prepared to weather these changes.

Insights from the Upwork Research Institute’s “Reinventing Work: Unveiling the Work Innovator’s Blueprint for Success” report indicate that one quality that sets high-performing companies and leaders apart is that they are open to flexible talent. These are companies that recognize that freelancers bring unique skills, fresh perspectives, and specialized expertise.

In fact, 86% of the companies surveyed in our report that approach talent and teams with this innovative mindset agree that freelancers make their business more efficient. This is compared to 48% who don’t take the same approach.

Similarly, 89% of these companies agreed that working with freelancers makes their business more innovative, and 94% say that freelancers give their teams access to specialized skills. This is compared to 56% of respondents who don’t share this mindset toward talent in their workforce.

Making the future of work better and more accessible to independent talent and businesses around the world is at the core of what we do. Whether companies need to scale quickly, gain immediate access to expertise, get complex tasks completed, or find lasting talent strategies that provide the latitude to focus on key initiatives, enabling flexible workforce models is key to achieving these priorities.

Learn how independent professionals are helping teams at Upwork perform their best work: https://www.upwork.com/success-stories/customer-zero.

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Upwork engages with freelancers as both independent contractors and through third-party employers of record, depending on the worker's classification and applicable law.