Work Unlocked: Key Takeaways from Season 1

Work Unlocked is a show that explores how the world of work is changing from two perspectives: the business and the worker.

Hosted by Upwork, each episode pulls you into conversations with business leaders, independent professionals, and remote work experts to help you make sense of what’s happening, how you fit in all this, and what it may mean for your future.

In case you didn’t have a chance to listen in, here are highlights from each of this season’s eight episodes:

• Episode 1: How to 10x Your Business With the Freelancer Economy
• Episode 2: Living Your Best Life Working From Anywhere
• Episode 3: How to Work Smarter, Not Harder
• Episode 4: The Great Resignation: Is It the End of the 9-5?
• Episode 5: Reimagine What’s Possible
• Episode 6: Increasing Your Income Starts with Finding Your Wow
• Episode 7: How to Find and Open the Third Door
• Episode 8: Teams, Unlocked

Episode 1: How to 10x Your Business With the Freelancer Economy

Matthew Motolla, considered one of the 50 top experts to follow on remote work, believes any organization can 10x their business or achieve moonshot-level goals by tapping into what he calls “the human cloud.”

Motolla provides a unique perspective on some of the most pressing workforce topics today. Highlights from the show include:

• The Great Resignation is a blend of freelancing and full-time employment, not one or the other. As more employees will become full-time freelancers and many will freelance on top of holding a full-time job.
• Freelancers who want to succeed today and in the near future must move from task-based projects to operating at scale. Because they’re increasingly asked to take over work that used to be done by traditional agencies and employees.
  
  
• Enable employees to augment themselves by giving them a budget to hire freelancers. Perhaps instead of spending $1000 each month on employee training, give employees that budget to hire a freelancer to train them on a new skill, or to help them get work done that’s not in their core skill set.

Listen to Episode 1

Episode 2: Living Your Best Life Working From Anywhere

When Larry English launched Centric Consulting as a remote-first company in 1999, online collaboration technology was still new and most people hadn’t heard of remote work.

English talks about lessons learned from leading a remote-first company for 20 years. And shares how, despite having no central office, he created an award-winning culture for its 1,100 employees.

Key points from this episode include:

• People working remotely tend to work too much, so train employees to have an end-of-workday ceremony. It could be simple like a few minutes of quiet time or turning off work notifications.
• Encourage employees to be digital nomads for a few days to several weeks at a time, as working and traveling exposes people to new experiences. This can help energize and refresh them, making them better employees.
  
  
• Instead of adopting several online collaboration tools, get one platform like Microsoft Teams,  Zoom, or Slack, then make sure that your entire company is on it as well as all of your leadership levels. Having leadership using the same tools sets a good example and, “The best ROI and the best outcome will be if you are all on and using the same tools,” says English.
  

Listen to Episode 2 now

Episode 3: How to Work Smarter, Not Harder

Cara Bedford runs the marketing department at CompuVision. Although her department runs like a full marketing agency, she’s the only person in it. All of the work is executed by a trusted bench of freelancers located in different parts of the world, so that Bedford can access the most qualified expert for the work, not just the most qualified in her city.

A few of her suggestions for getting the highest level work and productivity from a hybrid workforce:

• Great communication and transparency are critical. Bedford puts talent into project rooms so they can chat with one another and every voice is heard. Project plans include every team member’s deliverables and specifies overlapping time zones so people know when they’ll get responses to messages.
  

• Choose people in different time zones so a person can pass on their finished work at the end of the day to the next person. This creates a 24-hour workflow for maximum productivity.
  

• “Make sure you’re supporting the freelance team as a client just as you would anybody that you hire at a company, there is no difference,” said Bedford. For example, talent who are newer to your business may need more time discussing project details than talent who’ve worked on multiple projects with you.
  

Listen to Episode 3 now

Episode 4: The Great Resignation: Is It the End of the 9-5?

Dr. Adam Ozimek, Chief Economist at Upwork, leads research on labor market trends. From a remote work perspective, he analyzes data from multiple perspectives to see how work is shifting. And how these shifts affect businesses, workers, and the economy.

Here are a few of his findings around what people are calling The Great Resignation:

• If you don't adapt and plug into the remote economy, you're going to be at an even greater hiring disadvantage than you were pre-pandemic.
  
  
• Small- and medium-sized businesses who aren’t working with remote freelancers lose a competitive advantage. In part because employees are getting bogged down doing work outside of their core competencies.
  
  
• Adopting a hybrid workplace only increases your labor market area by maybe an hour or so, because employees must remain within commuting distance to the office. If your competitor allows fully remote work, they gain an advantage. As they can access wider labor markets, which allows them to be more nimble, more agile, and reduce costs.
  

Listen to Episode 4 now

Episode 5: Reimagine What’s Possible

Upwork has around 500 full-time employees and around 1,500 independent professionals. Leveraging freelancers to expand productivity and capabilities is so baked into the culture that every corporate team member is empowered to engage talent through the Upwork platform.

Zöe Harte, Upwork's Chief People Officer, and one of SIA's Global Power 100 Women in Staffing, talks about how our hybrid workforce model (employees and independent talent) impacts more than productivity, such as:

• The model aids in recruiting employees as it overcomes one of the biggest constraints in a job: access to resources.
  

• Enabling employees to leverage the platform also allows them to get ahead of burnout. Then employees can feel refreshed and engaged, which may improve the accuracy and quality of their work.
  

• Hybrid workforces enable you to create diverse teams. “Increased diversity of thought and experience leads to not only superior team results, but teams which are far more engaged,” said Harte. “There's far more innovation, understanding, and breadth of thought. That's not only good for the business, but also the team itself.”
  

Listen to Episode 5 now

Episode 6: Increasing Your Income Starts with Finding Your Wow

John Winsor is an executive in residence at Harvard University and the founder and CEO of Open Assembly, a nonprofit that helps organizations tap into the future of work. "I don't see how we go forward, any company goes forward, with the need for more and more specialized talent without creating some kind of open talent ecosystem around them," said Winsor.

A few of his takeaways include:

• “Stop thinking about talent in the HR world of longevity and happiness and engagement. It’s really thinking about the tasks that need to be done. Then from the tasks that need to be done, who's the very best person in the world to do that micro task. Then the engagement and the longevity can be put into that place.”
  

• “Every company has to become resilient. Nobody knows the future, so would you rather be a steam engine or a speed boat? If you're a speedboat, you want a very limited number of fixed assets and a lot more variable assets [such as freelancers].”
  
  
• “Access to remote, independent talent can improve diversity and inclusion issues plaguing our country. Because all of a sudden you're looking at things like who did the best job. It doesn’t matter where they’re from, what they look like, or what hours they work. They’re viewed by what they contribute.”
  

Listen to Episode 6 now

Episode 7: How to Find and Open the Third Door

In the beginning, Ken Circeo, Senior Creative Director at Microsoft, produced the company’s instructional videos single-handedly. But he soon had more video requests than he could meet, so he leveraged Upwork to duplicate himself.

“What I found was there are a lot of very qualified, very skilled creators who not only could support me, but could do things that I couldn't do myself,” said Circeo. “Now, I'm managing projects. I'm not getting into the project itself. I'm simply taking this skill that this freelancer has and adapting it to my projects and we're scaling our production tenfold.”

His advice to hiring managers new to the platform:

• Be patient and persistent when you're looking for talent. “There are tens of thousands of skilled technicians and designers and creators on Upwork,” said Circeo, so chances are the person you need is out there.
  

• When you're looking for talent, be specific in what you need done and the type of skills you’re looking for. If this is a new way of working for you, your first project may not go smoothly, and that’s okay.  Learn from it and try again as it’ll get better with practice.
  

• Build a go-to talent bench by developing long-term relationships. If you see someone has potential but maybe didn’t deliver a stellar first project, consider working with them on future projects. This gives the talent a chance to learn your processes and quality expectations.
  

Listen to Episode 7 now

Episode 8: Teams, Unlocked

In our final episode of this season, two famed brands—Budweiser and Amway—share why they prefer contracting global professionals through Upwork instead of using traditional creative agencies.

“I think I speak for a lot of people in creative when I say that COVID has really changed the way we work and approach creative productions,” said Adrienne Young, Lead Art Director at Amway.

What Young didn’t expect was how the change launched them into a new way of working. “Now we see that we can go to Upwork for exactly what we need, no matter what market the project is in, or what the scope requires. It has changed the way we get work done every day.”

The creative team at Budweiser agrees that accessing global independent talent, as they did in their #RaiseABud campaign, can produce better results. “We never want to have a one-trick pony or get too siloed into our way of working,” said Jake Vizek, Senior Brand Director, Innovation & Design at Budweiser. “And we know that, a lot of times, freelancers are the best in the business."

Here are a few takeaways from this episode:

• Make sure you have a very clear brief. “If you really understand what you're looking for and who you're looking for, and you see the work that they've done and it speaks for itself, [then you can] get the right team together. That's when you can do great work,” says Young.

• Clients and talent both offer different perspectives on a project. Especially with creatives, it’s important that independent talent respectfully defend some of their recommendations and that clients remain open to hearing new perspectives.

• When reviewing creative pitches, look for strong, preliminary work because it will dictate go-to-market timelines.

• Leverage the diversity of talent available through Upwork to customize teams on any project, big and small.

Both of these conversations were featured in our fifth annual Work Without Limits virtual summit. Learn more including links to watch their full sessions here. Or, listen to Episode 8 now.