Joe Fuller: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. This episode is one of the series of special dispatches on the sweeping effects of Covid-19 on our economy, society, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we will be bringing you shorter and more frequent interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus.

Hayden Brown was named president and CEO of the digital work platform Upwork in January 2020. At that time, she would have had no way of knowing about the storm that was about to break and the opportunities it would create for her company. The coronavirus has accelerated that transition, at least temporarily. Like other talent platforms, Upwork, itself, has had to go all in on distance work. How has that experience informed the company’s advice to its clients and the working conditions it offers its professionals? As the pandemic’s impact on the economy becomes clearer, we can expect to learn how well the digital freelance model serves the needs of businesses and workers alike. Hayden, welcome to our podcast.

Hayden Brown: Thanks for having me on. I’m glad to be here.

Fuller: Hayden, Upwork is one of the original distance-learning work platforms, where technical professionals and others in the area of marketing have been able to work remotely by choice and by your business model’s design. How has your business been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic?

Brown: We have seen some really interesting trends on our platform the last couple of weeks. So in late March, we saw a little bit of a slowdown in new-client activity, and that meant both registrations coming in slowed down on our website, as well as our existing customers were doing less new projects. They were posting fewer projects, they were not engaging as much as they normally do in generating new work. So we saw that slowdown in March for about two weeks. And then at the end of March and heading into April, we started to see a lot of our client-side leading indicators rebound. So that included our client registrations really upticking in a significant way, both new and existing customers starting to post many more projects and role-based opportunities on our site. And so those trends really we’re gathering steam throughout April, and that’s continued into early May. So there’s been a lot of new activity, although in the current macro climate, clearly many businesses are still struggling and trying to figure out how they’re going to be impacted by what’s going on.

Fuller: Hayden, I know that Upwork is in some ways unusual as a platform insomuch as you serve the entire gamut of companies—from small and medium enterprises right up to Fortune 100-type companies. Has that pattern been pretty uniform across the whole spectrum, or are you seeing pockets of demand decline and pockets of demand increasing?

Brown: You’re right that Upwork serves this huge range of customers. So we do work with 30 percent of the Fortune 500, and that includes customers like Microsoft, Glassdoor, Nasdaq, so many different customers from SMB [small and medium-sized businesses] all the way through use of our site. What we’ve seen with the current pandemic has actually been a slightly more impact to our SMB customers in terms of dampening their spend levels a little bit, and that’s been offset slightly by an uptick with our larger customers. But across the board, I’d say the impact has been relatively muted. Given the huge job losses we’ve seen in the economy recently, many people might have expected there would be a lot more impact to the businesses on our site. But what appears to have happened is, our current customer base has been relatively shielded from the worst of the macro economic impact and overall are doing pretty well in getting through this.

Fuller: What are you seeing on the supply side? Are you seeing people who’ve been affected by furloughs or shutdowns making themselves available for gig work? Or has there been a change in the types of people who are offering their services as a professional through Upwork?

Brown: We’ve seen unprecedented activity on the freelancer side. So that includes both new signups—where the volume of new people coming in to register and apply to be part of our platform has exceeded any of the levels we’ve seen in the past by a huge amount. And that is continuing. That started in March, has continued through April, and even now in May we’re still seeing really high levels of freelancer interest in being part of Upwork. Generally, our platform has always been demand constrained. So our focus right now is, how do we make our clients—our target clients—more aware of the many things that these freelancers can be doing to help them, both during the pandemic and once it abates, because there’s just a lot of people out there right now looking for ways to supplement or replace income that they may have lost through other channels.

Fuller: Are you seeing any different patterns in terms of the types of skills that new registrants are having on offers? Is it pretty much the same distribution as your incumbent gig-worker force? Or are you seeing new types of skills being available in greater quantity?

Brown: It’s pretty similar to our previous distribution. But I think the volume is just so much higher that that suggests customers using our site today just have that many more options in terms of who they can use. And whether they’re looking for somebody with a very niche skillset or very unique experience to their industry or something else, if anything, those sets of choices are becoming even greater than they were in the past.

Fuller: Have you been seeing any infrastructure issues at all in terms of either demand on your site, but just generally getting feedback—from either professionals on your platform or users—about promising communications problems and technology?

Brown: No, we haven’t really heard any of that type of feedback. We do offer an integrated communications platform. So that includes live chat, voice, and video calling that a lot of our customers use, especially when they’re forming new relationships and figuring out who they’re going to work with. Those services have been continuing, relatively uninterrupted. And I think our customers generally have actually had a lot of success with the tools that they’re using. So we haven’t heard a lot of feedback about that.

Fuller: Certainly, one of the few positives about the timing of this pandemic is it came after several years in which the IT and communications infrastructure of so many companies—and even in residential areas—were improved so we could even conceive of doing the type of work-from-home volume with integrated video and audio and document sharing. If this had happened 5 or 10 years ago, I hate to think what would have happened.

Brown: I know. The timing is really fortunate in that our infrastructure is a lot more equipped today than it ever has been, for sure.

Fuller: It was famously said, “It’s always dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future.” But as you talk with your colleagues and talk to clients, as we see some gradual loosening of stay-at-home orders and restrictions on people going to work, how are you anticipating what’s next? And what are the planning parameters you’re discussing with your colleagues to get ready for what’s going to come next?

Brown: So the two things that we’ve been seeing that we’re expecting to continue even after this pandemic are number one, remote work is here in a much bigger way, and it’s not going to go back to what it was. Seventy-five percent of companies have articulated a desire to increase their remote workforce going forward permanently. We’ve seen numerous companies here in the Bay Area, like Google and Facebook and Twitter, announcing either remote-work programs that will last until the end of the year or indefinitely. So that genie is definitely not going back in the bottle. And I think all companies are now realizing the capabilities that they have at their fingertips by deploying much more remote-centric work strategies. I think the second big trend that we’re expecting to see are an increased focus from businesses on a really flexible, dynamic, strategic workforce solution that is not about, number one, on-premise and in-person interactions being the only way that they get work done, but number two, gives them access to potentially a lot more freelance and vendor talent, because that’s a way that they can manage their cost structure, that’s the way they can manage the business dynamic lead, to both hire up when they need to meet new demands, scale back when that demand dies down. All of the things that people have been doing at hyper-speed during this crisis are still things that they need to do dynamically to manage their business, anyway. So needing to dynamically manage your business and the huge cost structure that typically a lot of companies have around full-time employees, contractors, et cetera, I think we’re going to see an increased focus on remote-friendly, flexible talent solutions—which is exactly where Upwork happens to play—in the future because people don’t want to go back to the level of risk exposure they have to some of the old models of working that were both expensive and very inflexible.

Fuller: In our research on the Managing the Future of Work project, one thing we found pretty consistently is, executives like the sound of having on-demand workers— particularly in technical areas, where it may be hard for them to get world-class talent or get enough to stack peaks in their internal demand for such talent. But when they actually start thinking about doing it, they often get concerned about how to integrate a non-full-time employee in a process, in a project. How are you going to control intellectual property? What about IT security? Do you hear those same concerns talking to your customers? And what kind of solutions or reassurance do you offer them?

Brown: We do hear those concerns, and it really does depend on the type of work that they need to get done. But this is where our enterprise offering, I think, is particularly useful to customers, because it has built in a lot of the protections that they’re looking for around the risk areas that they’re most concerned about. So it also is true that many customers are using vendors for a variety of tasks, which they can immediately start to surface on a platform like ours without a lot of risk to their business. In certain areas, there are really good technical solutions, integrations, et cetera, that we can offer—that they can use through partners like Citrix and Microsoft—that really help de-risk them in terms of both what their security concerns may be, as well as just making it a lot easier to onboard and offboard a remote talent force really seamlessly without having to go through a lot of hoops with their IT teams. So typically what we do with enterprise customers is, we help them set up some of the foundational pieces of the puzzle that they need to have for these programs. Then once they’re up and running, it’s incredibly easy for them to seamlessly onboard or offboard and manage those risks in a way that is secure, compliant, and really addresses any of those concerns that they may have had.

Fuller: Where do you see the biggest supply-and-demand imbalances in terms of specific skills? Are there pockets of area that are just constantly “out of stock,” to use a retail phrase? Or is there reasonable matching between the types of skills people on the demand side are looking for and the type of talent that’s available through Upwork?

Brown: I’d say that there’s continued demand. I mean, the appetite for technical talent these days just continues to increase. And, as every company—more so even now during Covid—is realizing that they have to have digital tools and a digital strategy, potentially digital interfaces with customers that they previously didn’t think were relevant, all of that huge shift toward every business in some way becoming a digital business is creating an increase in demand for all of the technical workers that can help with those tools, those implementations, et cetera. So I’d say, the trend that was already existing before the crisis—where there was this perceived shortage of technical talent—has only been exacerbated by the crisis. However, even if that’s true, I think the thing that people hadn’t realized before the crisis is, some of the shortages that they felt they had around skills were shortages because they were only willing to look in their own backyard. So when they were constraining themselves to recruiting in their local geographies and were not comfortable with remote work, and were not comfortable with contracting freelancers who could augment their local teams, they were really running into challenges in terms of finding those skills. I think now, as people have become rapidly so much more comfortable with remote work, this will only help them realize that some of the talent gaps that they thought they had in their organizations—that they were really struggling to fill in terms of the right skills—actually can be addressed. It’s just that they need to look at some different places and look outside of their local backyard and be open-minded to working with people who are in a lot of geographies but have the exact skills that they need.

Fuller: Are there particular sub-areas of technology—cyber or artificial intelligence or even knowledge management, now that we’ve got this need to be able to take off from centralized pools of data and company records and make them more easily accessible and distributable—that really pop out at you as areas of future growth? We may have some listeners who want to know what they should be studying, after all.

Brown: That’s interesting. It’s hard for me to highlight specific sub-areas of technology that are more relevant right now. I mean, for sure you’ve identified some of the hot areas, such as cybersecurity. But we’re also seeing ... I mean, New Jersey, as an example, had this call that they put out for COBOL developers. That’s a programming language that has been very under-utilized for many years because it’s a very old legacy programming language. Now suddenly with all of the crisis hitting, they were trying to update these systems that have been coded in the language many years ago, and they were scrambling to find those developers available. So I think there’s certainly the clear, hot trend areas. But I’d say even right now, we’re seeing customers looking back at legacy systems, older technologies, and really trying to figure out who is equipped to help update and modernize those things, because they’re desperate to bring some of those capabilities up to date or dust off some things and make some changes that they have to make to be relevant right now.

Fuller: Interesting. Through Upwork, you have had a lot of experience in managing people and creating a platform to enable people to do remote work. And that does look like it’s going to be a new normal for many, many workers who are used to going to work every day, seeing colleagues, having live meetings, having the casual cup of coffee or tea or their beverage of choice with coworkers. We’re beginning to see reporting and companies expressing concern about almost the sociological effects of being strictly in a remote-working mode. What have you learned about the quality of work life for people who are largely experiencing colleagueship through a computer screen and a built-in camera and a headset?

Brown: I think there’s two interesting things about this. So one is, the pandemic conditions that people are working under right now should not be confused with a normal work-from-home type of experience, because people are obviously so severely restricted in terms of who they can be socializing with, how they can be fulfilling those variety of needs in all parts of their lives. But the second thing that I think has been really interesting is, we’ve seen within even our own company—and we have had more than two-thirds of our company working from home for many, many years, so we’ve been a heavily distributed remote model—that working under this current condition, where everyone is working remotely, has actually brought people closer than ever before, and people are feeling more connected to their colleagues than ever before, in part, I think, because they’re finding ways to fulfill some of those social-interaction needs using digital tools and technology. Some workers are not as handicapped by the fact that they’re at home and everyone else is socializing in the office. Now everyone is socializing through Slack and Hangouts and through happy hours that they’re setting up. Everyone’s adopting these practices to be really human and connect with each other. And I think that’s been one of the silver linings for us, in terms of having gone fully remote during the crisis, is seeing even more of those connections being formed than ever before and people finding new ways to make those connections. There’s one last thing I might add to this, which is, I don’t think people need to think about working remotely even on a permanent basis as a complete either/or versus being in the office. I think a lot of companies can find success—and this is one that we’ve done a lot in the past—with having a distributed team, but then finding times throughout the year when that team does come together, whether they’re dispersed over the whole globe, and we do a once or twice a year “meetup,” where those teams meet in person, they spend a week or two working together, really strengthening their social bonds, getting to know each other, people coming in, it’s like, “Wow, you’re so much taller in person. I only ever saw you on Google Hangouts, and now I see the full three dimensions.” So I think companies can find really great ways to blend face-to-face interactions when needed and these touch points that people do crave. It doesn’t have to be completely remote and never see each other the way we are right now during the pandemic or everyone in the office, and that’s the only way we do things. I think there’s some in-between that people can find and make it really successful.

Fuller: Our research has also shown that workers very much like to have, perhaps they always work from home on Fridays, and that’s understood by all colleagues, it’s part of their job description. They don’t have to apologize for it to their supervisor. Or they want to spend between June 15th and Labor Day at their lake house or at their beach house or somewhere cooler—if they live in the Southwest—or warmer—if they live way up North. So that the opportunity now to make those types of accommodations and increase the individual’s quality of work life may be enhanced now that this is going to become a more standard part of organizing work and of allocating tasks and running teams.

Brown: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right about that. I’ve talked to several CEOs at other companies that are doing SaaS businesses, and several of them have said, “Wow, we’re really reevaluating. Do my wife and I need to go back to San Francisco or the hub city where we were located? Can we just work from our country house for a period of time, or even just move our family out of the suburbs, even, to someplace much more remote?” So I think a lot of people are having these conversations with their spouses and their families now, thinking, “Where do I really need to be for this work? And can I be either seasonally available in a certain geography, or just maybe dialing in and traveling as needed?” So I think that trend is going to continue and take on some new form as we look at this. Certainly a lot of companies in the Bay Area, I think, have been talking about their office space and whether they even need the amount of office space. There’s been such a huge premium on real estate out here, and now I think a lot of companies are looking at that and saying, “Maybe we don’t even need the footprint that we thought we needed, to be in-person and support the type of work that we thought we were doing. Now we can do this a little bit differently.” So I think there’s going to be a lot of changes to how people think about urbanization, where they need to be to do a lot of this work. It’s hopefully going to be really positive, unlocking what the people’s potential is, and not pushing them to do horrible commutes, live in these cramped quarters inside of cities, and other things that maybe just weren’t great for them, anyway.

Fuller: Well, the systems effects are going to be profound and fascinating to see unwind, whether it’s everyone from commercial landlords to apartment owners and tax authorities, because if I don’t have to go to headquarters, maybe I’ll live in New Hampshire or Texas or Florida, or some state without an income tax.

Brown: Yeah. I think this is really going to change people’s perception of what the boundaries are around these things, and I think they will make really different decisions as a result. It’s going to be fascinating.

Fuller: Hayden, could you give us some examples of some of the types of projects you’re doing? And are there changes in that pattern of demand that are worth noting?

Brown: We have seen a couple of themes of activity that have been really interesting, as people have been creatively using our platform in new ways right now. So the first area has been around IT and infrastructure skills. This is related to digital transformation—digital tools—that businesses are using for continuity as they’re managing through this crisis. So they’re using our platform to find freelancers who have the skills to help them with deployments for new websites, building a new Covid-19 app tracker—several clients who’ve been working on things like that—or new ecommerce integrations for their digital storefronts, which suddenly are the primary way that they may be engaging with customers. So there’s been lot of activity around digital transformation and IT. There’s been a second trend, which has been around marketing and content. I’m sure it’s no surprise that you’ve seen this huge explosion in content creation right now. Everyone is pumping out webinars and white papers and stories for their customers about how they can be helping, what is the relevancy of their solution right now. So companies are really looking to our platform to find the writers, the content creators, the designers, the video producers to put together all of this content, both for internal employee audiences as well as for customer audiences. They’re redeploying their budgets from virtual events and things like that, that they were previously doing, to digital channels. So there’s just a lot of activity in the marketing and content space. Then a third area that we’re seeing a lot of activity is around customer support, where customers have seen spikes in contact rates. Whether or not their business is positively or negatively impacted by the crisis, customers are wanting to reach out more than ever. So we’ve definitely seen more customers trying to spin up additional customer contact resources to really engage their customers at this critical time and be able to respond to those needs. The final thing I’d add is, they’re having some really interesting niche verticals that have been very active, like game development. I think a lot of people see the opportunity of people at home looking for new ways to be entertained. Game development is one of those opportunities. Then things like instructional design and e-learning, where clearly the shift to digital-learning platforms has created a big demand for folks who can help create the content, think about learning modalities, and really help develop ways for educators to reach their audiences at this time as well. So it’s been fascinating to see the ingenuity and innovation that people are coming out with as they’re tapping into these different types of skillsets to get critical work done right now.

Fuller: So people are coming to you ... I think of Upwork as a place you go for technical talent, but it sounds as if you’re also providing almost a turnkey set of capabilities—whether it’s marketing collateral, design of the websites, and the technical implementation of ideas like that.

Brown: Absolutely, the marketing creative area is our second-largest category of work, broadly speaking. And so that’s where we’ve been working on easy packages for people to, for example, move their in-person event to virtual. And how do they do that? And what are the range of freelancers that can help them with all of the pieces of that—from content design through to actually filming and editing what that content needs to look like and making it very consumable for their audiences. So that’s a big area for us.

Fuller: Well, I think there’s a niche market that people are missing, which is e-grading. I think I know a lot of professors out there would love it if there were an app that would do their grading for them. The old joke, certainly at our school, is they don’t pay you to teach, they pay you to grade.

Brown: I’m sure we have some freelancers who could write some algorithms for you on that.

Fuller: I’m not sure our students would appreciate that but ... Well, Hayden, thanks a lot for joining us for this Covid-19 dispatch from Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work podcast. It’s been a pleasure.

Brown: It’s been great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Fuller: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronavirus’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.