How Independent Pros Are Key to Upwork's Best Creative Work

Upwork’s creative team is optimized for excellence and speed. “Our work model helps us deliver more,” said Patrick Holly, former VP of Creative. “We’ve grown our capacity exponentially in a way that’s agile and sustainable.”

The team hasn’t always been so flexible, but Holly has developed an approach that fuses internal clients and remote independent professionals. By incorporating independent talent with employees, the creative team has claimed a greater strategic role with more room to innovate.

It’s an approach that has raised the bar. “This is the standard we hold: To deliver high-quality work quickly and cost-effectively,” Holly said. “We deliver at scale—and the work we’re doing is awesome.”

The Context: Amplifying how Upwork’s in-house creative team delivers value

When Holly first connected with Upwork, he was a newly independent creative director. “I’d chased opportunity my entire career,” he explained—positions that took him through brands like Apple, Uber, and Harley Davidson as well as leading agencies like R/GA, AKQA, and Saatchi & Saatchi. “I’d moved six times in five years.”

As an independent professional, Holly could choose where he lived and worked, and who he worked with. Those values are central to Upwork—a symbiosis that prompted Holly to give traditional employment another look.

He pitched a team structure to Upwork that would lean into the strengths of an in-house agency, add the value of an external agency, and leverage the independent talent available through Upwork.

Upwork’s leadership team was sold.

“In-house agencies know the brand and are great at executing deliverables,” Holly said. In-house creatives can move quickly but may miss chances to push boundaries. In contrast, external agencies can be powerful change agents. Their broad experience and perspective can help a company move forward in leaps rather than incrementally.

Independent talent gives the team quick access to many different skills. “Sometimes we need a copywriter, sometimes a scent expert,” Holly said. “Our priority is to solve business problems with strategy and creativity. The execution is in question until we determine what it should be, based on the brief and the requirements.”

Focusing on solutions over deliverables helps the team serve Upwork’s goals. “We deliver what the business needs and do what we need to do when we need to do it,” Holly said.

Upwork’s Wake & Make campaign

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The Challenge: Building a workforce that can innovate, scale—and turn on a dime

The Creative team initially organized around three considerations: Why, how, and what they’re doing. They’ve recently taken the structure further: “We created specialized pods to serve each of our internal clients as well as possible,” Holly said.

Each pod works with a specific part of the business; each professional within the pod has previous experience in that area. Together, they come up with campaign strategies and find the right talent to deliver impactful creative work.

Working with independent talent was a priority from day one

From the beginning, Holly’s agency experience helped him see independent professionals as a major tenet of creative work.

“Our work needs to be transformative, conceptually excellent, and have strategic rigor,” Holly said. To hit that mark consistently, it helps to include new and diverse voices—professionals whose perspectives help generate innovative ideas.

Flexible talent is also essential for creative teams that want to stay relevant and effective.

While some creative campaigns are planned over months or years, they can also be a fast reaction to a cultural moment or the marketplace. “Our ability to grow the workforce that supports a campaign from nothing to something in days allows us to take full advantage of those possibilities,” Holly said.

Upwork’s Talent on Tap campaign

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The Solution: The stability of employees, the flexibility of independent talent

For more than two decades, Upwork has pioneered a better way of working by helping businesses connect with talent from around the globe. Access to independent professionals challenges the status quo and enables a team to adjust in a competitive environment.

“Flexible talent is often a more cost-effective way to address a time-sensitive or specific need,” Holly said. “A hyper-specialized person doesn’t need to join your team full-time—that doesn’t make sense for you or them.”

Take generative AI. Holly’s team did a quick-turnaround campaign to promote the AI talent available on Upwork, and is also exploring how AI can extend their capabilities.

“For our next photoshoot, we’re engaging AI experts to create visual assets to go alongside traditional photography,” Holly said. “If there is a new technology or execution strategy out there, someone on Upwork probably already offers it. This allows us to tap into new skills whenever and however we need.”

Upwork works with more than 1,800 independent professionals in 97 countries—what the company refers to as its hybrid workforce. Upwork engages with independent professionals as both independent contractors and through third-party employers of record, depending on the worker's classification and applicable law.

The creative team relies on independent professionals for one-off projects that address a short-term need and for repeat or larger engagements.

“When we have something special that needs to be done immediately, independent talent is the obvious choice,” Holly said. “We can find somebody with the experience to deliver exactly what we need—right now. Upwork connects me with millions of people to support my team as needed.”

To make these relationships happen, the creative team trusts Upwork’s own platform and services.

Upwork is designed to provide timely access to skilled independent talent and to enable clients and talent to develop working relationships that match the scope of a project’s needs. This includes:

• Talent Marketplace. Start your talent search with a job post and receive proposals from independent professionals around the world.
• Project Catalog. Browse and buy predefined projects, offered by independent talent, to start your project quickly.
• Any Hire. Simplify working relationships with anyone anywhere—even off Upwork—by streamlining hiring, worker classification, and payment.
• Full-time Hiring. If you find and engage specialized talent, and you and the professional ultimately agree you'd like a full-time working relationship, you can easily convert to a full-time role.
• Enterprise Suite. A full-service platform that’s customized to meet a company’s talent requirements.

When engaging talent through Enterprise Suite, Upwork’s creative team can access sourcing, pre-vetting, and talent compliance solutions. The compliance service—provided by Upwork’s Classification team—identifies whether a worker should be engaged as an independent contractor or as an employee (through a third-party employer of record).

Agility that doesn’t break the bank

“If you drive a hybrid car, you don’t click between ‘now I’m using gas,’ or ‘now I’m using electric’—it transitions seamlessly between the fuel it needs. That’s how our team is able to work with independent talent.”
— Patrick Holly, Executive Creative Director, Upwork

Independent talent helps fuel everything the creative team does, whether through skilled collaboration, original insights, or niche expertise. “If we are going to build a workforce that is doing what it should do for the business—and doing what it takes to make high-quality work—we need access to experts,” Holly said.

That’s how independent talent can have an outsized impact: they join the project for a set amount of time or a defined deliverable, do the work, then move on to another project. “By collaborating with high caliber professionals as needed, we benefit from their expertise while spending only what’s necessary to get the work done.”

Holly also notes that working with independent professionals means the team doesn’t have to compromise: “There are only two other options—we miss out on that input altogether, or we scramble to bring someone in on a full-time basis and put them into a system that doesn’t need them.”

The Results: A team that’s all but futureproof

Companies build teams for today with an eye firmly on the future. Holly believes the key to futureproofing and preparing for uncertain times is to be agile.

“We have no idea what the future will hold,” he said. “By having a workforce that is built to be flexible, to grow or contract as needed, to span disciplines, to stay cost-effective, and to react quickly—we’re hedging our bets in the best way possible.”

Upwork’s in-house creative team has grown support from independent talent quickly, taking more than two years to engage a hybrid workforce of more than 40 professionals, to experiment and refine the work model, and to make intentional efforts to establish the right relationships.

“To find talent, you can’t focus only on what works for the company,” Holly said. “If you want to attract the best talent, the relationship needs to work for them, too. We found these professionals in a way that felt good for us as well as them.”

If Holly could give one piece of advice to a team that’s rethinking their work model or starting from scratch, he’d tell them to find people who can pull apart business problems. Then turn to Upwork to find the talent to execute when you need it.

“I built a global workforce through Upwork,” Holly said. “When I say I think we have the best talent in the world, I believe it. We have results to prove it. And I think I’m a lot closer to the truth than the people who won’t hire beyond their backyard.”

List of awards won by the Creative team

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Upwork is not affiliated with or endorsed by third-party organizations mentioned in this article. Upwork engages with freelancers as both independent contractors and through third-party employers of record, depending on the worker's classification and applicable law.