Qualitative interview study with 21 freelancers on the Upwork platform, sixteen in the US and five in India. Video interviews of 30 to 70 minutes were held from June to August 2019.
21 freelancersFreelancers in design, writing, software, audio and video production, marketing, research and other skilled fields, each with at least one enterprise client.
Video interviewsSemi-structured interviews in English covered how freelancers scope, price and finish skilled tasks, and how they find work.
ThemesVerbatim transcripts were analysed to identify themes.
Set against clientsThe freelancer findings were compared with the client side reported in earlier work by Lustig and colleagues.
BWhat the study found
Doing the workhow interviewees described finishing skilled tasks
•Interviewees described finishing a complex task as joint work with the client.Interviewees expected clients to help scope the task and to give access and feedback. Interviewees were frustrated when clients underestimated a task or went quiet.
•Interviewees chose fixed or hourly pay to suit the task.A fixed rate suited well-defined work. An hourly rate suited vague work where the scope was likely to grow and extra effort would otherwise go unpaid.
Finding workcosts interviewees described in the platform's matching and rating tools
•Interviewees said paid tokens for job applications cost them earnings when not hired.Upwork calls the tokens connects. One interviewee estimated losing 15 to 20% of earnings this way. Invitation-only pools of vetted talent favour established freelancers.
•Interviewees said one less-than-perfect review could sharply drop a freelancer's score.Future clients see this opaque job success score. The paper suggests newcomers are hit hardest.
Seeking stabilityrepeat clients, and both sides of the market
•Interviewees with repeat clients described spending far less effort hunting for work.Interviewees also described steadier income, recognition of skills, less dependence on ratings and a growing grasp of the client's wider work context.
•The paper argues freelancers and clients face the same six core issues.These are defining tasks, setting pay, the overhead of collaborating, matching, awareness of work context and evaluation. The client side comes from earlier work, not these interviews.
CKey takeaway
Online freelance platforms assume work is done alone, yet skilled freelancing can be a joint achievement with clients, full of invisible work like scoping and chasing feedback. Repeat clients may ease this with steadier income and shared context.
Made for this site with AI assistance from the verified research brief. It is not the paper's own figure.
Abstract
Online labour platforms promise efficient, low-friction matching of workers with clients at scale and on-demand. Prior studies on Upwork have shown that the combination of specialized knowledge and expertise, high autonomy, and extent of client-worker engagement makes macrotasks a unique category of ‘on-demand’ work. However, there is a need to unpack the nature of macrotask work from the freelancers’ perspective. Based on a qualitative study of 21 freelancers on Upwork, this paper fills this important gap by delineating how freelancers reason about accomplishing macrotasks, their interaction with clients, the key challenges that they face in various stages of the work process, and the strategies they devise to mitigate the costs and overhead. This paper shows that freelancers perceive accomplishing macrotasks as a collaborative achievement with the client. It also demonstrates that the skill-intensive nature of tasks implies that matching freelancer with the task/client is of enormous importance. It describes three programmatic solutions that the platform offers to facilitate the matching process along with their benefits and limitations. It, then, shows how freelancers seek to minimize the costs and work associated with matching and collaboration through repeat hiring along the benefits they result in. Lastly, the paper highlights how the same set of core issues is mirrored for both the freelancer and client sides of the market, which need to be addressed in order to enhance the ease and effectiveness of client-freelancer collaboration.
Research brief
By Srihari Hulikal Muralidhar, Sean Rintel, and Siddharth Suri.
Takeaway: Online freelance platforms assume work can be done independently. But freelancers see skilled 'macrotask' work as a joint achievement with clients, full of unrecognised 'invisible work' such as scoping and chasing feedback. So they seek repeat clients, who bring steadier income and shared knowledge of the client's work.
Why this matters
What was known
Earlier studies of Upwork looked at how freelancers deal with the platform, or at the client's side of hiring freelancers, but not at how freelancers themselves match, interact and collaborate with clients. (§2.2, p. 6)
What this paper adds
The client-freelancer relationship seen from the freelancers' side, covering how they scope, price and complete skilled tasks, find work, and seek repeat clients. Setting this against the client side shows the same core issues on both. In this paper, we will show that the client-freelancer collaboration in accomplishing macrotasks is a type of invisible work in itself.(§2.1, p. 4)
Who it matters to
Skilled workers new to online freelancing, the clients (from large enterprises to start-ups) who hire them, and the platforms that mediate between them. (§1, p. 3)
Research questions
How do online freelancers reason about accomplishing macrotasks in practice?
How does platform design shape the process of matching freelancers with clients/tasks? What are the implications for the power relations between freelancers and clients?
What strategies do freelancers adopt to reduce the transaction costs and the overall precarity at work?
Method and data
Design
Qualitative study using in-depth, semi-structured interviews.
Setting
Upwork freelancers in the US and India, recruited through a 'job' post on Upwork. Interviews held by video call (Skype or Upwork's built-in calling) in English.
Participants / data
21 freelancers (fourteen male and seven female, sixteen from the US and five from India) across design, audio and video production, writing, marketing, research, software and other domains, including both newer and long-standing freelancers who had worked for at least one enterprise client.
Duration
June-August 2019. Interviews ranged from 30 to 70 minutes, with a flat 50 USD payment to every participant.
Analysis
Verbatim transcripts analysed to identify themes. The freelancer findings are then set against the client perspective reported in prior work by Lustig and colleagues.
Findings
Getting the task done is joint work. The Upwork freelancers we interviewed, in design, writing, software and other skilled fields, saw finishing a complex task as a joint effort with the client. They expect clients to help scope it and to give access and feedback, and are frustrated when clients underestimate it or go quiet. #
“A lot of it is really educating the clients about what I need to give them what they need.”
Pay structure follows the task. When freelancers can choose how to be paid, they pick by task. A fixed rate suits well-defined work. An hourly rate suits vague work where the scope is likely to grow and extra effort would otherwise go unpaid. #
“If I work on a fixed rate, then it doesn't really matter if I work fast or slow because the flat rate is what it is.”
Platform matching tools carry hidden costs. Upwork's tools for matching freelancers to tasks help but cost freelancers. Applying uses paid tokens ('connects') that are lost if they are not hired. Invitation-only pools of vetted talent ('talent clouds') favour established freelancers over newcomers. #
“You already pay for the 'connect' upfront. Most jobs require multiple. That way, you easily lose 15-20% of your earnings.”
Ratings weigh more on freelancers. Freelancers and clients rate each other, which lets freelancers vet clients. But freelancers said their opaque 'job success score' could drop sharply after a single less-than-perfect review, which future clients then see. Newcomers are arguably hit hardest. #
“99 percent of the time I will get five-star reviews and then 1 percent time I will get a four-star review, and it will just completely drop my score”
Repeat clients bring stability. Freelancers who are hired again by the same clients spend far less effort hunting for work. They described steadier income, recognition of their skills, less dependence on ratings, and a growing grasp of the client's wider work context. #
“Most of my work is ongoing retainer work with clients who love me and who are happy, and I feel really good. So, I feel like I have real income stability right now.”
Both sides face the same problems. Setting the freelancers' accounts against the client side reported by Lustig and colleagues reveals the same core issues on both sides of the market. These are defining tasks, setting pay, the overhead of collaborating, matching, awareness of work context, and evaluation. #
(§5, p. 20)
Questions this paper answers
Is freelance work really independent work?
Not for complex, skilled tasks. Freelancers work alone but depend on the client, often their sole contact, for scoping, access to tools and data, and feedback. Chasing that help is unrecognised 'invisible work', and unresponsive clients leave them unsure whether their output will be approved. (See §4.1, p. 12.)
Should freelancers charge by the hour or a fixed price?
Interviewed Upwork freelancers generally preferred fixed prices for well-defined tasks, which give flexibility and avoid hourly tracking. They preferred hourly rates for vaguer tasks involving scoping and several review cycles, where scope creep is likely and extra work would otherwise go unpaid. (See §4.1, p. 10.)
Why do freelancers want repeat clients?
Because then work finds them. Repeat clients cut the unpaid effort of searching and bidding and bring steady income. They signal that past work went well and reduce dependence on platform ratings. They also let freelancers learn the client's wider context, which makes the collaboration itself work better. (See §4.3, p. 17.)
Do two-way ratings put freelancers and clients on an equal footing?
No. A single poor review can sink a freelancer's score and stays visible to future clients, whereas clients can always find another freelancer. So freelancers use client ratings less to redress grievances than to avoid risky clients and vague tasks before they start. (See §4.2, p. 15.)
Contributions and implications
The core issues mirrored on both sides of the market need to be addressed for client-freelancer collaboration to work better. (§5, p. 22)
Without enough choice for workers and competition among clients, market power sits with those who hire. Platforms need to resolve this. This is a major issue for platforms to resolve to ensure a fair, equitable future of work.(§5, p. 19)
Platforms can be rich sites of collaboration and professional relationship-building between skilled workers worldwide and their clients.
Limitations
The scale is limited to one platform, a relatively small number of interviewees, and two countries, so the findings cannot claim full generalisability. (§6, p. 23)
The client side of the mirrored issues is drawn from prior work by Lustig and colleagues rather than from our own interviews.
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Concepts
Macrotasks
Freelance tasks such as graphic design, content creation or software development, as opposed to microtasks like image tagging: Macrotasks are often complex, knowledge- and skill-intensive in nature.(§1, p. 2)
Invisible work
The distinction we build on: Star and Strauss use the term 'visible' and 'invisible' work in relation to the kinds of effort that get noticed and recognized as 'work' versus those that do not(§2.1, p. 3)
The work to find work
The unpaid effort and upfront costs freelancers take on to find and win suitable tasks (profiles, portfolios, proposals, bids, negotiation). As one voiceover artist put it: you spend 90 percent of your time looking for 10 percent of the work.(§4.2, p. 12)
Connects
Upwork's mechanism for making freelancers apply more selectively: 'Connects' are a token or platform currency that freelancers need in order to apply for tasks.(§4.2, p. 13)
Mirroring
Our term, applied to six issues (task definition, pay, collaboration overhead, matching, work context, evaluation): what we call "mirroring", wherein the same core phenomenon manifests on and impacts both sides of the market(§5, p. 20)
How to cite
Srihari Hulikal Muralidhar, Sean Rintel, and Siddharth Suri. 2022. Collaboration, Invisible Work, and the Costs of Macrotask Freelancing. CSCW 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555175
This brief was prepared with AI assistance and published by Sean Rintel. It is not the authors' published text. Page numbers refer to this PDF.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{hulikalmuralidhar2022collaboration,
author = {Hulikal Muralidhar, Srihari and Rintel, Sean and Suri, Siddharth},
title = {Collaboration, Invisible Work, and the Costs of Macrotask Freelancing},
booktitle = {CSCW 2022},
year = {2022},
month = {November},
publisher = {ACM},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3555175},
doi = {10.1145/3555175},
}