2022 Global Impact Report

Refining our thesis and building a strong foundation for the future.

Read the full report

A message from our founders
Our impact on Team Members and their communities
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions of Oyster’s operations
Systems change: catalyzing a more favorable status quo
Final thoughts
A message from our founders
Our impact on Team Members and their communities

Our north star is helping people access employment opportunities regardless of where they live, bringing a range of benefits to them and their communities. When we engage people through our platform, we call them Team Members.

To date, our focus has been on building a winning product without much focus on where these individuals are based. As we grow as a company, however, this will increasingly become more important to us.

We’ve deepened our thinking on how impact occurs and have clustered it into two distinct profiles. We break down these dynamics using the Impact Management Project’s dimensions of impact.

Who benefits

Traditionally credentialed talent
High-salaried, traditionally credentialed talent (e.g. many years of international work experience or top-tier education, etc.) either now based in, or relocating to, emerging markets. These Team Members are not underserved by the global employment market but are looking to relocate for lifestyle or personal/family reasons.
Emerging Talent
High-salaried, traditionally credentialed talent (e.g. many years of international work experience or top-tier education, etc.) either now based in, or relocating to, emerging markets. These Team Members are not underserved by the global employment market but are looking to relocate for lifestyle or personal/family reasons.
2 Geo-locked refers to individuals who are unable to travel from their home country. For example, they might not have valid forms of international identification or they may be unable to secure visas

We’ve developed an even more ambitious vision: One where the entire employment system pivots to a model of distributed working, benefitting hundreds of millions of people.

Tony Jamous Founder & CEO
Jack Mardack Founder
Impact, especially on human wellbeing, is difficult to define and measure, and we are learning as we go. When we started in 2020, we defined the scope of our potential impact as the direct effects of our product across four domains: people, local communities, businesses, and the environment. (Read our original Social Impact Thesis for more.)

Two years in, some of those hypotheses are now coming to bear. In this report, we focus on our direct impact on people and local communities, which is where we are currently making the most measurable progress. We also explore the direct impact we have through our own operations—i.e., the choices we make (and remake) every day about how we run our company.

Finally, while our direct impact will affect millions of people, we’ve developed an even more ambitious vision: One where the entire employment system pivots to a model of distributed working1, benefitting hundreds of millions of people. We view this system change, and our role in catalyzing it, as our indirect impact.
1 In distributed companies, workers work from wherever they are productive and comfortable. See a recent blog we wrote for more information.
Tony Jamous Founder & CEO
Jack Mardack Founder

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