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
Emerging-markets-based, geo-locked2, and/or low-income job seekers. Those with low prospects of finding a “suitable” role locally and unable to relocate for work. These Team Members are heavily underserved by the existing global employment market.
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
What outcomes are created
Traditionally credentialed talent
Individual & family:
Improved lifestyle (e.g. less commuting, more time with family, etc.).
Community:
- Contribution to local/national tax income;
- Local spending and uplift to the local economy; and
- Contributing as valued members of a community (reversing brain drain).
Emerging Talent
Individual & family:
Access to quality employment, income, benefits, and development opportunities which are otherwise unavailable.
Community:
- Contribution to local/national tax income;
- Local spending and uplift to the local economy; and
- Contributing as valued members of a community (reversing brain drain).
Scale of change
Traditionally credentialed talent
High—demand for this type of labor is high and there is willingness to accommodate (and pay for) remote arrangements for this top-tier talent.
Emerging Talent
Low—despite the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people who fit these profiles globally, demand for this type of labor for remote jobs isn’t there yet. We expect this to grow over time and hope to influence this growth.
Duration of change
Traditionally credentialed talent
High—likely long-term or permanent contracts.
Emerging Talent
Moderate—likely to be at least 12-month employment contracts.
Businesses are on a journey of discovery with distributed working. It’s still seen as “risky” to create these types of roles. Therefore, organizations today will likely allow these arrangements for credentialed talent only, where their expertise and value exceeds the misperceived risk. As distributed working becomes more commonplace, we expect emerging talent to increase as a proportion of total distributed work roles. We also see it as part of our mission to make this case publicly, particularly with respect to correcting misunderstandings about risk. We’ll do this not only through our corporate communications, but also by being a living embodiment of these principles in the way we run Oyster (see: “ESG dimensions of Oyster’s operations” below for more on this).
For now, the distribution is very much skewed to the first group (based on the salary data we have available). Therefore, in terms
of our impact measurement in the short term, we focus on proxies for community-based impact given that this is likely to be the majority of impact we are creating. In terms of metrics, we’re still working through how to balance our ambitions of transparency about impact with the commercial realities around publishing sensitive information. Internally, we measure in terms of the number of Team Members from emerging markets and the Committed (annualized) Gross Payment Volume to those markets in terms of salary and tax contributions.
Given these sensitivities, below is an approximate percentage of Team Members employed from or in emerging markets, including an estimation of the total-dollar flow to those markets.
For the ~75% of Team Members who live in developed markets, we believe Oyster’s offering adds value to their lives, but on average across the dimensions identified above, we believe we’re less directly impactful than for those Team Members in emerging markets.
While we work to shift this balance, our success in developed markets with traditionally credentialed talent still serves important purposes: it proves that the model works and so contributes towards our systems-change goal, it generates revenue to help Oyster grow and double down on our mission, and it shifts the paradigms around work among this influential population.
