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Dear Reader,
When I heard that hundreds of millions of highly educated women all over the world are not formally working, I knew intuitively that there must be something wrong with work. It became clear that if we redesign work to be performed anytime from anywhere, we could tap into this talent pool.
We started Odetta as a work platform where our Odettians could complete tasks on their own timetable from any location, also known as asynchronous-first. In most firms, jobs are created and tasks are organized synchronously-first with later accommodations for the asynchronous workers. Odetta designs the jobs radically differently - every task is first decomposed in a way that can be done asynchronously. Our different organization requires skills and processes, but when it is done, it unleashes new possibilities for both our workforce and our clients. We discovered quite by accident that an asynchronous-first model enables you to more efficiently collaborate in groups.
Our asynchronous job design was invented out of necessity to meet our mission, but it is part of a larger trend within the future of work. Work is becoming “unbundled,” driven by automation and globalization, and as we distribute and atomize tasks, we make it far easier to automate routine tasks. Odetta’s focus is on the complex and intricate work that is left behind after commoditized work is automated. One of our key insights in the last year during COVID is that this asynchronous-only model does not work for all types of tasks - but that it will work for far more than many people imagined three years ago.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
Warmly,
Katharine
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