How Asynchronous-First Empowers The Female Economy??

Newsletter Issue: July 2021

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

Monthly Spotlight:?Human QA & SKU Validation For Marketplace Ecommerce

Odetta is assisting an eCommerce company to evaluate the product pricing of their marketplace and compare with other retailers. We perform a hard-to-automate QA role that requires a human to review products with elevated or unusual prices and flag them for the client leveraging common sense and smart research skills.

Customer Testimonial: Excellence at all Costs!

“The Odetta team is whip-smart.” —Google

Founder Lesson Learned: Build Brands Unconventionally

Odetta is moderately famous in a few of the top business schools in Pakistan, and some founders recently asked us how we built our brand. I realized that out of necessity to meet our mission, we focus on hiring Odettians while they are still in school, before they get discouraged by the labor market. Most of the Odettians who join our platform heard about us by watching a fellow classmate earn money while doing her masters. This is just another reminder that authentically following your mission can lead to unusual brand awareness.

Odettian Applicant Quote

“I don't want this to be a cliche post about 'achieving your dreams' because being a female in Pakistani society, I understand how unrealistic it can sound. But I am here to tell you, through my own example, that going after what you want is not impossible. You may have to tweak your plans, refuel your optimism, form your hype team, accept the difficulties and teach yourself patience, but you will get there. I know I'm surrounded by inspirational women, stuck in monotonous lives and who dream of doing so much. Please don't give up on your ambitions. Being the only female in my distant family to pursue higher education abroad, I hope I have 'normalized' a path for my younger female cousins but I also want to share my experience here with my friends and colleagues because I genuinely want people to feel they are capable of doing anything. If I can, you can.” —?Minha, hired in our second ever batch of Odettians

Quote of the Month

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”?—T. S. Eliot, Poet