No longer a quirk of economics, freelancing is on the rise, and predictions say it’s here to stay. Connecting businesses and independent professionals who are embracing this new way of work, Upwork is a marketplace that enables you to find, hire, collaborate with and pay highly-skilled freelancers for knowledge-based work. Businesses post more than three million jobs, and freelancers earn more than a billion dollars annually on Upwork.com, making it the largest freelancing site in the world.

Founded by two friends who wanted to work together from separate locations – one in Greece and one in Silicon Valley – Upwork believes in work without limits, meaning people should have more freedom and flexibility as technology breaks down limitations in how we work. Its own company is built this way with a distributed team of approximately 300 full-time employees who engage hundreds of freelancers around the world for projects.

With a team this large, this ambitious, and this geographically scattered, how does Upwork avoid the pitfalls commonly associated with distributed work?

Modern work calls for modern technology

Upwork employees will tell you that the company’s ability to operate with a distributed team model has a lot to do with online collaboration tools.

In the early days, Upwork was stretching G Suite to its limits as one of the first companies to pilot the popular video chat program Google Hangouts. Employees dreamed up solutions to problems together via group video chat; but there were still some gaps between the system’s abilities and Upwork’s needs.

“I’m a visual thinker, and a lot of the work we do in user experience design is visual,” says Upwork product designer Larry Stone. He felt friction in trying to create a visual plot of how users interact with the Upwork interface —  a “journey map” — inside of Google Sheets, the spreadsheet tool. G Suite saw him using left-brained tools for right-brained tasks. When he found Miro in the summer of 2016, he says everything became “much easier.”

Remote collaboration is a topic close to Vaz’s heart. Before partnering with Upwork, he ran his own creative agency from his home in a small town in Brazil. In doing brans to help bring a creative team together. But he says nothing worked as well as Miro.

Shipra Kayan, Upwork’s director of product design research, cites a compelling example of her team using Miro to see a project through to completion: “We wanted to create a lifecycle diagram for jobs posted on Upwork that showed the various stages of a job  — “posted,” “canceled,” “interviewing,” “given up,” and so on. The data scientists were using their own metrics, though while the designers were concerned with other data; and engineers were using their own specialized diagrams, too.” Only when the work was consolidated in one place did things really start to click. Miro kept everyone on the same path to a higher-quality finished product.

“We sometimes have a dozen people editing a board at the same time — the software is very powerful, but it’s also simple and straightforward to use,” says Sean Kane, Upwork’s Vice President of Engineering. Miro saves him a lot of time in the hustle to see ideas go from concept to reality — his favorite features are the ability to grab Google images right off a deck and the ability to add sticky notes easily.

“I have a strong belief that when the whole team understands the same core problem, you move forward more cohesively,” Kane says.

Everyone on the same page

With a lively distributed team, Upwork’s implementation of Miro makes a meaningful difference in how it operates. It used to be standard practice at Upwork to literally point a webcam at a whiteboard while someone wrote and drew on it. Now the whiteboard lives online where it can be easily viewed and edited by everyone. Suddenly there’s a lot more engagement during brainstorming sessions. Developers who were previously not involved may find they can make meaningful contributions, and the entire team gets the benefit of additional context.

With multiple offices worldwide, team members working from other locations and job flexibility a key driver behind the way people want to work today, supporting remote team members is becoming the rule, not the exception. Miro helps maximize remote workers’ satisfaction and overall contribution.

In simplest terms, it provides the potential for 100 percent of the team to participate and do so in a meaningful way.