Why UAE businesses are turning to freelance websites

Firms are going online to find expertise at cheaper rates.

Nicole Abi-Esber at the Urbanista Cafe in the Gemmayze district of Beirut, Lebanon. Bryan Denton For The National

When the team behind the Dubai-based personal finance app Wally realised that the majority of their users lived in non-English-speaking countries, they knew they had to do something to reach them.

But there was a problem. Professional translation services were out of the start-up’s price range.

“We were getting quotes from professional translation agencies and they were giving us quotes of a few thousand dollars per language and some of the languages like Mandarin were more because it is more difficult to find somebody,” says Nicole Abi-Esber, a Lebanese-American who was in charge of user experience at Wally.

Having previously used Upwork, a freelancing website, Ms Abi-Esber set about putting together a virtual team of translators in 18 countries.

“I ended up paying the least amount for Mandarin. It was about US$4 an hour,” says Ms Abi-Esber, who is now working as entrepreneur in residence at Middle East Internet Group, a joint venture of South Africa’s MTN and Germany’s Rocket Internet (Rocket is known for replicating popular websites, such as Airbnb, and bringing them to emerging markets).

“It was really cool because we got access to all these people all over the world and it was much cheaper. They were also comfortable because they were in their own homes instead of being on salaries with a translation agency. They were all students. There was one in Russia, one in Spain, one in Brazil. It was super cool. I think we saved $10,000 to $15,000.”

And importantly, the quality of work was also good.

“Because we had assembled a ‘team’ of sorts dedicated to our product, it guaranteed continuity between translators, whereas oftentimes agencies assign translations to multiple translators,” says Ms Abi-Esber. “Also we were able to hire people who had Android phones, and had the technical knowledge to download the test versions of the app and check the translations actually in the app, in context.”

UAE companies such as Wally have a strong demand for freelance websites. Businesses in the Emirates are California-based Upwork’s fifth largest market, and have spent more than Dh390 million to date on the service, which launched in the UAE as Elance o-Desk last June.

Kunal Kapoor turned to the service when he was setting up an online marketplace and it became apparent that not all of the expertise he needed was available in the UAE.

Nor did he necessarily want all of his staff to work for the company full-time, for both financial and workload reasons.

So he chose the only option open to him: to consult freelancing websites like Upwork, which had a bank of people with the right kind of skills at the right price. And he hasn’t looked back since.

Today eight of his full-time employees, out of 33 staff in total of The Luxury Closet, an online marketplace for luxury items, live abroad across the Middle East and South East Asia.

“Everything is online so you can do a lot of this stuff remotely. You just need to be connected,” says Mr Kapoor, who is chief executive of the Dubai-based company.

“The reason we started doing all of this was because we started saying we should build a work culture and policies that make sense,” says Mr Kapoor.

Working more online is not the only way the workplace is expected to change. A study in late 2014 for the commercial real estate services firm CBRE and Genesis, a Chinese developer and operator, found that young people expect the office to be very different in 2030. Workplaces will offer a “wide variety of quiet retreat and collaborative settings”, each of which will suit a specific job or task.

Respondents also said they would move from thinking about workplaces towards places of work, including outside the office.

So how will increased home working affect the quality of our work? Will we become more creative, working in a space we feel more comfortable in?

“The answer is not as simple as a clear yes or no,” says Alan Iny, senior specialist for creativity and scenario planning at Boston Consulting Group.

“From my perspective I have seen places like BCG, where there are sometimes people who work from home, and sometimes not, be very empowering and be very creative and innovative places. And I have seen it fail in other places as well because people are very hierarchical and domineering and it just doesn’t work out,” he adds.

It has certainly worked out for companies like Wally and The Luxury Closet. Mr Kapoor thinks it could work for others.

“I think that having the flexibility makes you deliver better,” he says. “You can choose your timing and deliver more.”

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