Imagine working global for an office with no borders. This is the proposition given by oDesk, a company that offers a global job marketplace from businesses that hire and manage remote workers. The company name is a short version of “online desk” which simply means one can work anywhere and anytime.

vice president Matt Cooper of oDesk, and some of his key staff were in Manila recently to attend a series of activities to show their appreciation and keen interest in the country that is now their number one market.

“We’ve been holding a contractor appreciation day events in different parts of the world, and the Philippines is our largest market in terms of hours worked,” Cooper said.

oDesk is the world’s largest online workplace.

Cooper said that it is a site where companies can hire, manage and pay contractors (freelance workers) all over the world to do any work that can be done in front of a computer. The range of services includes administration, data entry, customer service, bookkeeping, software, web and mobile development, and legal and financial matters.

The online company based in Redwood City, California was founded in 2004. Most of the companies that use the oDesk platform are small to medium sized, based in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and other English-speaking countries.

But oDesk had also attracted a number of fairly large companies. Prospective clients can post jobs for free and contractors may create profiles and bid on jobs also for free. According to its website, the company is number one in market rank in terms of annual contractor earnings and its market share is about 1.8 times larger compared to the second largest online workplace.

Cooper said that currently, the company has about 2.5 million users registered in the site, and about 500,000 of them are Filipino contractors. Over three million hours were worked by Filipino contractors on their platform, and these statistics would bolster the current title the Philippines now enjoys as one of the world’s top hosts for business process outsourcing (BPO).

oDesk also offers BPO companies in the country the alternative of hiring workers who don’t actually have to report to a physical office to do their jobs. “This is beneficial even to employees who won’t have to incur transportation or gas expenses, as well as other costs that come with reporting to a day or an evening job,” Cooper said.

Cooper added that oDesk noticed another trend in the types of jobs being contracted and its correlation to the firm’s popularity and growth in the Philippines. He said that prior to 2008, most of the jobs being done were technical in nature, so the Philippines wasn’t really on their radar then. But 2008 to 2009 signaled the non technical categories coming in, like virtual administration and customer service and that’s when the Philippines dominated the scene. Today, one out of three hours worked on oDesk is worked by a Filipino contractor.

Cooper said that the future for online work is definitely bright. This is because the world’s view on work is also changing due to the Internet, the challenges in the economy and globalization.

oDesk offers another way of working in today’s modern workplace by bringing work to the worker rather than the worker to the work. In the Philippines in particular, Cooper said that online work is also a good alternative instead of the traditional BPO office set-ups. This is because oDesk gives the Filipino contractors more freedom and more control over their time, while at the same time having steady work. Most of the time, it also affords them higher pay compared to those working the same type of job in the traditional workplace, with contractors growing their hourly wage rate by 190 percent on average over three years.

Cooper said that what cannot be denied at this point is that there is clearly a new work evolution taking place.

“We think we’re headed towards a model where individuals are operating their own personal businesses and are working for five companies at the same time,” Cooper said, adding that this is the future and that the Philippines has a crucial role to play in it.

oDesk also believes in foresight and that this is probably the reason why it is staking its claim in the Philippines to get their own piece of the action.