What the fissured workplace really means

We didn’t call it that back then. We just thought we were being lean. My cofounder and I had hired a few part-time writers, a freelance designer, a virtual assistant based in Jakarta, and someone in customer support from a BPO in Cebu. Everyone else was a contractor or “partner.” On paper, it looked agile. On Slack, it felt scattered. And six months later, when a major client project imploded, we realized we hadn’t built a team. We’d built a marketplace—with no glue.

The fissured workplace model doesn’t hit you like a wall. It melts quietly underneath your feet. For founders in Southeast Asia, especially those trying to move fast and keep burn low, it feels like the obvious move. Why carry full-time headcount if you can outsource? Why hire locally when you can contract regionally? Why train in-house if there’s an expert on Upwork who can plug in overnight? The logic sounds clean. But it breaks in the messiest way possible—when something goes wrong and no one feels responsible enough to fix it.

The original idea behind the fissured workplace was framed as efficiency. You separate your core from everything else. You outsource payroll. You hire delivery riders through a third-party vendor. You let your marketing consultant use their own contractor network. And in the beginning, it does feel like freedom. You're not managing all these people. You’re managing the outcomes. But in practice, what you’re really doing is removing every layer of shared risk from your team—and hoping they care enough anyway.

In our case, the breakdown wasn’t loud. It was subtle. A designer delivered the wrong brand deck format. The content team didn’t question it. The virtual assistant passed it on to the client. No one flagged the error. No one asked if it looked off. When the client pointed it out, we scrambled. And only then did we realize the deeper problem. The contractor in charge of the deck hadn’t read the brief fully—because the freelancer who scoped it never sent it to her. She was working off a template. The entire chain was built on “my part is done,” not “does this make sense for the whole?”

What felt like a communication hiccup was actually a structural fault. And it wasn’t a one-off. It was the pattern. We had created a workplace that made everyone interchangeable. And by doing that, we made ourselves irreplaceable. Every decision, every escalation, every project that required nuance or judgment—came back to us. We weren’t leading. We were patching. And that’s the irony most founders don’t see when they go down the fissured path. You think you’re freeing yourself from overhead. You’re actually baking in more dependency.

The moment of clarity came in a Zoom call. Our BPO partner told us casually that their agent had been reassigned to a new account because our ticket volume had dropped. “Reassigned?” we asked. “Yes, unless you lock in a monthly SLA.” Which we hadn’t. So just like that, someone who had been on our systems for six months, who knew our tone, who had built trust with customers, was gone. We’d treated her like a teammate. But she was always someone else’s employee.

And that’s when I realized we’d built an ecosystem that couldn’t hold loyalty. Everyone was efficient. No one was accountable. And in a crisis, nobody was sticking around to clean it up. Because they didn’t feel like it was theirs to protect.

I’m not saying don’t use contractors. I still do. But what I’d tell any founder now is this: fissuring your team isn’t just a hiring decision. It’s a cultural one. If your workplace is designed so that no one owns anything end-to-end, don’t be surprised when no one goes the extra mile. If your operating model says “just do your part,” don’t expect anyone to notice when the whole thing’s going sideways.

Here’s what I now believe about building with flexibility. First, outsourcing isn’t leverage unless the relationship is deep enough to carry context. Otherwise, you’re just rotating inputs and praying the outputs line up. Second, responsibility doesn’t travel through task management. It travels through emotional investment. If people don’t know where they fit in the bigger picture, they won’t step up when the picture starts falling apart. Third, even in lean teams, someone has to own integration. Not everything can be modular. Some things need glue.

The fissured workplace looks efficient in investor updates. You show headcount discipline. You look capital light. You say things like “we scale through partners.” But inside, it can feel hollow. People don’t talk to each other. Priorities shift without explanation. Work becomes transactional. And if you’re not careful, so does your leadership.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that operational clarity is a privilege, not a default. When you split labor into fragments, you have to double down on visibility. That means stronger onboarding for external vendors. Real documentation. Clear points of contact. And most of all, active rituals that make people feel seen. We started running fortnightly partner standups. Not because it’s scalable, but because it’s human. When someone feels like they’re part of a whole, they act differently. They flag risks. They ask questions. They stay longer.

I also stopped thinking of cost as just salary. Sometimes, the most expensive decision isn’t who you hire—it’s who walks away when you need them most. Contractors churn. Agencies shift resources. Freelancers get overloaded. And every time someone leaves, they take context with them. That context loss? That’s a hidden cost. And if you don’t budget for it, it eats your delivery quality alive.

We eventually rebuilt with a hybrid approach. Some roles we pulled in-house. Others we turned into long-term embedded partnerships. We created clearer scopes and gave people a say in shaping them. We rewrote our onboarding flow to include not just tools—but team history, customer tone, conflict expectations. And we stopped pretending that being small meant we could be fuzzy. If anything, being small meant we had to be sharper.

Looking back, I think our biggest mistake wasn’t choosing the fissured model. It was assuming that fragmentation would self-manage. That somehow, good intentions and smart hires would hold the center. But no team holds unless someone is actively holding it. And no system stays resilient unless you design for it—not just around it.

So if you’re reading this and you’ve got a lean stack of freelancers, consultants, part-timers and partners holding your operations together, ask yourself this: who owns the glue? If you’re removed for two weeks, who connects the dots? Who sees the red flags before the client does? Who feels like the reputation at stake is theirs too?

Because the fissured workplace can work—but only if you rewire your leadership around it. That means more clarity, not less. More narrative, not just metrics. More effort in the middle, not just on the edge. Otherwise, you’re not building a team. You’re running a temp agency—and hoping it holds.

I wish someone had told me this earlier: fast doesn’t always mean fragile, but fragmented almost always does. Don’t mistake flexibility for culture. Don’t mistake cost-saving for systems. And don’t wait until the silence breaks you to ask what’s missing. If your team feels disconnected, maybe it’s not about who they are. Maybe it’s about how you built it.

Because what broke wasn’t the model. It was our assumption that a workplace without walls could still stand tall. It can—but only if someone’s building the beams. And next time, that someone has to be you.