There are two main contributors to my colleague’s incredulity. The first one is the Nordic mentality. The second is the nature of the translation industry.

Janteloven (the Law of Jante) is an idea of equality where individuals ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t think themselves as being any better than the rest of the community. You ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t consider yourself any lesser either, but you try to see other people’s value as equal to your own. In the Nordic workplace, this mentality creates a culture where trust and respect do not have to be earned. I place substantial trust in each of my colleagues as a default. They can lose my trust, but they ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t initially have to jump through hoops to earn it.

This is different from the UK company culture, which is characterised by a distinct hierarchy. The polite and indirect communication style of British managers can disguise the fact that they are the sole decision makers at their company. In a earlier this year, a quarter of the UK employees interviewed said they had left a job because of a lack of trust in their workplace.

My British management peers might still have their junior employees make them a cup of tea, whereas I am sometimes found at the sink of our office kitchen cleaning dirty cups so that the others ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t have to. For a Nordic professional, the CEO rolling up their sleeves is an indication of the high level of mutual respect between colleagues, regardless of their role in the organisation. Courtesy across the levels of hierarchy makes the office atmosphere more relaxed and minimises power games and the need for office politics.

The translation community is characterised by a similar disregard for hierarchy in its interactions and collaboration. Size does not always matter in our industry since specialisation lends importance to the smaller players. The client/subcontractor roles may alternate and be reversed in the complex supply chains. The need for innovation drives language companies into R&D partnerships and technical alliances. Business is still based on personal contacts and recommendations through networks.

I was contemplating these characteristics when planning STP’s campaign to support Translators without Borders in their holiday fundraising appeal this month.

STP has been a corporate sponsor of this charity for the past seven years. The focus of their work is to provide people with access to vital knowledge in their language. This involves translating for non-profit organisations in the areas of crisis relief, health and education, and training new translators in under-resourced languages.

STP is registered with Translators without Borders (TWB) as a reviewer and translation provider for the Nordic languages, but our languages are not the ones they need most. We only get to donate a few hours of linguistic and project management work every other month. Yet we cherish opportunities to raise awareness of why language matters in humanitarian work.

To this end, the members of the STP team have cycled through Hampshire as a part of TextPartners’ European tour (Operations Manager Susan Hoare), completed the Great South Run (Project Manager Emma Tamlyn) and had their hair dyed (Executive Chairman Jesper Sandberg). I myself walked around with “Language matters” tattooed on my back for two months last year.

To support this year’s holiday fundraising, we have set up a with a promise from the senior members of our management team to perform embarrassing dares for publication online as we hit certain milestones.

Rosie Marteau, TWB Senior Development Officer commented: “TWB is privileged to have the support of its colleagues in the commercial language industry, including STP who have been steadfast allies of our work for many years”.

“In many ways we are two sides of the same coin; just as LSPs deliver translation services for corporate clients and brands, we support global charities and small local NGOs alike to ensure their life-saving information is in a format and language that people can understand, at times of humanitarian crisis. We understand each others’ work, and that makes us a natural fit for CSR partnerships such as STP’s sponsorship”.

The work of Translators without Borders is of course serious, and it deserves to be supported even without silly dares like ours. But in the spirit of Janteloven, we wanted to muck in, add a little extra incentive and a touch of Christmas cheer to . We hope you enjoy!

To read more about the work of Translators without Borders, visit

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By ‘virtual teams,’ I mean geographically dispersed groups of in-house staff who engage in interdependent tasks for shared goals and projects. I ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t mean just any odd group of remote colleagues.

In a translation company, a virtual team may be a group of project managers serving the same clients. Or a team of translators with the same mother tongue revising each other’s work or concurrently translating different parts of the same text.

It may also be a language technology group troubleshooting and processing files for the aforementioned colleagues, or a management team directing the whole show. In a virtual team, these people interact electronically rather than face-to-face and can be based in different offices, time zones and even continents.

Virtual teams, real costs

The prospect of eliminating office-related overheads may appear to explain the popularity of virtual teamwork. The reality, however, is that few of us with remote-working setups have abolished offices altogether.

Indeed, it’s common for translation companies to maintain both the office infrastructure, with the associated costs of rent, lease, electricity, furniture and hardware, plus the extra technology and remote setup needed to support virtual teams.

STP has physical offices in four locations, with nearly a hundred desktop PCs – and a large number of remote workers – connecting to the same virtual server every day. The company provides the hardware for both the office and remote environments. So we could hardly say that we facilitate remote working for cost-saving reasons.

Many translation companies build global networks of staff so that they can provide a 24/5 service. To turn work around as quickly as possible, projects are handed from colleague to colleague, and from one time zone to the next. In this context, the need for virtual teams is clear.

In truth, however, most of us have our virtual teams much closer to home: in the same continent, country or even town. We bear the inconvenience of geographically dispersed teams, but reap none of the rewards of around-the-clock cover.

Some employees claim that they’re more efficient when working from home. While it may be true that an empty house holds fewer distractions than a crowded office, I have little statistical evidence of STP’s translators or PMs becoming more productive after transferring from the office to a home-working arrangement. This, therefore, cannot be the reason for favouring virtual teams either.

So why do we do it?

Everyone agrees that there are numerous disadvantages inherent in virtual teams. Communication suffers from team members’ inability to read nonverbal cues. Virtual meetings allow no time to build relationships, which in turn leads to an absence of collegial spirit and makes it difficult to establish trust and rapport.

Virtual teams, in our experience, find it more difficult to express opinions, manage conflicts and make decisions. They’re also harder to monitor, support technically and engage beyond their routine tasks.

At STP, we support virtual teams because they allow us to hire from a greater pool of talent than any single office location can offer. They also help us to retain employees who start in an office but face change at some point down the line. The employee wants a change of scenery, their partner moves, their growing family brings a new need for flexibility, or they simply struggle in an office environment.

When these employees are allowed to work from their chosen location, they remain loyal and stay with us for longer. If they work from home, they save hours in travel time, are able to attend to personal or family matters and can adjust their working environment to their personal taste. The employer, meanwhile, should benefit from having a member of staff with increased focus and energy for their work.

Training and comms: the keys to virtual success

One of our biggest challenges with virtual teams at STP is providing adequate training, support and mentoring for newcomers during the first six months of their employment. Face-to-face contact with a supervisor or teammate is just so much better than virtual when it comes to building relationships and fostering trust.

We manage this by having all newbies complete a week of office-based induction training – an essential foundation for effective teamwork later on. This means, however, that we must keep enough senior colleagues working in those locations to help the newcomers. Sometimes the right colleagues are simply not in that office, and need to be brought in temporarily for the initial training period.

During their induction week, new employees meet our senior managers and other key members of their team. Then, when they eventually slot into their place in their own virtual team, they are assigned a mentor. They also join Yammer, our company social network, where we have 80 different collaboration groups. Some are compulsory for everyone, some are team-specific, and some are down to the interests of the individual.

From there, nearly all our collaboration and communication takes place online. We do small meetings and one-to-ones on Skype. We use tools like TeamViewer for help with technical troubleshooting, when someone wants to shadow another colleague, or when IT or language technology needs to take over the control of somebody’s computer remotely.

All of our large internal meetings have a virtual element to them – some people attend in person, others join via GoToWebinar – and many meetings are recorded for those who could not attend at all. To ensure efficiency and effectiveness, we’ve found it’s a good idea to ban multi-tasking during all virtual meetings.

Remote, but not detached

When managing virtual teams, it’s particularly important to be able to measure their work output. Both managers and team members must be clear on what the key indicators of success for that team are. Managers should then track productivity consistently, both at individual and team level, and share the results with their team as quickly and transparently as possible.

It’s equally vital to set up virtual ‘water coolers’ where employees can meet online for informal chats. We have an open group called Coffee Break in Yammer for this purpose. Unlike in the real world, though, everyone else can easily listen in to the smart, entertaining exchanges that take place there – and even give the occasional shy thumbs-up.

Often the discussions end up providing a delicious mix of professional and personal insight. It was on STP’s Yammer, for instance, that I first learned how rude it is to end an instant message with a full stop. Something my very unvirtual children had shockingly allowed to go unchecked for years.

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Lack of growth and advancement opportunities, limited coaching and feedback, a mismatch between the job and the person, or stress from overworking. These are just some of the motivating factors you will see mentioned.

Looking for general trends in the global workforce across all industries, however, will not get us very far. So if staff turnover is something that keeps you awake at night, you need to focus on understanding why employees leave your organisation.

The simplest reasons for people leaving our organisation range from discovering that the role did not suit them to getting a better offer elsewhere. The former typically applies to a linguist we have employed in a project management position and the latter to a translator enticed away to an in-house position at a content-owning client company or an EU institution. We have a higher staff turnover in our translation and project management teams, whereas fewer people resign from management or middle-management positions.

But we also lose people who like what they do and who say it would be hard to find a nicer company to work for. Many of our leavers want to move away from the UK, usually returning to their native countries. Some have gone back to academia for further studies, including PhDs. And others want to set up as freelance translators and have more control over their daily schedules. This usually happens when their family grows and their private life needs more flexibility.

I have looked at the figures long, hard and often, and I cannot see any single cause of resignation that we could directly remedy as a company. What we must do, then, is build a culture of motivation and reward that helps us hold on to our best people for as long as possible.

On motivating

Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory suggests that there are factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction and other elements that cause dissatisfaction.

The former are called ‘motivators’ and include achievement, intrinsic interest, responsibility, advancement, opportunity to do something meaningful, decision-making and sense of importance.

The latter are called ‘hygiene factors’. These generally ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t motivate staff, but if they are lacking or entirely missing in the workplace, employees will be demotivated. Hygiene factors include company policy, admin practices, supervision, interpersonal relationships, working conditions, salary, job security, fringe benefits and holiday.

An ideal company should have a high degree of both motivators and hygiene factors. If you have high hygiene factors but low motivators, your people will merely work for their paycheque. If the motivator factors are high but the hygiene factors low, the job is exciting but the salary and conditions won’t withstand competition. And if both motivators and hygiene factors are low, the workforce won’t be motivated and there will be many complaints.

This means that once you have a competitive compensation package in place offering flexitime, remote-working options, pension plan, health insurance and potentially a profit sharing scheme, and you have created a decent HR structure and effective internal communication, you need to turn your attention to the factors that really give your employees a good reason to stay.

On commitment

We live in a world where job-hopping every couple of years is becoming commonplace, and even desirable.

Among millennials, hopping from job to job is no longer a sign of disloyalty. It does not necessarily point to an inability to hold down a job or get along with colleagues. And yet, some recruiters say it is still easier for an older person with a steady employment history to find a job than it is for a hopper in their 30s.

This makes sense. Staff turnover is highly disruptive – especially in an environment like ours, where we try to focus on building long-term partnerships with clients as well as keeping up with fast-moving industry-specific technology and a changing marketplace.

Our team leaders spend a lot of time finding, training and mentoring new colleagues, and our teams face frequent reshuffles of tasks and workloads to accommodate temporary shortages of skills and expertise while newbies get up to speed.

Staff turnover is also expensive. An and report in the UK in 2014 declared that it takes an average of 28 weeks for a new employee to reach their optimum productivity level (OPL). Given the comprehensive nature of client-facing project management in our industry, this is certainly the minimum for translation company PMs.

The logistical cost of replacement is said to average at around ÂŁ5,000 per employee. This figure includes advertising the role, processing the applicants, assessing tests, interviewing, and arranging cover until the replacement can start.

The cost of bringing newbies up to their OPL, however, could be five times greater. Combined with the circulating reports that over 50% of people recruited to an organisation will leave it within 2 years, it makes chilling maths for employers.

What attracts a candidate to a particular job is often different from what keeps them there. Today, employees are looking for a career path, growth opportunities, comfortable company culture, diverse responsibilities and a work-life balance.

They want to pursue their dreams. They have a passion for creativity. They ťĺ´Ç˛Ô’t want to be told to just do their job. They want to be involved in casting the vision and working on high-brain-power tasks. People who feel like stakeholders are likely to stay longer.

On rewards

As with staff retention, money comes to mind first when thinking about rewards.

Financial incentives in translation companies, however, tend to be reserved for executives, salespeople and account managers – roles that are seen to be making the biggest difference to the bottom line. It is less common to pay bonuses to linguists and project managers, unless the business has set up a company-wide profit-sharing scheme that all employees participate in.

But not all perks and incentives are monetary.

We consider it important to reward STP’s long-serving employees. After certain milestone years of service, our people receive additional paid time off plus other awards in recognition of their commitment and loyalty to the company. We also have a policy of acknowledging work anniversaries on Yammer, our internal communication platform, with a personal, publicly shared message of thanks and praise.

This year, we also experimented with a campaign of honouring the more intangible daily staff contributions that do not get enough appreciation. For instance, we launched an internal customer service contest among our project managers to acknowledge the scope and complexity of their work.

We wanted to applaud them for carrying out their tasks in a friendly, cooperative manner, for showing initiative and for going the extra mile in their fast-paced, high-pressure working environment. The winners were given trips to international translation industry conferences where many of our clients convene.

The element of surprise

I have found that rewards tend to work best when they are unexpected. As soon as they become a regular, predictable part of the remuneration package, they seem to lose a lot of their motivational value. On-the-spot rewards are most powerful when given immediately after the achievement, and public recognition always beats privately given credit.

In the past two months, I have heard two motivational speakers quote the same research by Sam Glucksberg on the effect of offering rewards. The research they referred to indicates that rewards are good motivators for achieving narrow, focused tasks, but not so good for larger, creative ones.

Routine, rules-based work occupies our left brain, whereas conceptual tasks with no clear set of rules or solutions use our right brain. When working on tasks requiring innovative solutions, religiously applied rewards were in fact shown to lead to poorer performance.

This is because to succeed in right-brain tasks, you need intrinsic motivation – the inner drive to do things because they are important and interesting. For these right-brain tasks, trying to entice people with a carrot or threatening them with a stick simply does not work.

A different kind of incentive

Training and personal growth opportunities are good motivators. Last month, we paid for the 16 members of our management and middle management teams to go through the personality profiling, consisting of an online assessment and an onsite workshop.

Apart from the obvious self-understanding benefits, the key takeaways from the day included understanding how cohesive teams work, how each of us comes across in our interaction and communication with others and what our ideal work environment might look like.

The investment will deliver results when we apply these strategies to our collaboration and remember how to work with each person most effectively. But the session also served as a reward, aiding the individuals in their personal and interpersonal growth.

I keep smiling at my own profile, and it seems that my team does, too. In the section titled ‘Barriers to Effective Communication’, it recommends the following:

When communicating with Anu:

• Do not question her motives or competence.
• Stick to business at all times.
• Be ready to leave quickly.
• Do not wait for praise or recognition.

“Well we knew that already, didn’t we?” my team said.

“You are more of the ‘isn’t the task itself reward enough?’ orientation, after all.”

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