The idea of digital workplaces is becoming a norm now, and businesses are focusing on boarding talented people, regardless of their locations. It is like a win-win for both employees and companies. Employees got to work from their own places, where there is no micromanagement, or administration scrutiny. Businesses, on the flip side, can significantly cut their operational cost. They don’t have to rent a big office space, pay huge electricity bills, or provide travel allowed to your employees.
Sounds quite progressive, right? Well, building a productive remote team is not as easy as it may sound. Especially, in the translation industry when you have native translators working remotely from their home countries.
In this article, we’ll figure out some cornerstones of building and managing a remote team of translators.
Best Tips to Manage Your Remote Translation Teams
Building a remote team may come with many challenges, such as team collaboration, task understanding, and inconsistency in translations. Following are a few guidelines for you to effectively manage your remote teams, and overcome all potential challenges.
Focus on Workflow Optimization and Translation Processes
For seamless translation task management, you have to have well-organized translation processes and workflow. It will not just make the online translation management processes less chaotic, but also support your translation teams to be more productive. Dealing with complicated translation files can be time-consuming, that’s why you must focus on optimizing your workflow and avoid putting excessive workloads on your team. Workflow optimization will lead to agile translation project management, and it will also enhance your team’s productivity.
Use A Translation Management Platform
Using a professional translation project management platform can really make things easier for you to manage. Especially, if you have to manage a remote team of translators, you better get your hands on a reliable TMS tool. Most TMS platforms come with team management and collaboration features that make it easier for teams to communicate in real-time. A cloud-based localization management platform serves as a digital workspace where translators from different regions can come together and collaborate. Moreover, it will reduce the chances of project misunderstandings and conflicts between your translation teams.
Establishing Effective Communication Channels
If your project management platform doesn’t already have communication features, you must implement your own communication channels. Your translation team’s performance and project outcomes entirely depend on how well they have communicated with each other. Lack of communication always leads to frequent mistakes and quality of work is also compromised at all levels. It is the responsibility of project managers to ensure seamless communication between translation teams and allow them to provide productive feedback and voice their concerns.
Ensure Easy Accessibility to Project Resources
Whatever software or tool you use to manage your remote team, make sure it is interactive and provides your team with easy access to all project resources. Your project resources should be placed in a central place, from where your translation teams can access them. Make sure, resource usability is as seamless as possible and eliminate the need to inform a middleman to get the authority to access a translation resource. It will save the time of your team and let them focus on actual translation work.
Use Real-Time Performance Analytics
It is hard to keep a check on your remote translators, and you can’t get back to them every time you want to know about the progress of a project. Well, it is possible to monitor your translation teams in real-time through performance analytics. Such tools are also available in some cloud-based localization management platforms to help you see the project progress anytime you want. It makes the project manager’s job quite simple and hassle-free. Moreover, they can timely take notice of problematic areas that need improvements and take necessary steps to combat the issues.
Mitigate Downtime & Processing Errors
It is always recommended to do proper research work before investing in a translation tool for remote teams. If your translation tool is causing frequent downtime, it will waste your team’s time and cause productivity issues. Buy a translation management tool with a good reputation and professional tech support.
Moreover, incompetent software can cause errors that need to be fixed, or maybe they are more prone to cybersecurity issues and require manual updates. So, apart from checking the features of your TMS, you should also consider other factors as well, such as security and technical support.
Train Your Remote Team
Your remote teams should be trained in using the tools and resources that you are currently using. You may need to arrange training sessions for newly recruited translators, so they can easily get their hands on your preferred tools. It will also help them get familiar with your translation processes and perform more efficiently to meet your goals. Or, you can record team training videos once and reuse them for every new member joining your remote team.
Final Words!
Building a digital translation team comes with a lot of financial and performance benefits only if you know how to deal with the challenges that come along. Following the tips in this article can really help you figure out how to effectively manage your remote translators. Having the right knowledge and tools is definitely a must if you want your translation business to go all digital.