The Translation E-Buzz

This article was previously published in The ATA Chronicle

Company owners and managers rightfully spend most of their time and effort on satisfying client demands. But developing and implementing philosophies and strategies in areas such as processes and procedures, human resources, customer service, and communication are critical to long-term health, stability, and growth. The following discusses philosophies and strategies that will ensure quality work, on-time delivery, happy clients, and motivated employees, which all leads to a positive impact on your bottom line.

Processes and Procedures

“The man who gets the most satisfactory results is not always the man with the most brilliant single mind, but rather the man who can best coordinate the brains and talents of his associates.”

— W. Alton Jones

One of the most important—because it is extremely effective—processes to implement is to set goals. Goal setting, when taken seriously, handled well, and followed through, enables individual and corporate focus, growth, and improvement. At Ralph McElroy Translation Company (RMTC), each employee, in conjunction with his or her manager, sets new goals for the coming year during the annual performance evaluation, and both the employee and the manager are held accountable for the completion of those goals. Employee goals often include such items as learning a new software program, expanding skills to handle a different type of project, or cross-training to provide backup for another department. Each manager also sets departmental goals at the beginning of each calendar year, many of them based on input from his or her staff.

There are three keys to a successful goal-setting process: 1) limit the number of goals (three is a good number); 2) make the goals specific and achievable; and 3) monitor and report each goal’s accomplishment. Setting too many goals reduces the likelihood that all of them will be achieved, and having unfinished goals at the end of the year—regardless of the many that may have been accomplished—can “feel” negative. This is also the reason for making the goals specific and achievable. Vague goals, such as “improve our quality,” and overly optimistic goals, such as “increase sales 50%,” are not nearly as effective as those that are specific (“reduce our customer complaint rate from 3% to 2% by adding a final quality control check”) and achievable (“increase sales 15% by doing three new promotions”). And your follow-up, as the top manager, is critical. The simple fact that you take the process seriously and expect its outcome is its single best motivator. Knowing that you will ask for a verbal update quarterly in staff meetings and that you will publish quarterly or semiannual progress and annual results in the company newsletter ensures results.

Investing time and effort in making sure staff know what to do and how to do it is another effective operational process. Of course! But staff members are often left to their own devices in these areas, and while such individual creativity can be an asset, it does not foster a reliable, efficient, and productive workflow. Define procedures, so that your staff will not only understand and perform their own tasks and responsibilities well, but will also train others accurately and quickly and cover for each other when the workflow is unbalanced due to absences or a high workload. Defining procedures also minimizes errors, facilitates a consistent product, and gives staff members a common language and knowledge base with which to discuss projects and problems. RMTC has developed procedures for every step in the workflow (from job intake, to patent formatting, to FTP delivery), and these procedures are documented in both paper and online manuals in each department.

Procedures are best developed by consensus of the staff members who will use them, and should be put in writing and widely distributed, accompanied by training. They can take many forms, such as checklists, step-by-step instructions, or flowcharts, and must be reviewed and updated regularly in order to remain useful and meaningful. When RMTC needed a procedure for into-foreign-language projects, our middle managers formulated it in our weekly staff meeting and decided a flowchart would best illustrate its workflow steps. Then one of our project coordinators and I provided company-wide training via a simple Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to groups of 10 staff persons at a time. This particular procedure was reviewed and revised several weeks after implementation, based on feedback from the staff and problems that surfaced during the trial period, and then again more recently, as the nature and circumstances of our work and our clients’ needs changed over time. Of course, not all projects will “fit” the established procedure, and your staff should recognize and understand this and remain open to modifying or bypassing a procedure when necessary or more effective.

Another process that will be well worth your investment is to cross-train. What if your shipping coordinator (or receptionist, or bookkeeper, or QuarkXPress expert) becomes ill and cannot work for several days or weeks? How will you handle a sudden and unexpected (but welcome!) spike in your workload? Can you afford the high cost (in dollars, time, quality, and customer dissatisfaction) of temporary personnel or inexperienced existing staff? Cross-training to duplicate functions for emergency or extra coverage protects you against all these costs. It also creates opportunity and adds value for your employees, and fosters their cooperation with each other and their understanding of corporate issues. At RMTC, staff members at all levels have been cross-trained, not only within their own department but across other departments as well. For example, our production manager has cross-trained most of her staff to assist in at least one other department—from downloading jobs from translators, to preparing customer estimates, to performing computer-related tasks delegated by our systems administrator. So we are well prepared for a variety of events, both planned and unplanned, because our staff has been cross-trained so that they can quickly and easily step in to perform a second function, even one that may be unrelated to their primary role.

Your operation will also benefit if you learn (and teach and model) how to hold effective meetings. A meeting should never last longer than an hour—if you can’t deal with an issue in an hour or less, then you have some other, larger, operational or personnel problem that needs addressing. RTMC holds a weekly meeting of key operational staff, and when an hour’s time has passed we stop meeting and postpone any unfinished or untended business to the next week. Most of our weekly meetings last less than a half an hour, as staff members have learned to place on the agenda only those items that require input and consensus from others, and to present them in a concise and straightforward fashion. Speaking of agendas, an effective meeting always has one, even if it’s just a simple bulleted list of topics to be addressed; and distributing it in advance enables attendees to come prepared with ideas and discussion points. An effective meeting also always starts on time—this demonstrates to staff that their time is and should be respected and valued. A good meeting leader keeps to the agenda, and facilitates communication and consensus decision-making. Within 24 hours of the meeting, the leader should also distribute a summary of the meeting that includes the action items (who, what, and when) that were agreed upon.

A process that will demonstrate just how well (or not) your procedures and activities are working is to measure results. The act of measuring something will virtually ensure that it improves, even if you don’t set goals or reward results. But be careful what you do and don’t measure—for instance, if you measure speed and don’t measure quality, then a fast but sloppy work product may be the result. RMTC currently measures on-time delivery, employee productivity, a customer complaint rate, and staff turnover. We have developed an electronic time and job tracking system that automatically calculates and reports the first two measurements, on-time delivery and employee productivity. However, simple manual tracking can also be effective—our customer complaints are monitored by entering into a Microsoft Word table the date, the client and job numbers, the complaint, the resolution, the word count, and the category of the complaint (careless or typographical error, failure to follow instructions, miscommunication, shipping/delivery error, or quality problem). This information is distributed company-wide regularly.

Finally, have a disaster contingency and recovery plan. Its most essential component is to backup your data and keep a backup copy off-site. If you do nothing else to prepare for a disaster, do this, and stop reading this article in order to do it now. (We backup our financial, job tracking, timekeeping, and work product data nightly, and update our offsite copy weekly.) Then, if a disaster occurs, your first priority is your employees’ safety, and you can give that your undivided attention, knowing that when you and they are ready and able to return to work, your information resources will have been preserved. To help ensure your employees’ safety during a disaster, prepare, distribute, and practice a building evaluation plan. You may have to endure some teasing and laughter when implementing this, but the more important consideration is that it may save your employees’ lives or prevent injury. You should also have an emergency communication plan and operational contingency and recovery plan. Questions to consider in the drafting of these plans include: What will the communications to employees and clients be, who will prepare them, who will deliver them, and how? Who are the key employees who will need to be involved in getting the operation running again, where and when will they meet, and what are the issues in priority order that they will need to address? What are the minimum space and equipment requirements for a temporary or substitute operation, how will those be acquired, what vendor alternatives are available, what and where are emergency financial resources, and how will they be obtained? Many good books can help you address this process, and your insurance companies and workers’ compensation organization may also be of assistance.

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