Over the past months, the home office advantages and disadvantages, as well as the implementation potentials, have been widely discussed. The DAK health insurance group has performed a study to investigate the effects of home office work on employees’ psyche. The results showed a stark increase in calmness and lower levels of stress. The main reasons given for this were the lack of commuting and the increased compatibility of family and work. 75% of those questioned expressed a desire to continue working from home even after the Corona pandemic, or to have the option to integrate a mixture of office and home office into their working week. Certain scientists envisage an opportunity to redefine healthy work for the digital future following the changes to the working world brought about by the pandemic. It goes without saying that home office work also has its drawbacks. It becomes much harder to delineate between private life and work, family members can make it harder to concentrate on tasks at hand, while the lack of contact with colleagues and supervisors is also seen by many as problematic.
The translation industry seems to be very well equipped to make a quick home office transition. Skrivanek, for example, has from day one been building a network of translators who work all over the world, and often from home – so for translators, not that much has changed. But what about our project managers, graphic designers and tutors who have had to relocate their work to within their own four walls from one day to the next? At Skrivanek, we were also able to quickly implement this changeover as our laptops, VPN access, etc., are state of the art, and all of our processes including project management, quality management and accounting are digitised. Since Skrivanek is represented around the world, we are used to communicating via online conference tools, taking time difference into consideration. The translation industry is highly advanced in terms of technology, and this is how we were able to process translation projects without delay and frictional loss. We sincerely hope that you as a client can also verify this.
Interpreting services were also offered online before Corona by simply adding interpreters to conference calls, Skype or digital conferences. We believe that this form of interpreting will not only be increasingly utilised in the future, but that it will also provide you with greater time flexibility and significant savings.
Since the start of July, we have slowly been making the transition back to the office. Based on a host of extremely positive home office experiences, we are now trialling a combination of work from the office and the home in order to retain the advantages of both working methods and further reduce the risk of infection. We would be delighted if you could provide us with some short feedback on your experience with the home office services we offered over the past few months.