The Role of Technology in Managing Human Resources Globally
Luckily, technological advancements of the 21st century have made global human resource management much easier. Today, we will take a look at how technology can help us optimize HR processes on a global scale. Let's jump in.
Stefan M.
22 min
Managing HR resources on a global scale is no easy task. As international teams become a prominent feature of high-achieving companies, the HR department is faced with new communication problems waiting to be resolved.
Luckily, technological advancements of the 21st century have made global human resource management much easier. Today, we will take a look at how technology can help us optimize HR processes on a global scale. Let's jump in.
The Basic Principles
Let's start from the beginning by asking a simple question: How does technology help bring success to a company?
A company, fundamentally, is a group of people cooperating towards a shared goal.
No one would disagree that financial success is the measure of a high-achieving company. Similarly, no one would disagree that those people can only invest a finite amount of time in working towards that shared goal.
By delegating parts of the HR processes to a non-human agent, your HR staff can invest their time and attention into coming up with new ideas and solving problems that may arise along the way. This, effectively, increases your company's ROI, leading to better annual results.
Taking it a Step Further
In the most basic way, technology, properly applied to global HRM, allows you to:
Automate repetitive tasks
Identify solutions quickly
Manage large volumes of data
Communicate more effectively
All of these technological solutions factor into the efficiency level of your global HR strategy. Later, we will take a more in-depth look at how these premises can be applied practically in different aspects of HR.
Why is it Important?
As already stated, international human resource management is no trivial topic. When working with an international workforce, the human resources department is responsible for all employee communication, from the scouting and recruitment phase, and all throughout their employment.
Additionally, in today's competitive landscape, companies are constantly in a race to discover the next best HR tool, the next best method of communication, the next best recruitment strategy, and so on.
With so much at stake, it's easy to see how conducting global operations can be a daunting task for HR staff.
What technology has done, however, is give us a stronger foundation to build upon. Combining the infinite creativity of the human mind with the superior computing power of technology, we are now able to take our business ideas to the next level.
Paying respect to this principle teaches us to create a healthy work environment, summoning prosperity on the company level and all the way down to the individual employee.
How It All Ties Together
An understanding of the principles mentioned yields no merit unless properly applied in the workplace. While theorization and contemplation are useful, only action can bring forth tangible results for you and your employees.
Let's bring this full circle by going over and analyzing how technology can be used to boost workplace productivity and make for a much more efficient international human resource management strategy.
Bridging Cultural Differences and Language Barriers
Utilizing modern HR translation technology, you can bridge the language gap between you and your foreign employees, embracing cultural differences and building a relationship of trust and respect.
In HR terms, employee management refers to the process of helping employees increase their productivity and achieving their full workplace potential through an appropriate work ethic.
This is most often done by improving communication with your employees, subjecting them to appropriate levels of challenge, and offering them opportunities to improve their skills through courses and training programs.
Today, technology has allowed us to automate many employee management processes. Incorporating a systematized approach into your HR strategy garners employee development and helps your company achieve its objectives a lot faster.
A good example of this is utilizing membership management software to organize administrative tasks. With the right tools, tasks that used to take hours to complete can now be done within minutes of concentrated effort.
It is the job of a manager to ensure that all branches of the company are continually improving their workflow and help them find new ways to overcome obstacles.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is one of the most important factors for the success of a company. If your employees are disengaged, or lack understanding of their tasks, workplace productivity suffers greatly.
For this very reason, many successful companies have adopted the policy of using employee engagement apps as part of their global human resource management strategy.
Additionally, applying the principle of gamification helps drive employee engagement and incentivize action by utilizing game-like mechanics. This means features such as:
Point-scoring system
Leaderboards
Checkpoints and Objectives
Rewards
If your company results aren't quite up to par, a lack of employee engagement could be the main culprit. Take time to talk to your HR staff about the ways in which you can increase employee engagement and boost workplace productivity.
Performance Management
An essential function in a successful global human resource management strategy is the ability to track your employee's performance in the workplace.
Having a diverse, international team means very little if the team members aren't properly prepared for the tasks you assign them to. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your global team is essential to optimizing your HR approach and promoting employee development.
Integrating a performance management module into your company's IT is one of the best ways to achieve this. These systems make tracking the progress of your employees effortless. They also offer features that allow you to collect employee feedback.
Having a global pool of talent to choose from has revolutionized the game when it comes to human resources. Consequently, companies are constantly competing to hire the most competent people in any line of work.
Today, there are plenty of technological solutions to choose from that will make the recruitment process much easier and more effective for your HR team. Most job placements are advertised online, where your scouting strategy can be applied to a much larger scale.
In addition to that, you can create a systematic job application process that applicants can fill out online, automating it so that those who don't meet the criteria are automatically disqualified, and those who are qualified are stored in a database for further evaluation.
Training and Development
No two companies are identical. Every company possesses individualities when it comes to work protocol and workplace policy.
When building a global team, you can utilize digital training programs and courses to help your newer employees get used to an unfamiliar work environment. Additionally, digital training material is easily adaptable to cultural differences you may encounter when working with a global workforce.
There are 2 main options to consider:
#1 - On the Job Training: Giving your employees the ability to hone their skills during working hours. This option is great when working with ethnically diverse teams within your workplace.
#2 - Extra Hours: Offering employee compensation for studying training material outside of the workplace. Preferable for working with foreign employees that might be in a different time zone.
The best option for you will depend on the individualities of your company, as well as the demographics of your employees. Still, whichever method you go for, you can look forward to an increase in your employee's level of competence.
Scheduling and Organization
An increasing employee count can become quite intimidating for an HR team. Things can get especially out of hand when the employee base is spread out across the wide world.
How do you organize and communicate with so many different people, from different countries, speaking different languages, and operating in a different time zone?
Utilizing software designed for effective scheduling and planning can help your HR maneuver through all of the variables present when collaborating with your global team. You can always check employee availability and manage your communication accordingly.
By following this principle, you reduce downtime during work hours and ensure maximum company productivity throughout the year.
Documentation
Nobody likes paperwork, not even HR people. Alas, managing human resources documentation is a certainty present in every high-achieving company. But that doesn't mean the process should be difficult and ineffective.
The use of cloud-based technology can be a great asset in managing important employee information. Similarly, you can use different HR software to create document templates and fill in the necessary information a lot faster than you would by hand.
By putting in place an effective strategy for managing documentation, your HR department ensures that employees are given access to important information at the right time. This, in turn, fosters employee engagement and makes for an overall better workflow.
The Future of Technology in Global Human Resources
You never know what or when the next big technological jump will be. However, one thing is certain: technology dictates the terms of the competitive landscape in business and entrepreneurship.
When it comes to global human resources management, it's likely that we will see more complex and sophisticated strategies become standardized. As younger generations, those more accustomed to a technologically rich world, enter the workforce, there is no telling what kind of creative solutions they will bring with them.
You never know. Perhaps, in a hundred years, artificial intelligence will take over human resource management entirely.
Closing Thoughts
As a closing remark, it's safe to say that the advancement of technology has undoubtedly improved workplace communication and made global human resources more versatile than ever before.
Keeping up with new technological trends and innovations as a common practice will help you optimize your global human resources strategy, leading you to your business goals.
Do you need help with international human resource management? Are you planning a global expansion to multiple international locations? Or do you simply have employees in multiple other countries you want to comply with local laws and avoid legal trouble? Then you definitely need help.
Bureau Works helps with international expansion, legal compliance, and other global HR challenges. Read how Bureau Works can help your business and global HR team stay effective by downloading this white paper.
By leveraging Bureau Works, your HR team will be able to face all challenges international operations management throws its way.
Collaborative translation is a powerful tool for your business if you’re looking to expand to new global markets. By coordinating a team of professionals who work together in real-time, you can quickly deliver high quality translations that resonate with local audiences.
But what if you don't know how to synchronize a large team's efforts? Or are you struggling to find the right software for a well-coordinated translation process? Well, look no further! In this guide, you'll learn all the know-how's of collaborative translation to bring your brand to global audiences.
Overview
What is collaborative translation?
Why seamless translation collaboration is important
Best practices for collaborative translation and global market success
What is collaborative translation?
Collaborative translation is when multiple people simultaneously work together to translate content. A collaborative translation process often makes use of specialized tools and software to make sure the translation is quick, accurate, and consistent.
Example: Let's say you're a B2B SaaS company looking to translate your marketing materials into a new language to connect with potential clients abroad. Use collaborative translation to bring together translators, developers, and other specialists to translate content into many languages at once.
Your team can use a collaborative translation platform like Redokun to work on projects simultaneously. A coordinated workflow will make sure that your translations use the same terminology and style, improving the quality of the translated product for your target audiences.
Collaborative Translation vs. Crowdsourcing
People often confuse collaborative translation with crowdsourcing and think the two are the same. However, these approaches to translation are different.
Crowdsourcing is when a large group of people contributes translations, often through an open call or invitation by a company or author. Brands can turn to crowdsourcing, community translation, or volunteer translation when they are looking to reduce costs and accelerate the process, especially for large multi-language projects.
In crowdsourced translations, the contributors can be volunteer translators, subject matter experts, or just anonymous individuals online. In other words, you may not know who's worked on the translation and what their qualifications are. It makes crowdsourcing distinct from collaborative translation, where the team would be an established group of professionals you've selected
Why seamless translation collaboration is important
As a busy B2B/B2C marketing manager or project manager, you might ask yourself: Isn't the "divide and conquer" a better strategy when working on a translation or localization project? It seems logical that each project team member, including translators, designers, and editors, works on their tasks separately and step by step.
However, collaborative translation can help your team reap many benefits compared to a traditional approach to translation projects:
Produce high-quality translations consistently. When your whole team works on a translation project simultaneously on one platform, it's easier to stay in context and keep track of the translation accuracy for every target language. On top of that, your team can conduct agile QA throughout the project cycle.
Faster turnaround times. By working together, your team can complete projects faster and more efficiently. Centralization saves a lot of time at every stage of translation. And since your team can work on more than one translation at a time, you can publish your translated content in several new markets at once.
Reduced costs. You get to improve efficiency while working with a smaller team of translators. The smaller and more coordinated the team, the less the risk of costly translation errors. It means reduced translation costs and better project budget compliance.
Increased flexibility. Collaborative translation allows your team to produce translations into many languages at once and easily make changes to any project document. You can conveniently engage in a feedback loop and guarantee a continuous localization process.
Better communication. Collaborative translation effectively brings all members of your localization team together on one platform. It helps you make sure that everyone is working toward the same goals and simplifies overall localization management.
Six best practices for collaborative translation and global market success
To be great at collaborative translation, you need to approach it strategically. Even if you've never used this approach before, you can follow the six steps below to build an efficient collaborative translation workflow. And if you're already familiar with this method, these practices will help you improve the way you collaborate on any translation projects.
1. Work out a detailed project plan
Before you start working on translations together, you need a clear-cut project plan. You should first identify the following items.
Project timeline: Define crucial deadlines, project milestones, and the overall project duration.
Translation volume and key deliverables: Calculate the general word count, and determine the workload for every language pair if you translate into multiple languages.
Project team: Define what kind of specialists you need: translators, editors, proofreaders, etc. Will you need to find external translators? Consider all your HR needs in advance.
Your approach to the translation process: How much do you want to rely on machine translation? At what point will you edit translated strings? Answer all these questions before you go on.
Quality assurance protocol: Establish an efficient QA procedure for all the language pairs you're working on.
It may sound like a handful but the more detailed the plan, the more streamlined the translations will be down the road. Besides, you can already use Redokun to boost this stage of the localization process!
Redokun is a translation management system you can use to automate, coordinate, and optimize your translation processes from content creation to publication.
Redokun simplifies your project planning. In particular, you can use the tool to:
Monitor your ongoing translations easily. Keep track of all of your translation files and projects across multiple languages in one space, and check their progress at a glance.
Meet deadlines with digest emails. Redokun will send you daily or weekly email digests to update you on the progress of translations. From there, you can initiate one-click reminders to your translators who are potentially falling behind schedule.
Making budget planning easier. Redokun has a transparent, scalable pricing structure that will cover exactly the volume of work your project needs.
Redokun is an easy-to-use tool that requires no onboarding. Your team can start using all the system’s features right away. During your project planning stage, you won’t need to factor in a lengthy training period to introduce team members to the tool.
2. Divide tasks and assign responsibilities the smart way
Good collaboration is impossible without a well-planned distribution and organization of roles and tasks. Ensure that every team member is on the same page and understands their respective responsibilities.
For example, the project managers should divide translation tasks among translation team members according to their language proficiency, area of expertise, or subject matter knowledge.
On Redokun, you can invite translators to work on different language pairsand content types depending on their skills. All you need to do is enter the translator's email. The software will send them an email invitation and let you know once they've started translating the file.
You can also invite several translators to work on one document.
To maximize the efficiency of project management and task division, establish a clear structure of your workflow. Make sure all your pages, files, and folders are well organized and team members know where to find necessary resources for their respective tasks. A centralized, cloud-based storage for all your documents is a must.
Redokun is a cloud-based software that makes file management easy. You can create folders and customize permission settings for multiple users for better organization. No more need to look for spreadsheets and lost documents scattered around different digital locations.
Don't forget to make the most of the Reporting Dashboard. It shows you the status of the translation project and helps you see how users distribute tasks (for example, what methods they use to translate different content segments).
3. Enhance the collaborative translation process with clear communication
It's important to have open communication channels among all team members in your translation project, including internal and external translators. For a successful collaboration effort, you need a shared communication space to:
Conduct regular check-ins.
Discuss translation options and other aspects of the working process.
Update and adjust requirements and guidelines.
Maintain feedback loops.
It's up to you to choose between email, messengers, or tools like Google Drive or Slack to keep your collboarative operations flowing. However, using multiple channels for different aspects of the project can get messy. It's harder to manage your team and make sure all collaborators are up to date on the ongoing translation tasks.
You can avoid these potential problems by centralizing all your communications and project management. With translation software like Redokun, you can manage, translate, communicate, and collaborate — all in one place.
Translate content in context. Your translators or editors can use page previews in Web Editor to understand the context of the text while working on it.
Work together in real-time. Use Redokun as a full-scale collaborative translation platform. It enables real-time cooperation among your team members, improving efficiency and reducing communication errors.
Use comments, mentions, and notifications to exchange feedback quickly. Redokun's Web Editor is a convenient place to stay in touch and discuss your translation progress every step of the way.
Create a hybrid workflow. Work with your in-house teams or external translators to suit different localization project formats and scalability needs.
4. Use machine translation and translation memory tools
Computer-assisted translation tools are a great addition to human translation. Machine translation (MT) helps your collaborators speed up the localization process by automating translation. Of course, it doesn't have the quality of a human professional translation — it’s more like a helping hand that's always there to facilitate the translation of complex phrases or new terms.
Redokun is integrated with two Machine Translation tools: Google Translate and DeepL. Translation suggestions by these two tools pop up right below where the translator should key in the translation, as shown here.
To enhance collaboration even further, consider using translation memory tools. They ensure consistency and save translation software users a lot of time.
Translation memory (TM) is a translation technology that stores previously translated sentences or phrases as segments and creates a unique database for your localization projects. You can reuse your translation to increase efficiency and consistency in ongoing and future translations.
With Redokun as your collaborative translation platform, you can leverage TM to:
Consistently translate any repeated word, phrase, or sentence across different language pairs and documents. It's especially important for translating technical terms, marketing slogans, CTAs, and other catchphrases. Translation memory helps you stay consistent in your marketing messaging.
Pre-translate your entire documents. Combine TM matches from your previous translations with Machine Translation to get a fully pre-translated document even before your team gets to work.
Manage your translation memory database. Import and customize your TM database to further improve translation quality and consistency.
”The speed of translation is quite impressive in that it doesn’t take [much time], maybe a couple of minutes when you translate from English to eight markets. I think that’s what I’m most impressed by.”
Read more about how Kenni and the marketing team at Rockfon increased their translation productivity by 70% using translation memories and other Redokun features here.
5. Use glossaries and style guides
Glossaries and style guides are valuable resources your team can use for reliable reference.
A glossary is a list of terms and their corresponding translations that are specific to a company or industry.
A style guide outlines the preferred tone, voice, and style for a company's marketing materials across markets and languages.
Your collaborators can refer to these resources when they’re not sure about a translation. For example is when they're deciding how to translate a company abbreviation, whether to the Oxford comma, or choosing the right tone to address customers, etc. No more ambiguity about linguistic, stylistic, and cultural aspects of your translations.
Use Redokun's glossary feature to create a glossary and style guide that outlines rules for spelling, grammar, punctuation, terminology, and tone specific to your project.
6. Continuously review and revise
A key benefit of a collaborative translation platform is the ability to review and revise translations in an agile and efficient manner. By involving multiple specialists in the process of editing and QA, you can guarantee accuracy and consistency in the translated content at every stage of the project.
To implement effective review and revision procedures in your collaborative translation projects, it is important to:
Plan for review and revision in advance. Identify who will be responsible, set the timeline, and use specific tools.
Consider involving in-country reviewers who are familiar with the local market and culture to ensure that the translations are accurate and appropriate for the target audience.
Perform regular QA checks. They should include consistency in terminology and formatting, and verify that the translations are free from grammatical errors and typos.
Pro-tip: Ever experienced the headache of having to update a translation that’s already 70% done when there is a last-minute change to the source document?
With Redokun’s revision feature, you don’t have to spend hours poring over Excel sheets and comparing files to spot the places where new words have been added or sentences have been changed. Just upload the latest document version and the system will identify new text that needs translating — saving your team’s time and effort while keeping previous translations intact.
Summary
Collaborative translation is an excellent approach if you want to improve the consistency of your translations, reduce costs, and establish a strong presence in global markets.
The key to seamless collaboration is a combination of careful planning, role distribution, agile QA, and smart use of translation software.
Make Redokun part of your collaborative translation efforts and enhance the pace of your global business growth. Start your 14-day free trial today and benefit from a quicker and more streamlined translation workflow.
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