Where do you draw the line between fulfilling the needs of your clients and your home life?  As with some other important decisions, this is not a question that can be answered in isolation.  There is another side to this potential dilemma such as the views of close family members.  For some, the answer is that there are not enough hours in the day and supporting your family and business may result in you wishing more time for both.

According to a paper from one management consultancy, corporate boards should say goodbye to ‘weak’ leaders (defined as those unable to articulate a compelling vision) and ask those who are good at their jobs to stay longer.  Some candidates will do so for the love of working and others for the need of money in a climate where pensions are deflated and good jobs are at a premium.   When you are faced with fewer years ahead than behind you, what will it take to attract you to work after office hours, as your career is nearing its finale?

A client of mine, who was in his early 50’s, expressed his concerns to me.  When he had been a young career-inspired professional in the late 1960s, he saw senior managers working hard, but still within the hours of 9:00-5:30.   When it came time for his promotion to IT Director for a large organisation, he was suddenly required to work both harder and longer than he had ever before.  It was at this time that his wife suffered from a debilitating illness and the question of home and work-life balance became a priority.

Technology is supposed to help this dilemma.  I can remember being told I would have ‘less downtime’ when flying internationally.  My preferred explanation is that it blurs the boundaries between work time and non-work time.  So, rather than having a work office and home office, we can also have a train office and airport office and car office and restaurant office and hotel office and street office and vacation office, enabling us to make that all important phone call or email or IM or twitter or use some other community tool.  (As an aside, my favourite is the “Cappuccino and Chocolate Muffin” office, but this can get unreasonably messy.)

So, why would the Directors of eTeams shout out our desire to work with our clients outside of normal business hours?   Why do we adopt the fast communication technologies used by our clients, for example Skype?

Simply stated, our experience is that our clients’ business days do not always finish at 5:30pm.  When our clients have an incredible idea, they want to understand quickly how we can help support its implementation and we want to be available to them.

We endeavour to offer a personalised service, rather than just a consistent service.  This means that we want to be contactable at the most senior levels within our company and to discuss with all of our clients how we can develop a solution specific to them.

The earlier we are engaged, the more discussion and thinking time we have in order to consider and then to implement the best solution.

This approach takes eTeams beyond the realms of ‘cooperation’ between client and language provider, towards that of collaboration.  Why is this important?  As part of our client discovery, we take time to understand how our clients determine the success of their language projects and the role we have within the project.  

The saying that our clients’ successes are also our successes has never been truer.

“eTeams – translations you can trust”