Oh My They're Real!

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March - May 2019

Janus Worldwide is an international company that provides translation and localization services for IT products.

The team is distributed across tens of offices in a few countries. Most of the projects are conducted by remote teams, some of them with an 8-hour timezone gap.

We were invited to conduct a series of online & offline training sessions to improve the company’s customer service, employee satisfaction, and production efficiency.

Before the first session

We launched a survey to evaluate employee satisfaction and diagnose the company’s internal relationships.

The survey showed a high level of emotional burnout caused by a lack of quality communication between colleagues. The company’s business processes were well structured; there were detailed guidelines for every role and every activity; but the company suffered loss of efficiency because of double work, excessive amount of errors, and decision-making failures. Employees were sincerely unaware about each other at the emotional level, they even didn’t know each other by the name.

At the preparatory session with the management team, we noticed their nervousness and lack of motivation. This gave us the clue to the roots of the above problems.

The course

We developed a custom communication skills course of 4 online and 2 semi-offline sessions, each lasted for 4 hours.

Every session was dedicated to a certain topic:

1. project quality management,
2. customer service,
3. team decision making, etc.

All the sessions were build so as to increase the degree of connection and mutual consideration between the colleagues. Using a balanced set of business games, brainstorms, and exercises in couples, we trained the vital skills of remote team self-organization and conflict management.

This helped to decrease expenses on error correction by 80%, stop the employees’ burnout, and speed up delivery. The company stopped missing the project deadlines, and stopped suffering financial loss from failed projects.

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The most impressive insight we heard from one employee was literally: "My God, I now understand I wasn't sure my colleagues exist. I mean, I see them as real people only now..." It was not the case only for this person, but she was the only one who managed to verbalize that. Before the training, they took each other as some kind of phantoms or disembodied functional units.

(Although we consider it the most important outcome for a communication training).

The psychological and spiritual state of the employees was improved. People no longer felt watched, they now worked with pleasure instead of being pushed to work. In the virtual space, a business structure that has to push its employees to have them work is non-viable.

The screenshot shows the company’s feedback after one of the semi-offline sessions.

We held an exclusive one-day training developed especially for this team.

The goal of the training was to improve the quality of internal communication in order to increase profitability of the customer projects. All the participants got certificates of an HD Trance format.

The training was followed by a series of online interactive sessions for employees in 3 different countries. Every session brought together up to 120 employees, they worked in small teams and developed new working algorithms for themselves. It's been a lot of fun and use for the business.