Language Learning Services & Technology

Adaptive Globalization speaks with thousands of professionals in the language services and technology industry every year about their career ambitions and development.Alongside job specifics such as responsibilities, location and pay, corporate culture is one of the major topics raised by of those exploring new career options. Often when discussing job opportunities Adaptive’s recruiters are questioned not only on culture as regards the local office space in which a candidate would be working, but on the role that corporate culture plays in the hiring company’s business operations and overall identity.For some organizations, culture is only peripherally addressed at a leadership level, with top and bottom-line considerations driving daily decision-making. For others, culture is a foundational component of business success and a key aspect of strategy.Defining and implementing corporate culture can be challenging, especially within a global business where international offices and local cultural differences must be factored in.To learn more about how to address these challenges, Adaptive spoke with Mark Brayan, CEO of Appen.AG: The first step in building a successful corporate culture is to have a clear vision for what culture means within an organization. How is this interpreted at Appen?MB: Culture is how people work together, how they get things done. If the culture isn’t going to achieve business objectives, it will fail. Strategy needs to be supported by culture – you can have the most elegant strategy in the world, but if you don’t have an enabling culture, that strategy won’t get implemented.When developing business plans, culture is a fundamental consideration as both culture and strategy have to be aligned in order for the organization to be successful.AG: How is culture created at Appen?MB: You can’t write down culture on a piece of paper and make it so – you have to create conditions, and culture creates itself within those conditions. Conditions can be formal, such as business structures, or informal, such as respect for the customer.As a business, you don’t create culture – you create conditions for culture. Where the business can help shape, culture is through creating the right structures and via the leadership of the business displaying the desired cultural behaviors.To reinforce this, Appen does have formalized culture and value statements, which in fact preceded my joining the business. These do have a physical and online presence around the business, and there is a system of encouragement to adopt these standards via employee awards based around the values.AG: Is culture within Appen static, or does it evolve? How is this evolution managed?MB: We shape the direction of our culture through ongoing feedback. We try to continually integrate employee input through tools such as engagement surveys. The primary values which emerge from these as important to Appen’s teams are respect for each other and respect for customers, and we work to ensure these are built into our norms and behaviors.Another major way in which culture should evolve is in accordance with shifting stakeholder requirements. When Appen transitioned from a private to a public company, a new group of stakeholders had to be integrated. From staff and customers, we then had to ensure that investors were considered and positively impacted by our culture.There are internal leadership meetings to discuss cultural goals and propagating culture – understanding what people value and what binds them to the company. it’s talked about, it’s an active part of dialogue, but it’s up to leadership to adopt it and work to implement it.AG: The first step in building a successful corporate culture is to have a clear vision for what culture means within an organization. How is this interpreted at Appen?MB: Culture is how people work together, how they get things done. If the culture isn’t going to achieve business objectives, it will fail. Strategy needs to be supported by culture – you can have the most elegant strategy in the world, but if you don’t have an enabling culture, that strategy won’t get implemented.When developing business plans, culture is a fundamental consideration as both culture and strategy have to be aligned in order for the organization to be successful.AG: Much of the discussion around corporate culture happens from an internal viewpoint. How does Appen’s cultural and value mix impact customers?MB: There is a definite benefit for customer, with regard to quality of work, time-frames, responsiveness and other aspects. Appen’s corporate culture is, in many ways, almost more customer-facing than internal-facing.The mindset is “how do we help the customer?”. There are direct links between culture, how Appen works with customers, and how the company performs. Good corporate performance is good for culture – it attracts talent, provides challenge and opportunity, and strong financial performance feeds culture.But if a company is struggling, then strong corporate culture is also vital – culture can be relied upon to support periods of poor performance.AG: What allowance is made for international variance in corporate culture?MB: Appen has offices in Australia, the Philippines, the US and the UK. That gives us a very rich set of cultures. However, there is consistency in those core corporate cultural elements that define Appen as a business.We have a wealth of cultural nuance around regions of the world which are a benefit in adding color and diversity to our teams.However, how people work together, how we treat each other, how we get things done – that’s the variable we work to keep consistent.

Growth is something that happens around a team. Sometimes to a team. But what’s it like viewing LSP growth from the top? To help answer that question, Adaptive Globalization’s Global Recruitment Director Tom Newman spoke with Véronique Özkaya, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer with Xplanation, Chair of the Board with GALA and a former CSO with Moravia and VP with Lionbridge. Adaptive Globalization works with candidates across all areas of the language services and technology industry, with over 200 candidate placements made in 2016 so far. Throughout this large volume of interaction with industry professionals, without a shadow of a doubt the most commonly-heard aspiration among candidates is a desire to join a ‘growing’ company. Growth is exciting – it means change, it means progress, it means a move into the unknown. While growth certainly permeates almost all areas of a translation agency, it’s not often that members of the core production and sales teams are offered the chance to view the corporation’s development from a bird’s-eye view. AG: Xplanation’s growth has been rapid and spread across multiple geographies (11 countries and counting). What has been the reason to expand so fast across the map, and not focus on consolidation in primary markets? Veronique: Initially it was purely down to the circumstances of knowing a number of people in those geographies. They really had a startup attitude and could stretch from business development to admin tasks and recruitment.  If you take an office like Sweden in the beginning, we had these multi-talent profiles so we knew we could afford to start from scratch and build around the skills of our team. We knew that the opportunity of regions like Denmark or Sweden was there – we saw strength in the manufacturing sector and a growing need for exports so it was an obvious move. Phase two of growth is a little bit more difficult, once hubs are established. That is more driven by our customers. What we do now is look at our customers and where we’re going to reinforce our capabilities. It’s not just geography – you need to reinforce your services, customers, and regional presence. We have a base, we know it has potential, and we want to accelerate that. But the core is really the people. The talent. AG: Why did you build production teams at each country? Veronique: We try to build production teams in-country wherever possible. It’s our approach to have a customer-facing capability at least at a production level as often as possible. In countries like the USA, for instance, we wanted a PM in that time zone. But beyond that, we have been careful to match cultures where possible, and not be purely time-zone or geography led. We need our customers and their support teams to mesh culturally and work together for best results. AG: Is the US market still a major target among Europe-based LSPs? Veronique: I’m a firm believer that there remains a lot of potential in the US. What is different from Europe is that decisions are made quicker, which is appealing. Selling to the US from a primarily Europe base is a challenge, however. We do have an offering with a lot of automation and cool technology, processes, and people – but the first engagement can be tough. We’ve definitely seen a big difference between having one office, to having multiple offices and country managers. This global platform has been a major accelerator in our ability to sell internationally. AG: With respect to your office in Beijing. Has the Far East been the most challenging region to establish yourself in, as a Western European business? Veronique: I think it is certainly more difficult than the US. It’s the culture, market, and trust-building. Even in America, people want to do business with Americans. In Japan and China, I’ve seen it repeatedly. A Chinese company will always feel more comfortable dealing with a Chinese company.  I think it is just down to human nature to feel comfortable to what you can relate to. Despite our own industry’s best efforts, we haven’t reached a truly ‘global world’ yet! Local presence and cultural fit are still extremely important. AG: Does Xplanation have any plans for South America or other areas of the globe? Veronique: Our plans for the next 3+ years are principally strengthening significantly in Germany, the UK, and USA. Beyond that… many exciting things are coming! Not another geographical location, but we do have other a number of plans on the horizon which we’re very excited about and will contribute substantially to our continued growth. Keep your eyes open for news over the coming few quarters!

Adaptive Globalization is proud to unveil our shiny new corporate identity as Adaptive Business Group!Our internal restructuring project is designed to provide an improved service to our global customers and candidates, ensuring an increased level of specialization and dedication to our core markets. The newly-formed Adaptive Business Group will now operate three separate divisions, each functioning as independent agencies with an exclusive focus on their niche market segments.Adaptive Globalization will continue to provide a dedicated recruiting and staffing service to the language services and technology industry. Adaptive Globalization’s customers include translation and localization agencies, interpreting agencies, client-side translation and localization teams, machine translation/human language technology vendors and more.In 2016 alone Adaptive Globalization has placed candidates in more than 20 countries across Europe, Canada, North and South America and the APAC region.For more information on Adaptive Globalization, click here.Adaptive Digital maintains a focus on recruiting talent for corporate digital marketing teams and agencies, with expertise filling roles in Search and Performance Marketing, Media Planning, Programmatic Advertising, Paid Social, Social Media Management, e-Commerce and Analytics.Adaptive Digital recruits for many of the world’s leading digital agencies, as well as advertising technology vendors and boutique online marketing companies around the world.To learn more about Adaptive Digital, click here.Adaptive Tech helps build and support the sales and marketing teams of software vendors in MarTech, CXM, E-Commerce, BI, WCM, ECM, AdTech and Big Data. Adaptive C&A’s customers include global enterprise software companies in areas such as web experience management, personalization, marketing analytics and online advertising, as well as high-growth start-ups and specialist VARs of major technologies.The Adaptive Tech team fill roles covering entry/mid-level inside sales up to senior sales management and strategic marketing positions.For a closer look at Adaptive Tech, click here.What does this change mean?We are confident that our new structure will enable all Adaptive teams to continue deepening their expertise, strengthening their professional networks and providing the essential market intelligence which is at the heart of the service we provide. Adaptive Business Group will also be able to deploy advertising and technology resources more strategically to offer clients a more comprehensive recruitment service reaching further across target industry sectors.Despite these changes, on a practical front it will be business as usual for all current clients and candidates who will continue to work with their regular recruiters without disruption!The last few years have been a fast-paced and exciting period for Adaptive…From humble origins as a handful of specialist recruiters in a small office in the UK, Adaptive has grown to a true global staffing specialist with 40 full-time consultants collaborating across permanent office locations in London, Berlin, San Diego and New York. Adaptive’s evolution as a market leader in the recruitment industry has been entirely due to the exceptional efforts and achievements of our dedicated team of consultants, each of whom gives 100% of themselves to every working day, client search or candidate project they manage. Adaptive is extremely fortunate to work with such a passionate and positive team, and makes every effort to reinvest in continued company improvements.In recognition for these efforts, Adaptive was recently awarded “Best for Staff Development and Training, 2016” by CV Magazine in the 2016 Recruitment Awards. We are delighted to receive this accolade, and continue to develop our staff training and development programs to support our corporate slogan, “Investing in people”.