Work-life balance: Translation Businesses in Singapore

Is Work-life balance possible or feasible for employees of translation businesses? What exactly is work-life balance? Some say it is “the ability to balance between the number of hours we work and the number of hours we are off work”, “Leaving the office before 7pm” , “Careful management of our time, making sure we have enough for leisure activities without compromising our work.”….

Ideally, work-life balance means more life, less work. But it seems difficult to balance work and life for employees of translation businesses in Singapore. Translators have to translate a few thousands words a day, editors have to edit and proofread the same amount of words, if not more. Translation Project Managers have to manage resources from different time zones when it comes to multilingual projects. Desktop publishing artists have to work round the clock to meet publishing deadlines……and more.

At Sage Languages, we know how important it is to balance work-life. For a start, we have introduced a shorter official working hour, from 9:00am to 5:30pm. In this way, our teams can beat the 6:00pm rush hour and get home earlier, minus the stress of public transport “squeeze”. We have also introduced flexible lunch hour so that our teams can beat the 12:00pm to 2:00pm lunch time crowd. These moves have proved to be very successful because our teams are much happier now. Happier people are healthier, more productive and it is a win-win situation for everyone.