Sustainability - At the Heart of What We Do
Sustainability - At the Heart of What We Do
Author: Miriam Finglass | Translation Project Manager
At Context, Sustainability is much more than just a buzzword. It’s one of our most important values and a guiding principle in what we do. It is at the core of our activities, informing our interaction with clients and suppliers and the way we collaborate and grow as a team. Here we highlight some practical aspects of our sustainability efforts in relation to the environment, health and wellbeing and community.
Environmental Sustainability
The Context team works towards continuously reducing our environmental impact. Some of our actions and achievements to date include:
- An almost paperless office through digital invoicing and printing only when necessary
- Installation at the Context office of a solar PV system that powers all Context servers and desktops
- Switching to a provider that supplies electricity from 100% renewable energy sources
- Zoned heating at our office to reduce our carbon footprint
- Our office environment contributes to local biodiversity with one acre of native woodland and wildflowers
- Flexible hybrid work for our team members avoids long commutes and reduces our employees’ carbon footprints
- Participation in tree-planting at Hometree, Co. Clare to help restore native Irish woodlands
- Taking part in the Climate Heroes Challenge.
Climate Heroes Challenge
From 15 – 26 April, Context team members together with some of our freelance linguists, took part in the Climate Heroes Challenge organised by Global Action Plan. Two Context teams competed against each other and the other community groups taking part around Ireland to reduce their carbon footprint. Each team member logged daily activities on the Climate Heroes simple and easy to use platform, which showed encouraging real-time calculations of our carbon savings. It was a fun, enjoyable experience and helped to develop habits that will stick with us into the future. And we had some nice prizes for the winners! Across all teams, participants in the challenge saved a combined total of 43 tonnes of CO₂. To put that into perspective, if everyone in Ireland did this, it would amount to a 63% reduction in Ireland’s total annual consumption-based emissions. Context also made a donation to support community programmes in Global Action Plan’s GLAS community gardens and nature explorer programme. The next Climate Heroes Challenge will be happening in October 2024 and we’ll be looking to improve on our performance even more!
Health and Wellbeing
At Context, we know that health and wellbeing are vital for working sustainably. We have an optional and customisable health and wellbeing programme for employees. In this programme, employees form pairs of health and wellbeing buddies. Each employee chooses their own health and wellbeing goals from categories covering Eating Well, (Home) Office Ergonomics, Financial Wellbeing, Personal-Professional Development, Physical Exercise, Positive Impact, Quality Sleep, Personal Activities, Social Interaction and Workload Balancing. Once they’ve decided on their goals, employees discuss them with their buddy, who they then meet with regularly to catch up on how things are going. A great positive of the programme is that it’s completely up to the employee to decide on their goals and what they want to share with their buddy. Goals could include taking more exercise or getting better sleep, making more time for social activities or hobbies, improving work-life balance etc., but they can be anything the employee wants to achieve in terms of their health and wellbeing. Since employees can choose their own goals, they can be more realistic than is often the case in one-size-fits-all programmes. Another advantage is that the programme is motivating without being stressful, as regular catchups are intended as a fun, friendly opportunity to pause, think about, define and discuss goals and progress on an ongoing basis, aiming for continuous improvement. In addition to their personal commitment, the catchups with their buddy create an increased sense of accountability for employees. And to top it off, employees who participate in the programme take an extra annual leave day per quarter, a wellbeing day, a great opportunity to pursue their personal health and wellbeing objectives.
Community
At Context, we value the important contribution of all our freelance linguists and we support their fair and just treatment in relation to rates and working conditions. We believe that freelance translation and interpreting should be a sustainable activity. My colleague Ulrike Fuehrer’s article What is a ‘Translator’? details the important work done by our community interpreters in often very challenging situations. It highlights the need to create a robust and sustainable job profile for community interpreters. Despite the growing numbers in migrant communities in Ireland today, no coherent government approach to the training and accreditation of community interpreters exists. In light of this reality, Context provides support to community interpreters in the form of training and resources. Without the vital work of our community interpreters, equal access to public services for migrant communities would not exist. Through our work with our community interpreters and our strong working relationships with community and public sector institutions, Context supports equal access of migrant communities in Ireland to public sector services such as medical care, legal supports, asylum seeking, citizenship rights and employment. We hope that this contributes to the creation of sustainable communities in Ireland, now and into the future.
What does Sustainability mean to you? Will you join the next Climate Heroes Challenge?
The Future of Work - Beyond Hybrid
The Future of Work - Beyond Hybrid
Author: Ulrike Fuehrer | Director at Context
What allows us to thrive and perform in happy, well-functioning and high-achieving teams?
Much has been said about hybrid working. A recent experience profoundly changed my way of looking at virtual and hybrid teams.
In 2019, I alone had 83 work-related flights. There seemed no other way of doing my job. When Covid forced me to stay put I was grateful, not for the pandemic but for the paradigm shift in multilingual simultaneous interpreting, despite all its technical challenges. Our first international online meeting with 6 languages was held on 26th March 2020. Hundreds of similar events followed. Two years later we introduced combined meetings with an online and an onsite element. Participants were able to have chats at the coffee dock and over dinner while keynote speakers from the US logged in remotely for their half-hour input. Once the technical hurdles had been scaled, the benefits of reducing travel to the necessary and meeting in-person for clearly defined purposes became apparent and were met with approval and relief.
Our ‘in-house’ team doubled in size during this period and was geographically as dispersed as our thousands of freelancers and their respective meeting participants.
Over the next two years, we embraced a hybrid work format with small groups coming together in the same physical space some of the time for training and team activities, for project and strategy meetings. On those office days, animated conversations between peers and pairs permeated the building, creating an atmosphere of quiet excitement. Work-related road blocks tended to be removed in minutes; small challenges that may have been put on the back burner were addressed, and a sense of inspiration and contentment was palpable.
Two years on, we pushed out the boat and held a full onsite team event, bringing together all operational and support people from 4 countries and 7 counties. Some of us had been working together closely, yet never met in person. This large facilitated event took place at a beautiful countryside location with a variety of indoor and outdoor facilities, in lovingly furnished buildings surrounded by flowers and vegetable gardens. Working on an intense agenda and committing to a range of actions felt like child’s play in this environment. Meeting the 3D version of our Zoom colleagues released creative energies, courage to tackle bold projects, a sense of a shared purpose. We all came away smiling. The depth of personal and professional engagement experienced on that day made us realise what we had been missing. It showed us that we need to build regular, meaningful in-person events into our working lives.
Yes, it has its advantages to work from home some of the time. However, realising what we need and miss in our hybrid world might sharpen our awareness of the values that underpin our culture, commitments and success. A great starting point is to look someone in the eye – rather than into a Zoom or Teams camera.
There is no simple way of making this magic happen for dispersed teams. It requires organisational effort to provide for those personal and professional interactions, that depth of dialogue, the heated or measured exchanges, a meeting of minds and bouncing of ideas. It’s an effort well worth it.
Spending time together in the same physical space, sometimes away from traditional work environments, allows us to thrive and to perform as a happy, well-functioning and high-achieving team, in the interest of our personal wellbeing and to the benefit of our clients and suppliers.
How much direct personal interaction is desirable for the New Work and New Culture of 2024? What can we learn from Frithjof Bergmann 50 years on?