All is Fair in War or How to Motivate Employees for Efficient Work

Eventually the question of motivating employees appears in front of every employer. In this moment there emerge several questions, which requires clear answers: how to make employees work harder and more efficient? What kind of tricks have to be implemented in a company in order to receive better results from company activity? The experience of international freelance marketplace for linguists 2Polyglot will show how the company implemented competition between its departments.

Primary goals of the competition were:

·        To define the most efficient way of traffic attraction for short-time period;

·        Service promotion;

·        Renew employees’ energy in summer while everybody is dreaming about vacation and the sea;

·        Increase website traffic.

All employees were divided into three groups according to their positions:

·     SMM (2 persons);

·     SEO (5 persons);

·     PR (4 persons).

Unique links with UTM marks were created for each group. Therefore, it was possible to follow total amount of clicks in Google Analytics.

As for the term, this competition has lasted less than a month from July, the 7-th till August, the 3-rd.

Departments were supposed to use their “special” tools for attracting visitors to the site, but each team had its own tactics and used everything what was necessary.

 Social media team used usual ways of promotion: everyday posts of 2Polyglot public pages in such social networks as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Vkontakte, Pinterest, Tumbler, comments on similar pages and adding new friends. Of course, this all was accompanied with unique links with marks. As a result, significant flow of visitors every day on the site. Social media advertising did not count.

Employees of this department attracted new visitors due to posting articles, infographics and press-releases with the help of paid or free resources. Furthermore, there were also actively used social networks, as colleagues posted comments with links in different topic-related groups. In that moment paid advertising of the website has not been launched yet, that is why toolkit was limited for SEO specialists.

PR managers posted free articles on different portals on various topics with their unique link. But the thing is that many websites do not allow any kind of links in published articles and that was a pretty significant obstacle for this department. Sometimes PR cooperated with SMM specialists (i.e. asked them for sharing published articles in public pages and groups) and any misunderstanding was not recognized. Furthermore, during competition there was launched mass emails sending, which is under jurisdiction of PR-department) and it also gave some quantity of visits.

Trickeries are also fair…

It should also be mentioned that the competition was not ended without tricks from some participants. There were attempts  to use nonstandard methods in all teams including cunning ones. For example, one of employees was asked to compose press-release for SEO team, but he has added his own link to the text having decided to make a profit from the situation. SEO specialists did not recognize it and launched paid press-release mass sending. Therefore, they gave to competitors additional traffic due to own inattentiveness. This situation demonstrates the presence of passion in one big team where all participants work for one project. All is fair in war.

After conclusion every participant of teams put particular small sum of funds into the “bank”. Total amount of money was the price for the winners. No employee lost a lot, but the prime inspired winners for further success.

Consequences of the competition

At first, new website visitors. During the competition, the total amount of visitors increased almost triple. As a result, SMM team won, which had attracted more visitors than two other departments had together. It is necessary to add that such effect is objective and true for short time period.

At second, visitors attraction mechanism. As it was concluded, the most efficient tool had occurred to be sharing information via social media. Due to correct work of SMM results may exceed the expectations.

At third, participants’ impressions. It is possible to confirm that both sides of the competition winners and losers were satisfied. The event occurred to be interesting and inspired employees in lazy summer season.

Anyway, we realized that such events can be very useful for motivation to work harder and that leads to more successful project promotion, in this case this is 2Polyglot.

Freelance linguistic marketplace 2Polyglot: the history of creating

Andrew Prudko shares his personal experience of launching international online platform 2Polyglot, which is oriented on linguistic freelancers.

The idea of creating an international linguistic platform did not appeared without purpose. As it always happens, at first, it emerges some kind of issue requiring solution and then you realize that it would be great if it this solution was a little easier and more comfortable, but you are obliged to get along on existing ways. So as we had the need to translate the website of our marketing company to different languages. But, unfortunately, in our team there were no polyglots, so we thought, “Hm-m, what if to create our own, but digital one”?

Actually, that’s how it usually works: there is a common issue, which needs solving and if you manage to solve it, you will have a successful business.

We faced an issue, which was in the fact that we had to browse through different multipurpose freelance services in order to find a convenient translator. And that usually leads to time wasting. Therefore, we started our search for a specialized marketplace where we could find a freelancer, but we did not manage to get one. Most of them have plenty of specialists’ types such as designers, programmers and so on, though the necessary one was absent.

We have realized that a lot of people and companies, which need services of translation, actually face the same issue every day. We have made a research and received data turned out to be quite interesting. According to American research company “Common Sense Advisory”, a market of world linguistic services is dynamically emerging. Furthermore, in 2014 $73 billion was spent for translation services; 1.5 million professional translators exist on Earth; rate of translation specialists increase will be 42% till the end of 2020 and 15% will be the rate of translation market increase till the end of the same year.

From this moment, we have decided that freelance linguists deserve separate platform and their profiles should not be lost among plenty of accounts of IT-specialists. Then another quite difficult task appeared, which required creative approach – choosing the right brand name. As platform is linguistic and connected with languages, then our website had to show that it possessed foreign languages knowledge. So at once the word “polyglot” emerged by itself. But the thing is that obviously, such domain name was already taken. The decision could be only in adding one word more, which could make the project name too complicated or a digit instead of a word, i.e. “four” sounding similar to “for”. But the research showed that this digit had a doubtful reputation in China, because Chinese “four” sounds similar to “death” in Chinese. Furthermore, they even often replace fourth floor fascia in hotels with “3a” or simple “F”. This tetraphobia (phobia of the 4 digit) influenced all areas of Chinese life, so we decided to express our respect towards Chinese culture taking into account that the project is international and access to Chinese market is important to us. That is why we stopped at “2” digit having decided to turn “2” into a globe on our logo confirming we work in the entire world.

From this moment the official work on creating new platform for freelance translators, copywriters, language tutors and tour guides reached its origin. Step by step website was developed and on the 24-th of March in 2015 the platform was officially launched in two languages: English and Russian. It does not look like a real polyglot, right? Anyway, it was only the first day, so as it is said, to be continued.

Then we faced an issue of choosing a convenient electronic payment system and this topic can be another separate post, because of too many details. I will only say that in the end we have chosen PayPal as other different payment systems had conditions, which did not fit our interests, i.e. high rates of fees, absence of possibility to keep money on the system without sending to a bank account and so on.

Since we have launched 2Polyglot, we have created 4 versions.., excuse me, “F” versions of the service in English, Russian, French and Ukrainian. By the way, we did not hesitate to make much translation work on the site having used services of executors registered on it. So our users helped us to develop our marketplace and we proved the necessity of this project by our own example. More than 3 thousand linguistic freelancers have registered on the site with total traffic of 25,000 visits per month since March. And this is only for “3a” months after launch! I believe that qualified services of language area will soon be associated with our platform and all who need to find freelance work will come 2 Polyglot.