Social Responsibility & Apprenticeship

LingvoHouse appreciates the need to adopt a positive stance on delivering community benefits and fair working practices. As a woman-owned micro-business, LingvoHouse has felt a number of challenges in growing business opportunities since its conception in 2008, such as rapidly understanding everything from tax and legal obligations to website building with minimal assistance within the highly competitive translation industry. However, in spite of these issues, LingvoHouse has grown within a decade by nearly 1000% in revenue plus obtaining various accreditations that speak volumes of the high-quality services provided.

 

Give Back to the Community

Hence LingvoHouse strives to be a fantastic place to work to retain the employees who are making the company successful and to give back to the community and those persons who may feel disengaged.

Some of the social and economic initiatives (a) LingvoHouse has provided include support for individual, vulnerable cases for people who need help, for example, a low-income family with quadruplets, or families where the child is sick and they have been campaigning for a treatment fund and we have provided donations to assist them. However, as LingvoHouse increase in size, we will look to increase our community support, including providing financial contributions to a local charity, sponsoring local events, providing access to services for disadvantaged members of the community on a pro-bono basis and volunteering/engaging in local schools or community projects. We will measure any positive impact by thoroughly engaging with all stakeholders to obtain their feedback on the benefits of our activities plus ideas for any improvements.

 

Fair Working Practices

LingvoHouse have embedded fair working practices (b) for personnel engaged in all service delivery whether clients are from the private, public and third sectors. This is because we believe we get the best service from a workforce that is well recruited, rewarded, motivated, well-led, has access to appropriate opportunities for training and skills development, are diverse and is engaged in decision making as follows:

• Recruitment Practices

– Our talent acquisition process is fair, transparent and enables equality at every stage. However, we go further to ascertain whether applicants are from the local community, disadvantaged or from young/older people (whilst being compliant with age discrimination laws) and from this seek to offer opportunities that benefit those that may otherwise become dispossessed;

• Payment of the Living Wage

 

– We operate a fair and equal pay policy that includes a commitment to supporting the Minimum Wage. Please note that in practice our core staff members are paid the Minimum Wage or a local equivalent if not based in the UK.

• Zero Hour Contracts

– Our staff have stability of employment and preferential hours of work as LingvoHouse avoids any exploitative employment practices wherever personnel are employed worldwide;

• Nurturing Talent

– LingvoHouse supports employee career development including for those who are still studying by accommodating flexible working hours and allows for family-friendly working and a wider work-life balance to assist in retaining our talent. We encourage people to take extra courses and pay for this and also free up their working time for this learning and development. We also provide regular skills development and technology training all year around because we introduce new developments all the time, usually via twice-monthly training sessions either for individuals or the full team plus all-team brainstorming. LingvoHouse also ensures that mentoring and coaching are part of our general career development pathways and allows for one-on-one catch-ups at least once in every two months with the Managing Director. There is also regular team building which is especially important in an all-digital environment.

• Legal Obligations

– LingvoHouse promotes equality of opportunity and has a workforce which reflects the UK population in terms of characteristics such as age, gender, religion or belief, race, sexual orientation and disability in addition to our worldwide bank of linguistic resources.

 

Equality and Diversity

We will measure the above by reviewing all related policies annually or more regularly when necessary (i.e. complaints), and also allow open dialogue with employees on issues and how we can make things better for them. With regards to equality and diversity (c), women lead our Board, we have a truly diverse workforce and have no gender pay gap etc..

We feel that LingvoHouse is a rewarding organisation, both for its employees as evidenced by low staff turnaround and the wider community due to the local benefits provided for the communities we deliver services to. Despite being a micro-business, we plan to increase what we can ‘give back’ in the short-term including supporting apprentices on their career progress. Furthermore, processes will be put in place to measure the impact of the above to confirm they are delivering benefits whilst reviews shall occur in the interests of continuous improvement.

Apprenticeship

LingvoHouse is open to provide 3-month apprenticeships to students/graduates pursuing language careers, where apprentices would shadow our Sales team and Project Managers work to learn how they do their job by getting involved in the day to day operations and to see how a translation company operates in practice. Some young people in the past came from Erasmus whilst some others applied via our website. They are now all in successful career placements e.g. marketing, and one even started her own language firm.

 

To apply, please email your CV & cover letter to tatiana@lingvohouse.com with the email subject “Apprenticeship 2020 / Your Name /”.