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Employee spotlight is our blog series where we get up-close and personal (and have some fun) with our favorite team members at Commit Global. Next one on our list is our Quality Process Supervisor Gustav Schmid.
1. Gustav, how long have you been working at Commit Global?
I have been working at Commit Global since June 2022.
2. What does your job entail?
My job entails multi-language project quality management. Basically, I address the performance analysis of translation teams through proprietary metrics and administer the resource allocation control per content type and average productivity to achieve pre-established KPIs. I also interact with PMs to monitor volumes and the impact of their variations on meeting deadlines, evaluate the translation of specific terms/phrases analysis and provide translation queries support and clarification to facilitate quality alignment between teams. Among my current responsibilities is to resolve specific style guide issues (e.g., level of formality), address and provide suggestions for new glossary terms, expedite solutions for product-specific questions not covered by reference materials (e.g., if the context is missing), coordinate arbitration of review feedback, and monitoring and controlling translation team performance from a service point of view.
3. What do you like most about your job?
The responsibility to identify how to make our final product better by streamlining the quality process.
4. What is the best career lesson you’ve learned so far?
To delegate responsibilities and structure/document processes clearly is the only way to enable a business model to become organic. This lesson derives from a book I read when a teenager called Die Geschichte vom Herrn Keuner (Stories of Mr. Nobody), a collection of aphorisms put together by the German writer Bertolt Brecht. The particular aphorism I learned in this lesson was about the Indispensable Civil Servant. In a nutshell, this men’s colleagues used to say the Servant was the best ever and that the department could not work without him. When Mr. Nobody heard that, he immediately asked how this person was good if the department depended so much on him? But at the end, he had enough time to get things organized in a way he could finally become dispensable and the department was fully organized and every process was sufficiently functional for every new employee to come.
5. What would you do (for a career) if you weren’t doing this?
I would be working on creative writing and advanced editing and proofreading. I could also cook or either drive a car.
6. What do you like to do when you aren’t working?
I like to get my house organized, listen to good music (according to Duke Ellington’s definition) and to cook.
7. What’s a fun fact about you many people may not know?
I love Barry Manilow.
8. What is your biggest achievement to date – personal or professional?
To have a daughter.
9. What is your motto or personal mantra?
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
10. Given a chance, who would you like to be for a day?
The President of the United States.
11. What would be the title of your autobiography?
An endless enigma.
12. If you could have any superpower what would it be?
To die when I decide to by just going to sleep.
13. Do you have any strange phobias?
Yes, some sort of third-party Acrophobia when it comes to other people (not me) close to windows; I am not afraid of flying in planes or climbing high mountains, though, only other people close to windows, esp. children.
14. If you could choose anyone, who would you pick as your mentor?
Socrates.
15. Any favorite line from a movie, book or song?
“‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”. Rhett Butler, Gone with the wind
