Communication in the workforce should be the number one priority for all leadership teams to help manage their staff efficiently. This is especially true in multicultural teams, where understanding one another and your customers can be the real difference between success and failure. As a result, more and more businesses are looking to focus on language training to help better address workplace culture challenges.
The pain point here for many businesses is that staff members are unable to clearly communicate with their colleagues and customers in a professional and appropriate manner. This leads to performance issues when these language and culture barriers are not addressed sooner rather than later, with many fast-acting companies seeing fast improvements after implementing corporate language training.
Removing Language Barriers
Even when working with people from the same background and spoken language, miscommunication can be an issue. Throw into the mix different workplace languages and cultures, and it can be even harder to keep projects moving forward as intended. If this is the case, the most proactive way to knock down these barriers with your team is to provide corporate language training.
Whilst it might not solve every workplace culture or language difference, it could help to clear significant hurdles in how your staff interact with one another. It can come down to simple things, like one word having a stronger meaning in one culture than another. Helping staff to understand the cultural and language divides can be essential to avoid miscommunication, mistakes, and potential conflict with colleagues or clients.
Focus on your Target Audiences
Of course, having your staff become polyglots would be quite the undertaking. Instead, you should look to focus on two primary areas:
- The most commonly spoken languages within your staff.
- The most commonly spoken languages with your clients.
Since you likely target specific areas as a business, you should be looking to focus on those areas in terms of language development. This is a useful approach as it can help to give your staff a better idea of cultural deviations. Language is more than simply understanding what is being said, but also the importance of how something is said.
For example, a specific term of endearment could be taken as offensive or insulting to another person. As such, you should look to focus on ensuring your staff understands the language and culture of your most commonly encountered languages.
Simpler Language In-house
With in-house language training, you can help to ensure staff find a clearer way to communicate with each other. This means simplifying the language, removing regional slang, and creating a more universal approach to communication.
This plays a role in ensuring that employees can communicate together and with other staff members whilst avoiding any potential faux pas that could create workplace culture problems. Language training can play a huge role in creating an efficient way for everyone to communicate. This creates a safer form of communication that feels much more in line with what one would expect. This way you can avoid any potential issues and loss of either in-house harmony or reputation with clients simply by adopting language training in-house.
Overall, a business is more efficient when it takes the time to focus on the different languages and cultures in their workforce. The easier it is for staff to talk with their colleagues and/or customers, the more productive the whole team can be. By Investing in professional corporate language training this can help avoid mistakes, miscommunication, and ensure that your business can keep moving along in a profitable and more productive manner.
Address Workplace Culture Challenges with a Professional Language Program
The next step to improve employee performance is to hire a professional language program provider that can help ensure your language goals are achieved with qualified language teachers.
Workplace Languages specializes in language training options for every company’s specific requirements. They provide online and onsite classes that can be scheduled around your busy schedule, including the innovative Lunchtime Language program.
All Workplace Languages lessons are available at various language levels to accommodate for any industry in any language. Lessons are then tailored to the industry, company, or job-specific needs of your workforce.
Contact Us today for more information so we can understand how we can help your company develop and grow so you can thrive in the international business environment.
