Languages act like oxygen in organizational life. It covers all the facets of the business. Unfortunately, the leaders of a global organization pay no attention to linguistic diversity. Many organizations that don’t go for multilingualism create inefficiency in the workforce. Moreover, it results in less exposure, lost sales, and creates serious problems in pursuit of competitive advantage.
Therefore, developing a strategy for managing different languages is very important. For instance, if you are running a Chinese company and want to open a subsidiary in Japan then you must take assistance from a Chinese translation company.
Selecting a Lingua Franca
No doubt, selecting a lingua franca can change the way, employees collaborate with people across borders. However, it still comes up certain challenges. The best thing is to adopt a lingua franca with the local languages to resonate with the local cultures. For example, if you are adapting the Chinese language to English then adopt the appropriate dialect of the Chinese language. The Chinese language is spoken in different dialects. Here Chinese translation services can be of great help to the management. In this context, you can hire a professional in translation service Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco or Houston that can help translate different Chinese dialects like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. into English with flawless accuracy and perfection.
Linguistic Proficiency in Hiring And Promotions
The people’s proficiency in the local language can help the leaders to decide the suitable people for specific promotions and assignments. There is a probability that management can overvalue or undervalue linguistic skills and judge the talent of the people accordingly. The research by Tsedal Neeley on language in global organizations and teams revealed that language strategy is critical for global talent management. If you are dealing with hiring and acquisition, then you must be considering the language and cultural nuances in the assessment, hiring, and promotion of people.
Dealing with a Diverse Workforce
To deal with a diverse workforce, your company should adopt a shared language strategy. No doubt, global firm tactics, and choices will depend upon the department and region. For instance, to deal with the employees in Vietnam, the company should go for Vietnamese translation services. The translation services will help the employees to work effectively to attain the company’s strategic objectives. In reality, language strategy must resonate with the value proposition to customers. In this way, companies can easily tap into different markets and coordinate among them. Here the companies should learn how to infuse language into the skills to get the desired value.
Assessment and Training
When looking for the right talent for job candidates, the recruiting department at global companies must know the challenges regarding language. First, they may look for fluency to look at the communication skills of the potential candidate and their cultural reference according to the market. To make sure that you are hiring the right talent, you may compromise for language skills and can provide training to meet both global and regional requirements.
For example, IBM has adopted English as a lingua Franca. However, they also identified eight other languages to serve the local markets. They hire global professionals with the expectations of training them through caching and online training. The employees themselves know that global assignments require language training requirements. If they need to cater Danish market then during their language learning modules, they can go for professional danish translation services.
Another challenge is to rely on external hires with moderate language skills to find the midlevel designations instead of hiring junior candidates with the motivation of learning the new language. The second approach takes a lot of time. Global companies are of the view that entry-level hires become good leaders because they are trained from an early culture.
Going for a lateral approach makes it difficult to build an integrated business culture. Employee retention is another issue. As months and years pass, the company witnesses that lateral hires lack certain competencies along with linguistic skills. They can take the assistance of translation companies. However, this approach requires a lot of patience. It may help to build a cohesive business environment but for this, you need to hire people continuously.
Evaluating Talent without any Prejudice
Your company has improved the hiring and training system. The important thing to keep in mind is keeping language in view while evaluating the employee’s performance and making decisions for promotions. Language fluency does not mean that employees are high performers. Therefore to access the skills of different people, companies go for 360-degree evaluations. In this process, feedback from people is taken from supervisors, peers, and subordinates. It makes managers look beyond verbal communication to evaluate performance. It is the best tool to check that management of the company is not only taken up by fluency.
If you are working as the head of a global bank’s Japan subsidiary then you must adopt a 360-degree review process. You can promote the person who is proficient in English so that he can communicate with you easily. If he is not proficient in Japanese then no worries, you can take the assistance of professional Japanese translation services. Moreover, you can also give him the training to get cultural knowhow of Japan. For its evaluation do use 360-degree feedback to gauge employee performance.
Wrapping Up
Are you ready to devise a language strategy for your organization? It will help in increasing the productivity of various departments. This strategy will help you in deciding which type of employees, you type of employees you need to hire.
