Workforce Language Services

Living in an urban area in the Northeast, where bilingual employees are common, I was surprised to read an article in the Charlotte Observer about a seemingly new phenomenon, a bilingual School Department secretary. 

In addition to handling phone calls and visits from Spanish speakers, she also interprets letters for Northeast Learning Community staff members.

Merced says students should pay attention in their Spanish classes.

“There’s a great demand in this area for people who do what I do,” she says. “I was surprised when I moved here and learned how large the (Latino) population was.

“And now I can use my ability with the language to tell people about the great schools we have. That is fun.”

I’m happy that Lillian Merced is filling an important need in her community, but wonder whether she is the exception rather than the norm in Charlotte.  

Another thing that concerns me is the fact that bilingual employees are often over-utilized and obligated to fill roles that they aren’t comfortable with just because they speak two languages.  It’s important to remember that simply speaking two languages does not a translator or interpreter make.  Furthermore, the added challenge of being called away from other important job responsibilities to interpret for a customer can create a burden for bilingual employees. 

Having bilingual staff in any organization or company is certainly an asset.  Nevertheless, at some point a company may have to make the decision to contract qualified translators or interpreters so that the need for multilingual documents or interpretation services is adequately met without taxing existing employees.

Myelita Melton’s article reads a bit like Hispanic Culture for Dummies, and may not be useful to managers who have already given some thought to how to manage a diverse group of employees.  But her points about Latino culture serve as a useful reminder and could be the starting point of a discussion about managing in a multicultural environment for those who have just begun to think about it.

 Her mention of nationalism among Latinos should be highlighted:

Nationalism: Nationalism is deeply ingrained in Hispanics. This is a fact that most Americans don’t realize fully. When we see a person speaking Spanish, many automatically assume that the person is Mexican. Often that just isn’t true. Spanish is spoken over a wide geographic area that includes many very different countries.

All of us are deeply proud of our roots. Latin Americans have deep attachments to their homelands and the unique culture that comes with that. Because you speak English, would you like to be mistaken for a Canadian instead of an American? Probably not!

I’ve often seen instances in which people assume that Spanish-speaking countries’ populations all behave and think the same way.  Managers would do well to keep in mind that the cultural and linguistic differences between people from the Dominican Republic and Argentina are just as profound as those between the U.S. and Australia.

In the online edition of Human Resource Executives, author Michael Felton-O’Brien offers a comprehensive overview of the benefits and drawbacks of occupational Spanish classes across varied industries.

Some benefits to managers’ learning Spanish:

Companies that lack bilingual managers can also miss out on potentially valuable feedback and ideas from workers, ranging from ways that a certain task could be performed more efficiently to ideas for improving safety, she says.

When employers make the effort to help their managers communicate in Spanish or another language, Baron says, it makes a positive difference with employees. “It will make them feel more comfortable going to the supervisor and asking questions and it will increase rapport, which almost everyone believes leads to a safer workplace.”

But the article also notes that in some situations and industries, employees’ limited knowledge of Spanish can be more helpful than harmful:

But, he says, the life-or-death situations that police officers, firefighters and health-care workers encounter on a daily basis may prove more troublesome.

“[Occupational Spanish classes] can actually be worse than nothing in those situations, because people think they know something when they actually don’t,” says Uyehara. “There have been stories in health care and law-enforcement settings where basic misunderstandings occur and people are given the wrong medical treatment with horrendous results. All kinds of bad things can happen if the information isn’t translated correctly.

Looking at both the benefits and potential drawbacks involved suggests that a two-pronged approach would be wise: increasing managers’ capacity for communicating in the language of their personnel while ensuring that qualified interpreters are available for certain situations and in certain industries. 

To read the complete article, click here.

Do we train our non-English speaking staff to learn English? Do we train our English-speaking managers to learn Spanish? Do we translate our employee handbooks and other materials into Spanish? These are common questions, not just in clubs but also across industries, as employers struggle with a multilingual workforce – and with largely English-only management.

As Jill Kushner Bishop (president and founder of Workforce Language Services, the company behind this blog you’re reading) explains, these questions deserve thought not only for directors of private clubs, for whom this article was written, but also for managers in any type of industry seeking to integrate non-English speakers into their company’s culture.  She briefly highlights the benefits of an affirmative answer to all above questions, and increased employee morale, retention, and productivity can be strong motivators when considering how to implement her suggested solutions. 

Please click here to read further.

English-only proponents firmly believe that providing assistance and services in immigrants’ native language slows their assimilation to life in the U.S. and sends the message that people can live here without learning English.  But anyone who has attempted to learn another language knows that it is a process that takes time and tremendous effort.  An article in an Arizona newspaper shows that various industries are encouraging employees to learn basic Spanish so that they can better communicate with Spanish-speaking clients.  This is laudable for two reasons: first, it gives English speakers a sense of just how difficult it is to learn a new language; secondly, it fills a gap as newcomers move toward fluency in English while facilitating communication.

“Let’s face it: there are obvious demographic changes happening,” said Bonnie Wheeler-Nelson, a retired real estate broker in Surprise who owns rental properties and sits on the board of a homeowners association. “It’s wise to know what’s going on.”

Wheeler-Nelson and a dozen other Arizonans participated in a recent one-day “survival Spanish” session geared to apartment managers and others in real estate.

The students who attended the beginning-Spanish class said an improved grasp of the language would help them do their jobs better.

Having lived in my husband’s village in southern Mexico, I’ve seen firsthand how the Yucatec Maya are losing their collective ability to speak Yucatec Maya, their indigenous dialect, with each passing generation.  A startling number of youth consistently answer in Spanish when their parents and grandparents address them in Maya. 

As we discuss having children in the U.S., I take for granted that my offspring will grow up speaking both Spanish and English, and perhaps Maya that they will learn from their extended family.  I expected it to be seamless and natural for my husband to speak Spanish to our children and I will speak English to them.  Until coming across this post in which one woman details the resistance her children have put up at learning and speaking Spanish, I operated under the illusion that any child would naturally feel comfortable speaking the languages that their parents chose to teach them.

I wish the best to Carmen Juri, the post author, as she attempts to instill language as a marker of cultural heritage in her young children.  And perhaps when they are older, they will recognize bilingualism as a gift that their mother gave.

Hiring managers and job-seekers alike are very aware of the addition of language skills in the list of required or preferred qualifications in job descriptions.  Being bilingual, most commonly in Spanish, is fast becoming a huge asset when looking for jobs.  This is true in a variety of professions and jobs: from police officers to customer service representatives to medical services. 

John Peoples is a managing partner at Global Lead Management Consulting, which focuses on enhancing workforce productivity with an emphasis on diversity. Being multilingual, he said, makes an employee more valuable in the workplace now more than ever before.

“For many organizations, it’s been part of the dialogue for more than a decade,” he said. “But in the past couple of years, they’ve gone from talk to implementing it.”

Global Lead works primarily with retail, health care and financial services companies. Such “direct-to-consumer” fields, including the hospitality industry, are where much of the need for bilingual employees exists.

From tourists to immigrants, even if they speak a functional amount of English, the people calling and coming into those offices are increasingly likely to speak another language better or more comfortably. That ease makes for more meaningful interactions and accurate problem-solving.

The article also makes the point that, although bilingualism is a skill to be marketed and capitalized upon, it is also a skill that needs to be honed.  It’s not enough to simply speak the language, but candidates must also either know or be able to learn the specialized vocabulary inherent to different fields.

As the Spanish-speaking population of Mesa, AZ grows, the city’s police force struggles to adequately serve and communicate with the Latino community.  Mesa’s residents and officers both feel the frustration and fear that comes with not being able to communicate during criminal or emergency calls.  This article describes the tensions and difficulties city residents and officers face as Police Chief George Gascón explores ways to bridge the language barrier.

The language barrier threatens public safety by allowing criminals to escape before translators arrive on scene and by slowing down the time it takes to bring charges against lawbreakers.“Being able to provide good services to the citizens is the bottom line,” said Mesa Police Association president Fabian Cota. “The fact that officers can’t communicate with victims … kind of means they are receiving inferior service.”

And it’s not just the public that’s in danger.

The inability to communicate puts officers’ lives at risk, too.

Mesa police Chief George Gascón said he is exploring ways to increase the number of Spanish-speaking officers in the city, but budget constraints leave him with few options.

“We recognize it’s an urgent public safety need. Quite frankly we don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Learn English,’” Gascón said.

“Sometimes communication is a two-way street. You need to have a mutual understanding and a mutual sensitivity.”

It’s no secret that the construction industry is becoming more and more Hispanic, and we continue to see this trend in the media and from our clients. This article outlines the importance of learning Spanish to better manage an Hispanic worforce.

Recent years have seen a large influx of Hispanic workers into the allied trades, particularly drywall and concrete work. In fact, a 2004 study by professors at the Texas A&M University reported that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority population in the construction industry.

The recruitment of Hispanic workers into the construction industry is complicated, however, by the large number of immigrants who speak English sparingly, if at all. Whether the language factor contributes to the inordinately high percentage of Hispanic fatalities in the construction industry, which was the focus of the Texas A&M study, is open to debate. But no one doubts that it is imperative for supervisors to be able to communicate with workers — and for workers to be able to communicate with each other — on the construction site.

Lately the industry has been shifting direction regarding the language issue. Years ago, the effort was directed without much success at urging Spanish-speaking workers to learn English as a second language. Now, there are programs through Associated General Contractors that provide Spanish-language training for English-speaking construction superintendents and foremen.

As this article notes, language use and language preferences differ dramatically based on generation in the US and level of acculturation.

When it comes to reaching Hispanics, using Spanish-language advertising might seem like a no-brainer. But according to a new study from Simmons Research, a New York-based tracker of consumer behavior, that’s not necessarily the case. While first-generation Hispanics prefer Spanish-language advertising because it’s easier to understand, second- and especially third-generation Hispanics are somewhat indifferent to it.