Bilingual Training and its Significance in Corporate Inclusion
Corporate training is an essential part of developing key expertise and competences in our employees and in any business. As we learn more about the importance of inclusivity and diversity, how can we incorporate these important ideas of inclusivity at work into our corporate training plans, actions and company culture?
One of the main challenges of embracing inclusivity in training is cultural barriers, and language can be one of these key barriers. Employees from different cultures and backgrounds may better comprehend and absorb training content in their mother tongue, but it can become tricky and expensive for businesses to run stand alone training programs in different languages to cater to everyone. Businesses then have to hire different trainers that speak fluent languages and understand different cultures well. The language barrier in training may create several issues and these are some of them for your consideration:
1. Discrepancy in content understanding – Separate trainers may have slightly different take on a particular topic, and such differences may lead to internal discrepancy and take away of the training sessions. In the long run, these discrepancies may even lead to more culture differences and segregation at work, which may not be beneficial for the overall corporate inclusivity.
2. Lack of sharing and communication amongst cultures – Trainings are a perfect opportunity for a rich cultural communication and exchange across teams. This is a time where various departments can come together, be open, vulnerable and learn together. Importantly, this is the time for sharing and understanding each others’ cultures. So, having separate training due to language barrier could be a missed opportunity for inclusivity.
3. Inequality in learning and opportunities – for some employees, training in a particular language (perhaps company designated language) means that they are not being trained in their first/preferred language. This may lead to inequality of service, as they may not comprehend the training as well as employees who speak that language as their mother tongue.
When choosing a training provider, the trainer, the language and approach, one must look at the main client’s needs and objectives. After the TNA (training needs analysis) a good consultancy company can then propose solutions as in bilingual training and/or a single language, or a combination of both along with 1:1 coaching sessions in the native language of the client.
To create a common culture in the workplace, we encourage you to consider and explore bilingual training (If this suits your organization!) in order to enhance corporate inclusivity. We have found that in bilingual training settings, participants are also encouraged to develop better listening skills, patience and openness, as participants from different cultures have to listen to different languages and not only stay with one mode of communication.
If we train across teams, we should also train across cultures and language groups and embrace the differences. In this way, we can learn from each other in an open, vulnerable and meaningful way. More so, to ensure that all employees receive equal levels of training so they can understand it effectively, it is crucial to have competent bilingual trainers involved, aligned in their approach, attitude, engagement and content knowledge to make a true impact in the individual and organizational level.
FELIZ Consulting is proud as it is expanding bilingual training topics and options to serve different clients’ needs. We have found it an absolute pleasure in doing so. Topics such as Emotional Intelligence and Resilience; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Mindfulness and Stress Management; Executive Presence are some of our bilingual programs receiving raving feedback from clients.
If this is something you are keen to explore, please reach out to us! We also offer training in Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Portuguese separately.
Thank you for reading it and stay in touch!
Written by Howard Chim and MônicaZionede Hall