2018: A New Year, A New Chance To Connect With Employees

Improving communication in your business

What does it take to make a business successful? To start, a good team. As such, you want to make sure as an employer that you’re treating them just as well as you want them to treat your business. One way organizations do so is through company perks. Typically this includes traditional benefits packages, vacation time, 401(k) plans, health insurance, and perhaps tuition assistance credit.

While these are great perks to offer, today’s workforce values employers who truly care about their professional development and growth. Business leaders looking to better connect with their teams should take a deeper look at employees’ needs and offer a benefits package that will truly do as it says—benefit them.
 
At Rosetta Stone, we’ve seen the impact language training can have on individuals, both personally and professionally, and many employees are learning to speak and work in languages other than their native tongue. Being proficient in more than one language can have huge advantages in the workplace and make you stand out from your peers.
 
We wanted to see what employees and employers value most on the job, so we teamed up Forbes Insights to survey business leaders around the world on the impact that improved communication through language training is having on their business, and how it is helping them compete in the war for talent. According to the report, as more companies are expanding in today’s global marketplace, having a multilingual workforce has become a critical success factor and businesses are taking action to provide employees with language learning resources.
 
We live in a global society with an ever-growing marketplace that requires organizations to work with vendors, clients and colleagues from different regions, cultures and languages around the globe. Communication can quickly become the deciding factor on whether a deal goes through or not.

Businesses like PayPal face this challenge every day. This global enterprise facilitating a variety of financial transitions in 26 currencies quickly realized how vital clear communication—both internally and externally—was to their overall global expansion strategy. Recognizing the role language would play in their success, the company created a language strategy to align with their organizational goals. They partnered with us to implement a standardized training program to help its team gain language proficiency in a number of languages, no matter where they were based.
 
It’s all about making connections both on a personal and professional level. Steve Dornsife, Global Learning and Organizational Development at PayPal, believes language learning is a critical piece towards their global expansion strategy, and has seen tremendous results of enhanced employee skills within PayPal’s workforce. Simultaneously, offering employees a chance to learn a new language has played a significant role in improving PayPal’s company culture, transforming the way teams communicate, increasing collaboration and engagement and removing communication barriers.

As a business leader, it’s important to arm your employees with the skills needed to perform day-to-day tasks, and overall, succeed in their roles. This is why when a team expands globally, their language skills need to expand alongside it.

Here are three things to keep in mind as you look at language training for your business:
 

 

 

 
Just remember: no two employees are alike and everyone learns at their own pace. Providing them with the resources they need to gain proficiency in a new language will not only benefit them and give them a skillset they can leverage within their careers, but it will also positively impact both internal and external communications—and your bottom line.