When creating a diverse workplace community, it’s essential to have a plan in place with ideas on how you can be sure you’re doing all you can to be as inclusive as possible for all employees.
Language can be a powerful tool when making sure all feel welcome within your community. This is why we’ve created this guide, to help you structure and create a plan to successfully improve diversity and inclusion within your organisation.
Using language learning shows that your business embraces diversity - you’re open to communicating to as many people as possible, making people feel more included within the company.
When an organisation puts in place a corporate language learning scheme, it not only shows that you’re open to diversity but that you’re willing to take action and it’s not just a case of updating your website with the right words - you’re actively creating change. This allows you to demonstrate you are an employer that’s looking to innovate; the ideal way to show you want to make positive changes, as well as get ahead of the competition.
In order to build a diverse and inclusive culture, you have to ensure you’re implementing effective targeted recruiting, as well as traditional anti-bias and diversity training. However, those businesses that introduce language training see significant and long-lasting benefits.
Having a workforce that is multicultural and/or a multilingual customer base means that you’ll need a higher level of appreciation and understanding for different cultures. It will also mean effective and improved communication with colleagues from different cultural backgrounds is essential and implementing a language training course will help with this.
Implementing language learning within your company helps you build and grow business relationships. This is crucial at a time of increased globalisation and companies need to ensure they are recognising, as well as celebrating, diversity - not just internally but also with clients and external stakeholders as well.
It’s not only strategic but also very effective to implement language training as part of your company’s employee benefits scheme. Even if an employee can only speak a few words of another language, they’ll find that it’s still much easier to build positive relationships with those around them.
Not only does having the skill of being able to communicate in a second language help with communication, it also improves people’s understanding of the person they are working with and encourages them to be much more sensitive to their needs. When people feel they’re being understood, they’re more likely to stick around with a company that listens to them, as they’ll feel more valued.
As well as bringing in language training to ensure inclusivity, another important thing to do is to ensure you are acknowledging and celebrating cultural differences within your organisation. This can be done through events or through diversity awareness training and will really help to bring teams together in a very positive way.
Events can be a great way of enabling employees to share their own cultural experiences and traditions with the team. Another example of initiative to make your workplace more inclusive is to set up a dedicated space for prayer and meditation to ensure a more inclusive work environment.
Working for a company that provides learning opportunities such as language training, mentoring and coaching not only means that employees feel they can self-improve and develop skills for their careers, it also provides your organisation with more knowledgable employees who want to grow within the organisation.
Make sure you keep track and monitor your talents’ progress as this will allow you to get a better understanding of the skills they have and the ones they are developing, which is crucial for any business to be able to be strategic with talent management.
Providing networking and peer-to-peer opportunities to your employees is another way to not only help them develop their skills but also to develop relationships with their colleagues and other stakeholders, therefore progressing their careers.
We’ve discussed how language learning improves your listening skill. Being able to communicate well across cultures requires people to listen closely and therefore gather the true meaning of what your colleague or team member is saying. This actually reduces any chance of misunderstanding or conflict that tend to happen when the communication between different stakeholders is not optimal.
Through effective language learning and training, you can be sure that a person’s skills in listening will be vastly improved. When learning a second language, you’re forced to listen more attentively than you perhaps would do when using your mother tongue. This will foster positive learning habits, meaning that it will become natural to listen very closely during all conversations, resulting in much more effective communication.
Better communication means more sensitivity to other people’s needs and feelings, putting diversity and inclusion at the forefront of your company’s culture and creating a feeling of unity within your workplace.
At Busuu for Business, we have expertly designed a digital language training programme to please. We believe language learning should be enjoyable, inclusive and beneficial both for companies and employees alike.
Contact us to learn more about our programmes and how they can help measure, track and boost employee engagement.