Businesses are trying to break the language barrier by training both managers and employees in different languages.
With the thousands of non-English speaking employees working in manufacturing, companies need to have a strategy in place that would close the language gap and ultimately reduce costs in recruiting and increase retention of employees.
Quaker Fabrics in Fall River, which has hundreds of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking employees, offers language classes to both employees and managers.
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Cynthia Gordan, vice president and general counsel for Quaker, said the company has been offering English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to employees for nearly a decade.
The ESL classes help employees learn English and learn company-specific or industry-specific vocabulary that would help them in their career development.
“Some of the classes are really intended to help people enhance conversation skills in either language and to facilitate social interactions for the individual attending these classes,” Gordan said.
For the past three years, Quaker has offered a course for managers, too. Managers voluntarily take courses in Portuguese so that they can better communicate with employees.
“The objective there was team building and enforcing the sense that despite the diversity of backgrounds, we all are here to further a common purpose and one of the ways is to facilitate conversation between individuals from different backgrounds … and it is sharing cultural background,” Gordan said.
The Portuguese classes not only include language skills, but also include education on Portuguese history and culture.
Quaker is not the only company making a move to train managers in different languages, several companies are doing the same as part of their work force development efforts, said Amy Thibault at TrainRI, a Providence group that assists local employers with their work force training needs.
TrainRI has tapped Spanish World, a provider of language courses, to provide the instruction for a popular course called Spanish for Supervisors.
“It was put together because we had a steering committee and human resources representatives that came up with it,” Thibault said. “They said this is a need and we always react to the demand coming in.”
The course is offered once a semester and brings together managers from different companies. ESL courses are offered throughout the year.
Offering language courses is a great step for businesses, said Susana Torres, translation and interpreting director at the International Institute of Rhode Island in Providence, but businesses need to dedicate both time and money into the programs, something many are not willing to do.
Torres said many businesses in the last three to four years have inquired about language services, but don’t follow through on actually hiring instructors.
“In many cases, they are not prepared to pay for the service,” Torres said.
The common complaint is that companies want the courses taught in a short period of time and are not willing to pay for the long-term courses.
Typically classes run for 10 weeks and require at least a few hours a week of instruction.
“Sometimes employers think it’s something that can be done in five weeks,” Torres said. “A lot of employers are interested in making sure employees have the basic grasp of language and in some cases they haven’t realized that in order to learn a language you need more than 10 hours (of instruction).”
TrainRI’s Thibault agrees.
“You need it to reinforce the (teaching) and keep it going,” she said. “Our courses are 60 hours long and are scheduled two days a week for a couple of hours.”
Because manufacturing varies throughout the state, organizations such as TrainRI and the International Institute add company-specific instructions into the core curriculum.
“Ideally, the instructor is supposed to obtain key phrases and terms used on the company floor,” Thibault said. “They are then incorporated into the curriculum.”
Teaching foreign languages to supervisors and teaching English as a second language to non-English-speaking employees is a win-win for everyone, say executives.
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