Because of the mass immigration of EU workers to this country, we now have a situation where some workers don’t speak any English in the work place which causes problems; the effects of miscommunication’s can be damaging. This is a problem primarily in Logistics companies where the on-site agencies have staff that are multilingual and have hired two people through a type of buddy system where one of them speaks English but the other may not know any at all; this is fine if they always work together, but when the worker who can’t speak English has to interact with workers who can’t speak their language then we start to have problems.

Don’t fret though the problem is solvable! Rather than wasting money trying to train up transient workers in English proficiency, or rejecting workers because they can’t speak any English that may be highly productive workers. We can instead start training up existing Supervisory level staff to be multilingual instead, by paying for them to undertake one or more different language courses; the main languages spoken in the work place such as Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian.

Not only will this make those supervisors more valuable to the company, it will open up new doors for the company and make the workflow a lot more productive without miscommunication’s.

In addition to this you will also have transient workers that have worked for the company for some time on temporary contracts, but you have not really looked through their files to see what else they are capable of. So if you take some time to assess those workers, you may actually find that some of them are already multilingual and can speak 4 or more languages as well as English; these workers are a gold mine and if they are able to be trained up to a high level like supervisor they will also help take your company to another level.

Of course the next challenge is training up the supervisors to effectively manage the workers into groups where those who can’t speak English will only be working with those who can speak the same language as them; this way when native English workers are hired to work, they will work effectively with those who can speak English and communication will flow correctly, with a good level of productivity.