Using translation and localisation services can do much to enhance corporate culture. Used well, translation services can enhance employee engagement and boost team spirit.
They can even help to deliver more effective business marketing strategies. Let’s look at how.
Using translation services for communication
Companies are finding it easier than ever to build remote teams. The geographic dispersal of employees means that company culture needs close attention.
If you’re reaching out to a staff team that spans several countries, why demand that they all use the same language? You can use translation services to deliver your company communications in multiple languages. This can ensure that all employees feel that they are equally valued. And a culture where everyone feels valued makes for a productive company.
This is a clear way of showing respect for diversity. It also shows that you are making an effort to engage all employees on the same level. Say it’s a requirement that all of your staff speak (for example) English in order to perform their roles. Translating communications from English to (say) Spanish emphasises the value of your Spanish speakers.
Using translation to build team spirit
Using a translation agency can also help to boost team spirit. Just because your teams speak different languages doesn’t mean that you can’t engage them. Company-wide team building activities are ideal for this.
Let’s say you’re looking at how to motivate employees and want to trial a staff competition. With a Spanish translator to hand, you can translate English to Spanish in order to engage your Spanish-speakers just as effectively as your English speakers. Remember to engage the translator for long enough to translate Spanish to English as well. That way, when you receive responses in Spanish, you will understand what they mean!
How about going one step further? You could create a multilingual intranet to which all staff can contribute. Allowing staff to contribute in various languages will ensure that everyone can participate. Be sure to use a decent website localisation service. This will head off any potential issues around data encoding, character recognition, text direction and so forth.
Observing local holidays via localisation services
As well as translation services, localisation services can do much to help enhance your corporate culture. Which holidays does your company observe? Does it celebrate local festivals with each staff team or just holidays in the country where the head office is located?
A localisation service can help you identify appropriate ways to observe local holiday traditions. You can do so for all the areas in which the company works. This means you can surprise local staff teams with appropriate treats linked to the holidays that are most important to them. This can generate a boom in appreciation and loyalty from those teams. A small investment in carefully targeted localisation services can thus reap big rewards.
Ideas such as this take minimal effort and cost very little. A few local, edible treats a couple of times a year is easy to organise. Doing so can make each team feel valued and increase the company’s productivity as a whole.
Holding events with interpretation services
If you’re serious about enhancing your corporate culture, then running company-wide events can pay huge dividends. They are a great way to ensure that employees connect with the company’s values. Events can also leave staff teams feeling newly energised and inspired. It’s also possible to use events to encourage staff to connect with other teams and departments. This can aid the smooth running of the company.
Don’t be daunted if you’re inviting staff teams that don’t speak your language. All you need is a good interpretation services company and you’ll be connecting with your employees more deeply before you know it!
Through a combination of document translation services, localisation services and interpretation, you can communicate almost as easily with the employees who don’t speak your language as with the ones who do. The document translation part is key when holding events.
It means you can provide plenty of details about what the event will entail, before it takes place. This will reassure non-native speakers that they will be able to participate fully and get plenty out of the event. It will also let them know that you have catered to their linguistic needs.
If you want to know more about how to hire the perfect interpreter, you can click this link.
Image: Unsplash
Translating employee feedback
Building a positive, thriving corporate culture is about more than one-off events. It’s about creating an environment in which employees feel engaged, valued and confident in their ability to speak out. Staff need to know that the business appreciates their feedback and may take action as a result of it.
This is an ongoing process where dialogue between employees and management is essential. Using translation to gather feedback can do much to support this process.
You can translate feedback forms and employee satisfaction surveys into employees’ native languages. This allows them to express themselves clearly. Head office can collect the feedback and translate it into managers’ languages. This provides management with local insights into their global operations.
Some issues may just be of local concern. Others could have company-wide implications. In either case, a robust, multilingual feedback system will give management key insights into the business.
Having a translation agency on hand also means that management can feed back to employees in their native language. This can further enhance communications between the two groups, despite their linguistic differences. Employees will know that their contributions can make a difference and that management is listening to them. This will inspire them to provide further feedback.
Effective engagement for a solid corporate culture
Using a combination of these approaches can help businesses to build strong, stable staff teams. It can encourage teams to take an active approach to supporting the company to reach its goals. This can have myriad benefits. These include lower absenteeism, reduced staff turnover and increased productivity.
Even a brand’s reputation can benefit as a result of its enthusiastic employees around the world. And when a company has a reputation as a good employer, it becomes easier to recruit the best talent. The targeted, strategic use of professional language services can have a major impact.
In Summary
The appropriate use of translation and localisation services can enhance company culture. A strategic approach to this allows the company to communicate effectively with employees. It can create systems where staff feel that their feedback is valued and acted upon.
Language services can help companies to engage employees through events, as well. They can also ensure that those events run smoothly. Team spirit can benefit from this. It can also benefit from the company using localisation services to show it cares.
Events for international teams can be expensive. However, a few gourmet treats for local holidays is something that every company should be able to afford.
Using translation, interpretation and localisation services correctly to enhance corporate culture can, ultimately, ensure a company runs more efficiently. It can also result in loyal employees, thus reducing the overheads associated with staff turnover. Employers who are creative in their use of professional language services therefore have much to gain.
About the Author
Ofer Tirosh is CEO of Tomedes, a translation and language services company that has been working with clients around the globe for over a decade and which continues to grow and flex as the translation industry develops.
