Main Benefits of Multilingual Training Courses

Going cross-border is critical in today’s globalized and highly competitive business landscape. Your business has to reach out to and collaborate with professionals and customers who don’t understand your native tongue. The good thing is that you can easily do that by first creating multilingual online courses.

Every continent in the world today has an emerging market that no ambitious entrepreneur can afford to ignore. Take Asia, for example, from the Middle to the Far East. The continent is home to economies such as the UAE, India, Singapore, and the world’s fastest-growing economy- China. Population in Africa’s and Latin America’s middle-income class is also worth keeping tabs with because it now forms a prime market for premium goods and services. 

Furthermore, tech growth and adoption across the world have turned the world into a global village. Communication and collaboration technologies, for instance, have made it possible for employers to hire and manage geographically distributed workforces. You can hire the best IT professionals from Tokyo, the best web developers from Paris, or the best customer service agents from India, for example, without necessarily establishing physical business offices in those countries. Market and talent acquisition opportunities are endless when you decide to expand beyond your domestic market.

But every new good thing comes with its fair share of challenges. In the case of international business expansion, most teething challenges can be traced back to cultural and language barriers. You have to be sensitive to your employees’ diverse cultures and meet their unique language demands, especially during training if you are to succeed as an organization. English might be the universal business language, but people who speak it as a second or third language (or who don’t speak it at all) will understand your training courses better when provided in their first language. The better their understanding, the safer and more productive they will be at work. That is one reason why creating multilingual online courses is essential. From a different perspective, upon international business expansion, you will need multilingual e-learning courses when training a culturally diverse online customer base.

With that in mind, let’s expound further on how your business could benefit from creating multilingual training courses, from the workers’ and customers’ perspectives.

From the Workers’ Perspective

1.     It’s a significant confidence booster in a multilingual workforce

The greatest asset to any business is its workforce. When your employees succeed, both in terms of individual performance and team coordination, your business benefits significantly in terms of ROI. But it is almost impossible for an employee to succeed if they aren’t confident in their ability; if they keep second-guessing their actions because they didn’t exactly understand the instructions issued to them in English. Besides that, multilingual teams are more often than not filled with insecure members who feel like they don’t fit in and who mistrust everyone who doesn’t speak their language. Communication in such a work environment is often broken and teamwork is almost a myth.

One way of solving such problems is to share with employees, in their native tongue, honest insights on how to excel in their roles. A comprehensive multilingual training course will teach them how to maintain a healthy work environment even when they don’t share a common language or culture. It will raise their confidence and reduce their insecurities by over 51 percent according to a 2017 study by Forbes Insights. For customer service teams, multilingual training courses will help team members to deal with a global audience confidently and with respect to each customer’s cultural identity. 

2.     Boosting employee retention

Your business is hurt when employees quit abruptly. High employee turnover rates can actually scuttle your global expansion plans, especially during the early stages, because it’s not easy to find replacements and train them fast enough for business continuity. Training new employees can also be quite expensive. What’s more, bringing in new faces on a seemingly constant trend can ruin your company’s reputation and culture, and even trigger negativity at work.

One surefire way of improving employee retention is to create a comfortable work environment and a supportive culture. That means providing each employee with ample training through multilingual training courses and online course translation. It also means supporting employees who don’t speak their native tongue with all the resources they need to learn how to manage on their own.

Research findings by Rosetta Stone reports prove employers can reduce turnover rates by almost one-fifth through language learning. 80 percent of participating employees in the study also confirmed that employer-employee relationships are significantly enhanced through language training. About 66 percent of the respondents felt more engaged at work when provided with multilingual training.

These statistics are supported by the fact that multilingual training improves the personal and professional growth of everyone involved. It creates a growth-oriented workplace that gets employees emotionally attached, so they don’t want to leave unless they have to.

From the Customers’ Perspective

1. Expanding the reach of your business
   Expanding internationally will help you stand out from the crowd, but you won’t stand out for long if you stop growing and expanding your reach. You must have a frequent, consistent aim to maximize your ROI and growth prospects. You should not stop pushing even after getting ahead of the curve. The success of your expansion process will require multiple elaborate and well-timed strategies, but you can use multilingual training courses as a catalyst to expedite the process. Translating your online courses into multiple languages eliminates language barriers and gives your content the needed potential to reach prospective customers from different geographical locations.
2. You need it for customer convenience
   We already mentioned that your workforce is your greatest asset. Customers are a very close second in that regard, and they are by far your greatest prize. That’s why you have to invest in everything that enhances their satisfaction or convenience. Offering your online courses in as many languages as your audience is diverse is one sure way of ensuring that each one of your audience members relates to your content organically and with as little hassles as possible. If someone has to get a translation tool in order to understand your message, chances are that they will opt to consume the already-translated content from your direct competitors.

Key Takeaways

• 1. Multilingual online courses are essential in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
  2. If your team is lacking in confidence, if insecurities and mistrust are rampant in your multilingual workforce, language training would be a quick remedy for those problems.
  3. You can minimize turnover rates at your company by driving employee engagement through language training.
  4. You can grow your customer reach through multilingual courses. Customer satisfaction and convenience when targeting a multilingual demographic also depend significantly on the success of your multilingual courses.