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Spanish Lessons
As the number of Spanish-speaking workers in the United States continues to grow, more companies are offering "occupational Spanish" training to their English-speaking employees.
Tony Redel says his Spanish lessons helped make him a better manager. "[Taking occupational Spanish classes] made my results come a lot faster because I wasn't relying on other people to communicate," says Redel, an operations consultant for Oak Brook, Ill.-based McDonald's. Redel is a winner of the company's annual Ray Kroc Award, named after the fast-food chain's founder and given to its top 1 percent of U.S. restaurant managers. He took a Spanish-as-a-Second Language course three years ago when he was working as a restaurant manager. Through taking the course, he learned that knowing how to explain the "why" of concepts such as food-safety procedures is just as important as explaining the "how." By learning how to explain things to his Spanish-speaking employees in a simple yet effective way, Redel says, he was able to head off problems before they arose. "If I see we have a procedure and people don't really know why we do it, I can explain in Spanish why we have to do it that certain way," he says, adding that his increased knowledge of Spanish comes in handy when giving employees feedback. "If I can go into exact detail as to why I'm giving them positive feedback, they appreciate it much more than me clapping my hands or giving a thumbs-up." At BioLab Inc., a chemical company based in the Atlanta suburb of Lawrenceville, Ga., approximately 15 percent of the company's 400 employees speak primarily Spanish, according to training manager John Norregaard. Many of those workers hold general labor positions in which they work throughout the day with potentially dangerous chemicals. When the company decided to begin offering classes in occupational Spanish to complement an existing English-as-a-Second-Language program for Spanish-speaking employees, he says, the response from managers and supervisors was solid. "We're in the process of making sure we have a good quality system in place," says Norregaard, adding that BioLab is in the process of becoming certified by the International Standardization Organization. "In order to do that, we need to make sure people understand procedures. "It's a two-way street," he adds. "We want our managers to be able to speak Spanish to our employees, and we want our employees to take advantage of the English classes we offer." A large chunk of the U.S. Latino population lacks proficiency in English. The 2000 U.S. Census found that one in 10 Americans over the age of five, or approximately 28 million people, spoke Spanish at home while speaking English "less than very well." Another 7 million Spanish-speaking adults said they have "little to no" command of English. These statistics didn't include the approximately 12 million illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries currently living in the United States. As the number of Spanish-speaking workers has risen, so has the number of workplace deaths for that segment of the population. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Injuries, there were 917 workplace fatalities involving Latino workers in 2005, up from 791 deaths in 2003 and nearly double the reported number of such deaths (533) in 1992. This rise comes at a time when the overall number of fatal workplace injuries in the U.S. dropped slightly from 5,764 in 2004 to 5,702 in 2005. Partly as a result of these trends, a growing number of managers and supervisors across the United States are enrolling in employer-provided occupational Spanish classes. These so-called "Survival Spanish" classes tend to focus on simple communication skills and vocabulary, rather than intensive grammar, in order to improve students' ability to communicate with their Spanish-speaking workers. But do these so-called "Survival Spanish" classes really work, or are they just creating a false sense of security for managers and the companies they work for? And how can HR determine whether such training is having a bottom-line impact?
A Matter of Life and Death? Sherry Baron, coordinator for occupational health disparities at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati, says the answer to reducing the level of workplace injuries among Hispanic workers is better communication. "Direct supervisors ... should be able to speak their employees' language," she says. "The ability to explain rules and regulations in a person's own language is key." Companies that lack bilingual managers can also miss out on potentially valuable feedback and ideas from workers, ranging from ways that a certain task could be performed more efficiently to ideas for improving safety, she says. When employers make the effort to help their managers communicate in Spanish or another language, Baron says, it makes a positive difference with employees. "It will make them feel more comfortable going to the supervisor and asking questions and it will increase rapport, which almost everyone believes leads to a safer workplace." However, while a sense of common understanding between employees and their supervisors is beneficial, some experts think survival Spanish classes may end up doing more harm than good. The tailored nature of most occupational Spanish classes offered by both community colleges and private companies can create blind spots in other areas of language comprehension, potentially leading to a false sense of security, according to some legal experts. Paul Uyehara, senior staff attorney with the language-access project at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, thinks occupational Spanish classes can be helpful in workplaces where the language necessary to do the job is rather limited. "If you're looking at [a manager] in a restaurant or landscaping business, the scope of communication is going to be limited, in most cases." But, he says, the life-or-death situations that police officers, firefighters and health-care workers encounter on a daily basis may prove more troublesome. "[Occupational Spanish classes] can actually be worse than nothing in those situations, because people think they know something when they actually don't," says Uyehara. "There have been stories in health care and law-enforcement settings where basic misunderstandings occur and people are given the wrong medical treatment with horrendous results. All kinds of bad things can happen if the information isn't translated correctly. "You have to understand the context and intended use of the second language [like Spanish]," he says. "If it's intended for the most simple of uses or purely courtesy to give some comfort, then that's legitimate and worthwhile. But if it's something serious that needs to be communicated and discussed, people need to use legitimately bilingual staff or bring in a certified interpreter. In business and agency settings, you have to have protocols to ensure that when it's important, communication is not going to be garbled."
Quality vs. Quantity McDonald's Corp., which implemented an e-learning-based Spanish language program for its English-speaking managers and supervisors in 2005 and has offered English-as-a-Second-Language courses to employees for many years, sees the training as crucial for its leadership development efforts. "If we have bilingual restaurant managers, they will be in the best position to lead and will set the standard," says Betsy McKay, the company's director of bilingual leadership development. The e-learning courses, which last approximately 30 minutes for each of the 12 lessons, deal with the specifics of working at McDonald's, rather than focusing on abstract language concepts. "I think in any language program, the most effective way to learn is contextual learning," she says. In addition to the current program, McKay says, the company is planning to roll out its "Spanish Under the Arches" program next year, which will combine language training with manager-training curriculum and feature live instructor-led classes via Web conferencing, along with e-learning and face-to-face lessons. The programs are being developed in-house with the help of experts familiar with language instruction, according to McKay. "We rely on external experts to a great degree to make sure we're providing the appropriate language in each area," she says. "Much of it is based on managerial skills like delegating and giving feedback, both constructive and appreciative." McDonald's measures key metrics such as customer satisfaction and employee retention when evaluating the results of its occupational Spanish courses, but McKay says a student's performance in the class is the most important determinant of the program's worth. "The most meaningful measure is the change in a student's performance at the restaurant," she says. However, while large companies such as McDonald's have the resources for comprehensively measuring the return of such programs, Tom Sutula, president and founder of Roswell, Ga.-based language-training provider Workplace Spanish Inc. (which counts BioLab among its clients), says many other companies struggle when it comes to quantitatively measuring the positive effects. "It is easy for a retailer to ... measure the sales performance next week," he says. "But ask that retailer how sales increased as a result of Spanish training, and they cannot measure it. They will fall back on a qualitative story about a Hispanic customer who was pleased and said that he would tell all his friends to shop at the store." Sutula says there is a way for HR to gauge the impact of occupational Spanish classes. "Hold employee or manager focus groups asking for specific positive incidents that would be recorded," he says. "This type of input would be a major step in demonstrating the effectiveness of the training, and allowing management to place emphasis on other areas where language training could prove helpful." With nearly 10 percent of BioLab's salaried workforce participating in the Spanish classes offered by the company, Norregaard says the effects are already being seen. "It's helped boost morale around here," he says, although he acknowledges that measuring effectiveness is difficult without relying on anecdotal evidence.
A "Two-Way Street" Providers of occupational Spanish classes say they've seen a rising demand for their services that correlates with demographic trends. "Within the last five years, there's been an increasing demand for occupational Spanish classes," says LuLu Cowan, the coordinator for customized training for workforce development at Amarillo College, a community college in Amarillo, Texas. "The Hispanic population in our area has grown tremendously in the past several years, so the demand for occupational Spanish classes has grown, as well." In addition to offering classes in academic and conversational Spanish, the college provides customized Spanish classes for local employers. The customized classes are "normally more focused on communication, not grammar," says Cowan. "The goal is not to achieve whole language fluency but to learn basic job-oriented words and phrases." The occupational Spanish classes are customized for companies via on-site needs assessments conducted by Cowan. "I can see the [company's] facility and get a sense of who they are and the conditions [employees] work in," she says. "I can ask 'What was the problem that was the catalyst for the call? What types of problems are they having and what are their goals?'" While there are common threads to the customized classes, including greetings and "social niceties," Cowan says the needs assessments allow her to drill down and find the right content for the right audience. "Nursing gets specific, because the terms and phrases that are relevant for surgical nurses may not be for the nurses dispensing medication or working in the front office," she says. "The same goes for school systems. So you can pull all these groups apart for more specific learning." Customized classes are usually for between 15 and 20 people and take between eight and 45 hours to complete over a 12 to 15-week period, according to Cowan. At the end of the program, students are expected to have learned between 40 and 50 phrases that are pertinent to their jobs, as well as basic conversational phrases. Sutula, whose company provides learning materials to 350 community colleges and school districts nationwide, says occupational Spanish classes can be a quick way for managers and supervisors to become proficient in communicating with their primarily Spanish-speaking employees. "Adults just don't have time to learn Spanish in the same way they would have in high school or college." Sutula says his company's programs focus on "short, quick, non-detailed responses" to questions to allow for a minimum of confusion between managers and employees. One of Workplace Spanish's clients is the City of Atlanta, where Commissioner Benita Ransom is responsible for 8,400 city employees, many of whom don't speak Spanish but must interact on a daily basis with Spanish-speaking residents. "Our workers need to be able to communicate with our customers," she says. Ransom initiated an occupational Spanish class for her employees in November 2006, and to date 180 employees have taken the class, which consists of eight sessions held twice a week for two hours at a time. Classes are divided according to department, which allows instructors to concentrate on specific words or phrases depending on the work each department does. "Whether it's for the courts or water department or fire department, we focus on the terms they use on a regular basis," she says. Nicole Porter, one city employee who has already gone through the training, gives it high marks. "It's free training, and I feel like it's a part of my compensation because it's personal enrichment and training at the same time," she says. Nancy Preffer, who works on the floor in BioLab's conveyer belt area, signed up to take the occupational Spanish classes for a few hours after work each week last year. She says she uses what she learned in class on a weekly basis even though she considers herself far from fluent. "You don't have to know a lot or speak it fluently, but if you can catch certain words, [Spanish-speaking colleagues] can understand what you're saying," she says. "In our plant, when we have Spanish-speaking staffers come in, it's really good because [occupational Spanish classes] give you the information you need, like how to say '15 minute break at 10:30' or 'Wear your safety glasses' in Spanish. "Anything new I can learn is a plus," she says. "It may not help me every day, but you never know when it will come in handy."
November 1, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications |
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