As more organizations become global enterprises, it is more important than ever for Human Resource Departments to understand how they can impact organization-wide globalization by adopting a global strategy specific to the needs of international employees, partners, third-party vendors and attract international talent.
If you want to stay competitive, a global strategy is essential and means employees and suppliers located around the globe are communicated to clearly – which is critical to the organization’s success and sustainable growth. Translating and localizing content for key audiences is an absolute requirement if you want to communicate more effectively, attract better talent and remain compliant.
Translations Provided by Language Services Providers
Communicating with your global workforce is crucial to engage and motivate employees. If you are a multinational company with a worldwide workforce, translating HR documents like employee handbooks and codes of conduct is a must. To reach your employees, you must adapt your business materials linguistically through translation and culturally through the localization process.
This is where an effective HR team comes into the picture: by ensuring that your corporate communications and training programs are translated into the local language of all your employees, you can have a profound impact on employee satisfaction, engagement and loyalty.
Organization-Wide Globalization for HR Professionals
To help ensure you are getting all of the support you need, our new ebook, dedicated to HR professionals covers:
- Globalization for HR Departments
- Corporate Websites
- Corporate Communications
Organization-Wide Globalization for Onboarding
When a company expands into new offices, factories, warehouses or distribution centers abroad, it needs to fill those new locations with qualified employees. HR is usually tasked with finding, signing and onboarding these new people — a task which inevitably involves a barrage of paperwork that must comply with local labor laws. For example, many countries require HR documents to be submitted in the relevant local language/s to government, labor, tax, social security and data protection authorities. In other countries, English-language HR documents are not necessarily prohibited, but they may not be legally enforceable. As such, you should always consider translating employee contracts, handbooks and training documents for non-native English speakers.
Training & eLearning
In a global business environment, HR teams are often responsible for creating localized onboarding programs for different roles and departments. One way to make training more effective is to produce online courses and videos that can be localized for employees who hold the same or similar positions in different countries (and therefore require the same training but in different languages). When you start working on a new training course, follow these three tips to make future translation attempts easier:
- Consider the reading level of your target audience: Are you training a financial analyst with an MBA, a factory manager with a high school diploma or a delivery and assembly team with little or no formal education? Be sure to create content that is at the appropriate comprehension level for each position you’re training.
- Write your course with a clear and concise sentence structure. Try using lists to write step-by-step instructions that are easy to follow and digest — and never use the passive voice!
- Avoid culture-specific examples, comedy, slang, metaphors and abbreviations. This will make it much easier, later on, to convert the course into other languages.
Corporate Communications
For your company to become a strong, well-integrated global organization, it’s important to communicate with your international employees in their own language. Your message and brand can easily get lost in translation if your internal corporate communications aren’t localized correctly. This can directly impact your team’s creativity, effectiveness and engagement. And remember: In some countries, English-only communications can be a legal problem if national language laws or mandates exist. In France, for example, the national labor code punishes employers with heavy fines if they issue certain HR communications in languages other than French.
Providing accurate translations of HR communications is difficult enough without the additional burden of keeping track of the ever-changing global legal landscape. That’s where an experienced language solutions provider (LSP) can step in to help. An LSP can ensure that you comply with worldwide language laws while skillfully localizing global corporate communications to achieve a cohesive and successful international business network.
We have recently released our new eBook, “How To Optimize Your Global Business: A Guide for Human Resources Professionals” download today to learn the ways you can improve your global communications to increase the impact of your workforce and how Morningside can support your organization.
About Morningside
Morningside, a Questel Company keeps your company in compliance with internal policies and laws and regulations by ensuring your human resources materials, communications, and eLearning and training content are accurately translated to meet requirements in all the regions in which you operate. Our network of global translators possesses deep corporate compliance expertise and knows how to accurately translate employee manuals, policies, benefits information, training videos, and more into 200 languages.
Madeline Sturdivant, Brand Marketing Manager at Morningside, a Questel Company, is an experienced marketing professional with five years in multiple disciplines, including digital, print, event, and strategy. She is responsible for the company's global marketing activities and managing relationships with the world's largest and most demanding healthcare, legal, and corporate organizations. Madeline's varied personal and professional interests drive her to continually expand her knowledge to benefit those around her.