Within an organization, language is crucial to creating a cooperative and friendly environment. On the contrary, the state of not being able to communicate well can be troublesome. It can get in the way of productivity, smooth functions, inter-organizational cooperation, and collaborative growth.
As an employer or CEO, you may feel this linguistic restriction is holding back your company a bit. That’s where you find the need to assess the proficiency of your employees and identify areas where training can help the employees gain it.
How Important is it to assess language proficiency?
Employees may come from various backgrounds that are different and within a company they have to work as a team. Similarly, representing your company to foreign clients or partners requires your employees to be proficient in a certain language.
So this assessment is crucial for many reasons.
Identifying areas of improvement
The one purpose behind assessing language skills is to pick out the areas where one needs improvement. For instance, one might be able to understand a language better than they are able to speak. Similarly, among reading, writing, speaking, and listening, one may be lacking in one while good at the other.
Once you have identified this, you can work better to improve them or find ways to train your employees.
Ensuring smooth communication
Identification of weak points and improving them can ensure smooth communication within and outside of the company. Without proper assessment, it’s not possible to communicate effectively because it can cause unwanted pauses.
Boosting confidence
Proficiency always gives one confidence and they are able to express their ideas in a better way. It also increases employees’ focus on the intent of the communication rather than the language. This way, better presentations of the most important projects in front of your clients can also result in a huge success.
Better representing the company
Your employees are the face of your company for outsiders which gives rise to the need to assess their proficiency. Better assessment results in improvement and it all ends up in making your employees represent the best image of your business.
Performing well
For the continual growth and development of your company, the employees have to perform well in every department – since they not only communicate with clients but also with customers.
It requires better communication skills and as an employer, you must work equally on the language needs of every employee.
Strengthening interpersonal relationship
You want your employees to be one team and don’t care about their proficiency holding them back from working as a team – you’re mistaken. Language can become a barrier to understanding each other and expressing ideas effectively. Therefore, strengthening interpersonal relationships among employees requires proficiency assessment.
How to identify language training needs?
You need to carry out the following steps to effectively identify the language training needs of your employers.
Create a friendly environment
The first thing that you need to work on is to create a friendly environment where everyone can confidently interact. There has to be a code of conduct so that no employee feels uncomfortable or embarrassed while expressing their ideas.
Analyze the employees’ job roles
Analyzing roles can make you assess language skills better and work on them properly. For instance, employees who attend to customers may need to work more on their proficiency.
Encourage employees to participate in linguistic activities
Conducting surveys, asking for feedback and day-to-day communication should have the use of the targeted language. You need to encourage your employees to participate in these activities to find out their flaws.
Hire language experts
You can hire language professionals to better identify the areas where employees need improvement. They can also help you efficiently devise the training strategy to train your staff.
Continue the process
Language assessment is an ongoing process as language learning because proficiency can be gradually gained and there is always a margin of error. So, you have to continuously work on assessments to keep your business growing at the same pace.
Conclusion
If your company is lagging behind due to the language skills of your employees, you have to carry out a language assessment. It is important but you have to work on it wisely considering the needs of every employee. In doing so, make sure not to lower the morale of your employees and make the process counter-productive. It is because a properly executed process will end up having great success for your business.