Weeks 1 & 2
Task 1: Workplace Difficulty Case – The Language Barrier (5 marks)
(Case sourced from GO2HR Canada, www.go2hr.ca)
Tourism and hospitality is a diverse sector comprised of workers from varied cultures, backgrounds, ages, and languages. This is one of the reasons our industry is so unique. But with this diversity, comes its challenges.
Assume you are the new housekeeping manager of a large hotel chain named “Continental” where your housekeeping team is comprised of workers from all over the world ranging staff members from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Asia and Europe.
Soon after your first month as a leader, you have realised that training the housekeeping team is big a challenge to due language barriers. They prefer to work quietly if they do not have a partner speaking the same language. If they are working with a partner who speaks the same language, they prefer to speak in their own language instead of speaking in English. Although your organisation have strong existing training programs for WH&S, hygiene, stress management, etiquette, etc but workers reluctantly attend these sessions because a majority of the staff members do not understand all the aspects of a training program.
Knowing this language barrier difficulty in your workplace, You are required to address the issue techniques and practices that you may be able to use to ensure proper training has been provided.
Questions:
1. Make a list of different training techniques you can use when trying to overcome a language barrier?
2. At the end of the training, what methods can you use to determine whether or not the worker understood?
3. When developing a training plan for an employee who has English as a second language, what types of things should you consider when putting your training plan together?
A1:
A2:
A3: