The power of multilingual management

RCS Influencer Jake Magalsky recommends embracing the struggle of learning a second language to ease the friction of communication.

The language barrier is a very real issue in the construction industry in the United States these days. Although many people are bilingual, there are still a large portion of managers and supervisors who only speak one language and work with a large workforce that speaks a different language. Because of the importance of communication, this language barrier cannot be ignored.

I highly recommend embracing the struggle of learning a second language to ease the friction of communication. Furthermore, we require at least one English speaking person for each crew to be on every job site, all the time. Also, we have safety and quality protocols and other printed material in two languages.

Because Spanish is the most prevalent second language for our company, many of our printed materials have English on the front side and Spanish on the back side. When doing this, it is important to not rely solely on Google translate for accuracy of these documents. You should have somebody who is bilingual look them over for errors.

Here is a brief story that ended up being quite hilarious. On one quality checklist for our residential shingle crews, we have a checklist item for "exposed shiner nail heads". The Spanish word for nail is clavos. However, the Spanish word for fingernail is uña. Google translate interpreted the document to say in Spanish, "Watch out for exposed, shining fingernails!" This has created quite a few laughs with our Hispanic crews and although we have corrected it, nobody has forgotten it!

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