Multi-Lingual Safety Training in Onboarding

In an increasingly diverse workplace, you can't afford not to communicate effectively with your employees. Training and orientation are an important part of the new-hire onboarding process. How can you ensure that your entire workforce gets the most out of this experience? One solution is to use a highly flexible portal like our AllegroHR acculturation product.

Safety is Essential

Ensuring that employees understand each document they sign is important during transactional onboarding. These compliance issues are covered in detail on Jay and Chuck's blogs. However, comprehension is just as critical when it comes to acculturation and your safety training materials. The risks of ignoring language requirements in this area are too great to ignore.

When something gets lost in translation on a job site, a worker may end up seriously injured or worse. As an employer, your exposure may be extensive enough to put your company out of business. This type of catastrophic event is less likely to happen in the first place if you take responsibility for making safety instructions accessible to every employee. If a workplace accident occurs in spite of your best efforts, at least negligence during onboarding won't be the reason.

Regulations and Compliance

OSHA requires that employers present all safety training in a manner that workers can comprehend. For example, if employees are given day-to-day job instructions in Spanish, OSHA requires that their training take place in that language as well. Limited vocabulary must also be considered. This means it's a good idea to keep safety notices and instructions simple and straightforward. The AllegroHR Acculturation Portal is multi-lingual so you can tailor it to suit the needs of your workforce.

You should also note that written language isn't all that's involved here. OSHA's training standards policy statement points out that not all employees are fully literate. Handing a safety manual to someone who can't read or understand it is not adequate. That's another reason an Emerald Software Group acculturation onboarding system is so valuable. You can use it to present videos and podcasts in addition to text-based information. This will ensure that your safety messages come through loud and clear.