CEO's Notebook

CEOs discuss: Avoiding audits; communicating with non-English-speaking employees; fishing for big-name partners; and a can't-miss plan for cutting costs. Plus: "My Biggest Mistake," by ...for Dummies creator John J. Kilcullen.

Hands On

Lost in the Translation

Communication is tough. It's even tougher when workers don't speak your language.

By Mike Hofman

Managing workers who don't speak English as their first language is tricky. Don't deal with it properly, and you risk problems ranging from poor customer service to diminished productivity to poor morale. "Organizations have to recognize that languages may be a potential problem," says Lisa Willis Johnson, chairwoman of the Society of Human Resource Management's workplace-diversity committee. "Lots of employees have very important skills, but they don't communicate in English well."

Semifreddi's, a $7.1-million artisan-bread bakery in Emeryville, Calif., bumped right up against the language barrier -- and decided to bump back, with a campaign mounted by CEO Tom Frainier. Frainier believed he had a track record "as an accessible, available, communicative guy," but he now realizes he was "delusional" in regard to his company's language barrier. Frainier speaks only English, unlike most of his 100 workers, who hail from Mexico, Laos, China, Peru, Cambodia, Yemen, and Vietnam.

One typical type of problem surfaced last year. Frainier had asked workers not to park on one side of the bakery because he wanted to reserve those spaces for customers' cars. Some employees misunderstood, thinking he was telling them not to drive to work. "I had made the classic Ugly American mistake of talking slowly and loudly, and assuming that people would understand me," Frainier says. But they hadn't.

The parking problem, however, paled in comparison with Frainier's next challenge: open-book management, which entailed regularly sharing detailed financial information about the company with his workers. "I would gather all of my employees from different shifts together for a big meeting, and I'd rattle off a bunch of numbers," Frainier recalls. "I would ask everybody if they understood the information, and everybody would nod. I didn't realize that they were just being polite."

When Frainier promoted two Latino employees to management posts, he asked them to help disseminate information to their fellow Spanish speakers. He also discontinued the practice of having big meetings. Now he speaks to small groups of workers who have similar English skills so that nobody feels intimidated about asking questions. Frainier has translators at every meeting, and he asks his managers to check in with him daily.

So far, so good. The CEO says that he's getting much more detailed feedback from his employees on everything from policy changes to individual career goals. And he says that the new language sensitivity has been a boon for company morale. In fact, he believes it has helped put the company on track to add $400,000 in new revenues this year.

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Your Basic qué pasa?

Communicating with non-English-speaking workers isn't just an intellectual exercise; it's a daily, hands-on challenge, says Lisa Willis Johnson of the Society of Human Resource Management. Johnson also serves as human-resources director at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, in Columbus, which employs natives of China, India, Jordan, and El Salvador. She recommends these techniques to aid communication:

Establish a routine.
Have regular meetings with only two or three agenda points. That way, employees get used to processing information presented orally, but they're not overwhelmed.

Give written instructions.
Employees may read English better than they understand a person who is speaking it.

Learn foreign phrases.
Try picking up a few phrases in the languages your employees speak, and ask other managers to do the same. "That helps morale," Johnson explains. "The person comes away thinking, 'Wow, my supervisors took the time to learn a little bit of my language, so I should learn a little bit of theirs." --M.H.

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Hot Tips

Need great people? Add an executive recruiter to your management team. That's the move Madeline Schroeder made when she was hired as CEO of Mambo.com Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up. To give her business a recruiting edge, Schroeder chose as her first hire an executive recruiter named Mark DeWitt. She persuaded him to give up his own practice and join her dot-com, using the lure of stock options and a potential public offering. DeWitt signed on and has helped the company add 51 of its 55 employees in just one year. And DeWitt has also helped Schroeder recruit private investors. "What an executive recruiter does is source and close candidates, and he was able to apply those skills to angel financing as well," Schroeder explains. --M.H.

If you own more than one company, you may risk losing your small-business exemption under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The Department of Labor sometimes classifies a cluster of businesses as an "integrated employer" if the companies are consolidated in some way. Franchised and spin-off business models are particularly vulnerable to that charge. You might be an integrated employer if your company and another company have a collective-buying agreement or common ownership and management, file joint tax returns, or share a location, board members or employees, or banking relationships. Having any one of those items doesn't make you an integrated employer, but if you have more than one, make sure you're complying with the FMLA, just to be safe. --M.H.