Day 1 — Promoting Communication Across the Language Barrier
HENNGE is a company that encourages the hiring of diverse employees — specifically, those who come to Japan from other countries — so what does communication between employees look like?
You might already know that at HENNGE, we’ve changed our official language to English. This opens our potential pool of talent to anyone worldwide as most countries incorporate learning English in their required education curriculums, and some countries even adopt English as a national language when there are many different local languages. Sounds like we’ve joined a global English-speaking Utopia, right?
Hold on a minute.
While HENNGE does use English extensively internally, our headquarters are still in Japan, and we have a lot of Japanese clients. Additionally, we can’t ignore the fact that anyone who comes to live in Japan needs to use Japanese outside of our office. To fulfill these criteria perfectly, we’d need to limit our potential employees to only those who are already bilingual and fluent in both Japanese and English, which is a significantly smaller group of people.
The good news is learning a new language is possible at any age. The bad news is learning a second (or third) language takes a lot of time and dedication. No matter the external rewards such as promotion, salary increase, or bonuses, an individual is only going to put in as much effort as they think is necessary. Intrinsic motivation, that is, a reason to do something that comes from inside yourself, is the most powerful motivator after all.
Some people, like myself, find their language learning motivation early on — I wanted to be able to read books in their original text, watch TV shows without subtitles, and play games in their original language to better understand the humor and references. I’ve been able to continue studying Japanese on my own for over 15 years using this motivation. However, I can’t simply insist that others do the same; they have to find their own reason to study.
A common reason to learn a second language is to communicate with people from other countries. Whether it’s to gain a new perspective on your own culture, or learn more about someone else’s, interpersonal communication can be a great motivator.
In our company, we have the unique opportunity to speak with people from all over the world — not only do we have many nationalities represented in our full-time and part-time staff, but we regularly have interns through our Global Internship Program. Many of us are actively working to improve our English or Japanese skills, and the best way to develop speaking skills in any language is to converse with native speakers.
I think many people here are aware of this opportunity, but just realizing it may not change a person’s actions. Depending on your culture, you may or may not feel comfortable speaking with those you’ve never been introduced to, even if you work at the same company. Japan in particular seems to have a culture of keeping to one’s self and preferring an introduction or specific reason to begin an interaction with someone new. If you want to talk to a new person, maybe you’ll feel it’s a bother to approach them without a specific purpose, and even if you don’t worry about that, you might feel uncertain about your ability to communicate.
Operating on the assumption that at least 10% of my coworkers probably wanted to talk more with others — especially those whose native language is different than their own — I created a channel in our Slack workspace specifically to promote this kind of communication called #fun-language-cafe.
Let’s talk about the name for a minute:
The fun prefix is a company-wide policy that any non-work related channel must start with — this makes it easy for anyone to search for and join the various hobby channels we have.
Next, language cafe — I wanted to invoke an image of casual communication, where visitors could join without any serious commitment or obligation.
My first goal was just to gather participants by casually talking to my bilingual coworkers, and those I knew were already interested in furthering their language abilities. I didn’t want anyone to feel they had to join the channel, since that defeated my purpose: I wanted to create an environment that was so welcoming and rewarding that people would want to join, and this would foster the internal motivation to improve that I mentioned earlier.
By doing this, we started with around 20 members in the channel. I suggested that members could post something they’d learned recently, or ask a question about something in any language. I had thoughts of holding after work or weekend events, but then took a poll to see who would be interested in having lunch together. Many responded, so I scheduled a lunch time and location in our office, and promoted it on one of our companywide channels.
This lunch proved to be big success! Not only did we have over 10 participants, but the channel members doubled just from promoting the lunch on the general channel.
Over the next few months, I continued to post regularly in the channel, explaining various English idioms or vocabulary that I would encounter while reading or listening to podcasts. Sometimes I’d promote a theme for the month, such as idioms relating to food or body parts, and try to encourage others to share idioms in their native languages.
We started regularly holding English-only and Japanese-only lunches, keeping the group size relatively small (less than 10 people) to allow each person more time to practice speaking. The conversations would range from instructive and useful to almost nonsense, when we would explore unusual concepts or phrases. In any case, everyone was having a good time!
Then, a couple months ago I had an idea to hold 1-on-1 lunches. While small group lunches do allow for a lot of conversation, there’s always one or two people who don’t speak up as often, and I also wanted to start encouraging inter-division communication. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes it’s difficult to simply approach a new person for a conversation without a specific reason, and since our day to day count of employees in the building is quite large, it’s impossible to know everyone.
I put together a survey to check the following information for matching:
• Japanese Language Ability
• English Language Ability
• Division
• Number of potential partners you would prefer (1, 2–4, unlimited)
My reasoning went something like this:
• I don’t want to match those who are beginner level English and beginner level Japanese together as it will be quite hard for them to communicate smoothly.
• I want to if at all possible match those who are not in the same division, with the assumption that those in the same division have more opportunities to meet and talk together.
• I don’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed with new interactions, especially those who are proficient at both languages.
At first, I hoped we would get maybe 20 participants, but as the week went on, I promoted this opportunity pretty aggressively, and somehow ended up with over 50 participants!
After closing the application window, I proceeded to match all 50+ participants by hand. Next time I run this — and I plan to organize this quarterly — I hope to do it with the help of technology, as this ended up being a somewhat time consuming task. In the end I managed to create pairs that met my criteria, including some requests for partners who spoke languages other than English or Japanese!
I sent messages through Slack to notify the matched pairs, and instructed them to schedule their lunches at their convenience. Of course, I also had my own partners to organize lunches with!
I solicited some feedback afterwards, and while there are points that could be improved, it seems the reception was overall very positive.
I want to emphasize that over 50 people volunteered to spend their precious free time during lunch to talk with someone new, and help that person practice speaking a second language, as well as practice speaking in their own second language. There was no other incentive such as reimbursement for lunch cost or a mini-bonus of any kind. This reinforces my idea that many of my coworkers want to communicate more, and improve their speaking skills in their second (or third!) language, they just need the opportunity.
HENNGE already offers many large group opportunities to communicate such as the MTS after parties, Communication Lunch, and so on, but no situation is truly one size fits all. By providing another style of opportunity focused on small group language learning, I hope to achieve three things:
- Support all language learners in our company.
The number of people who are equally fluent in both English and Japanese is quite low, and since most of us are in the same boat of needing to practice, it’s ideal if we can help each other out in our learning process.
2. Encourage communication across divisions and sections.
Knowing more people in your own company — especially those outside your own division and section — is an important factor in facilitating projects and goals that are companywide. By being familiar with your coworkers, you can easily know who is the right person to ask for help, and you will be aware of what other departments are doing to avoid unintentionally making more work for them, or even yourself by finding opportunities to collaborate early!
3. Inspire and encourage those who feel frustrated by their lack of progress.
Language learning is a long, long journey. It can also be difficult to find methods that work for you personally, especially if those methods are not promoted by your schools or teachers. Sometimes, language learning can also feel very lonely, like you are the only one struggling to understand what you hear or read, or form the sentences to say the things you want to say.
Most of all, I want to help others realize that they are not alone in their struggle. In fact, I’m still struggling too!
HENNGE has a unique environment, and we’re still experimenting with ways to improve communication between employees with very different cultural and language backgrounds. What’s most important is we continue to try different things, listen to the feedback we receive, observe the results, and change accordingly. ‘Change’ is our name after all!
(Illustrations from https://icons8.com/ and https://www.irasutoya.com/ used in this post)
This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2019. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2019 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2019.
