Struggling with English Communication at Work? Seeking Effective Training Solutions

Dear all:

I conduct communication training at my firm for the employees. However, it's been observed that some of them still cannot communicate effectively even post-training on communication, specifically the language part. Most of the hours at work, they happen to communicate in regional languages across the floor.

I would like to do something that would help these employees to communicate effectively in English and help them move on to the next level in their career at the firm. I understand it's their proactiveness that would take them up the ladder. However, can anybody guide or suggest if any training tools, plans, or methods could be used.

Your earliest response is most awaited.

Thank you.

Regards,
KV

Make communication skills a high-level KRA. I've seen this in one of the organizations I have worked with.

Hi KV,

Please explain what kind of business the organization is in and what makes it so important to have people communicate ONLY in English. I am sure it is necessary in your business... just need to understand. I work in a manufacturing setup where regional languages (amongst staff and workers) are a common thing. Here, we have defined communication skills as ones that enable people to express themselves in a manner that is comfortably understood by others and to be able to understand what others are saying, whatever the language. In our setup, it is effective... hence my request to you to explain your business environment. Needless to mention, good English communication will surely help them go global in the long run... so no undermining that fact. I would await your response on this.

Cheers!!!

Dear Bhavana/Shikha/Raj,

I am grateful for your suggestions and guidance and the time taken out. Thank you very much. I highly appreciate your kind gesture. I work in a telecommunications cost reduction and outsourcing company.

At my firm, I conduct communication skills training that runs for a whole year. This is because the employees here can only give 2 hours a week for training due to the nature of the work and workload. However, the training has not been very effective since very often the participants cannot make it to the training sessions for various reasons like workload, daily deadlines to be met, SLAs, holidays, leaves, etc. Hence, my firm has now decided that every employee in the company has to undergo communication training (new communication batch or refresher batch) on 1 Saturday of every month, else their appraisals and growth in the company will be affected. Apart from this, I would also have my regular communication batches running from Tue through Fri. I am really confused about how to approach the Saturday trainings - where do I start? How do I choose the participants for these trainings? What could be the training contents for Advanced Communication Training sessions?

FYI, let me also mention the topics that I cover in the regular communication training batches. They are as follows:

1) Corporate Etiquette
2) Introduction to Communication
3) Communication Barriers
4) Overcoming Communication Barriers
5) Indianisms
6) Grammar
7) Punctuation
8) Phonetics
9) Accent Neutralization
10) E-mail Etiquette
11) Effective Writing
12) 20 Rules of Writing Effective Business E-mails
13) Guidelines for professional communication
14) Recommended written communication
15) Concise writing
16) Interactive communication activities - case studies, role-plays, free speech, extempore, story building, quizzes, group discussions, debates, interactive audio clips, video clips
17) Pronunciation and intonation improvement
18) Vocabulary building
19) Presentation Skills in brief
20) American Culture and Business Etiquette

So, what could be the contents of an Advanced Communication Training Session?

I am utterly in chaos. Please guide again.

With much thanks,

Regards,
KV