I'm feeling sensitive after getting a review that slated my staff's English ability - I feel protective over a team that practises daily and has worked hard to improve confidence and ability.
I am curious to read other people's views on staff English levels. I am definitely from the camp of 'I am the visitor, so I am the one who should make the effort' - both in my professional life and as a traveller. I accept that there is another camp which is 'you market your hostel to international travellers, your staff must speak fluent English'.
Our place employs a total 60 staff (we have a restaurant, 90 bed hostel, bar and activity center) and my English speaking team is 6 strong. Twenty of our staff take daily English classes to improve their levels - though most did not finish high school and have relatively low exposure to people from other countries. I admire their dedication and their efforts.
Should I be considering changing our staff to add people with stronger English skills? This would have an impact on our payroll as we pay higher rates for English speakers. Should I write a very clear sign to say when our English speaking staff are working? To me it seems unreasonable of our guests to expect that every person they come across during their stay should speak English - cleaners, chefs, night porters...I wonder if you have a different view to add?
Does anyone have any good ideas/suggestions/tried and tested methods to improve English levels among staff or handling this problem?
15 years
I think receptionists should speak English. It must be a funny job when you don´t.
We had a similar problem with the breakfast ladies, which are also our cleaners. None of them speaks English, and some don´t even speak too much German (the local language). We solved this by adding a local student to their team (locals all speak English - we have to learn it at least for 6 years in school). Everybody was happy.
15 years
we've got a pretty multilingual team now - polish, lithuanian, russian, spanish, french, czech, german and of course english. i find the broken english of some of our guests a damn site easier to understand than your average scot though. i seriously struggle sometimes.
i think a lot of it depends on where you are. i think in europe its pretty expected - but im expecting to have to learn spanish pretty quickly through central america. where are you based littlebrit?
15 years
Hi LittleBritt, Replacing all the non-english speaking staff will be very expensive and a major Human Resources undertaking. As long as your staff is making the honest effort to learn the language and doing a satisfactory job I say keep them. As a matter of policy you can make all new hires to have English speaking skills as a condition of employment. Ensure all of your Management and Supervisor staff can speak English fluently or your frontline staff will not feel obligated to do so. For better or worse English is the language of business.
Good luck
15 years
Dont take it bad
Some native Englsih speakers have a certain degree of ignorance, especially if they havent travelled a lot and are quite young.
I remember some group of Australians I went with when I was around 20, they never been outside Australia and all that and they kept making fun of the Air Italia staff who spoke over the speakers to Welcome guests to the airline because of her accent...very rude and ignorant...its not as if they can speak Italian.
True English is the international language of business, but people, especially backpackers usually want to go out and see the world. Being exposed to other langauges and cultures is part of the package - including using hand signals. The fact that your staff do speak some English is an added bonus - if their not happy, tell these backpackers to get lost and check into an international 5 star hotel like the Ritz Carlton. Sometimes budget hotels/hostels cant deliver 5 star service simply because of costs.
15 years
fully agree...Two posible solutions for your problem could be:
a) provide free accomodation to someone that wants to stay for a long period of time, in exchange for english lessons for your staff. You get the whole staff trained and probably it is cheaper than sending all your staff to private lessons
b) provide free accomodation to someone that wants to stay for a long period of time, in exchange for helping in the areas where that lack of english is a problem
We tried both ideas...The first one, was a great help, and only after 2 months of daily lessons (only took as one hour from our housekeeping staff and they loved it as well)....we could see a great improvement in all their functions and communications with passengers....Easy things such as "where is my towel" " where can i put this" " What time is breakfast" were now answered by housekeeping saving heaps of time for the reception to keep with their hard work and also for pax`s not to be pissed of
Second idea, actually i love it....because having a backpacker (i always have one at the reception) is great, because other backpackers go and check on this person as they rely more on them (at the end it is one of their group, isn`t it ???) so our income for travel agency products highly increased as more our backpacker/staff was recommending things and everybody following their advise......
15 years
We had a similar problem with the breakfast ladies, which are also our cleaners. None of them speaks English, and some don´t even speak too much German (the local language).
Your staff has improved their English a lot then, at least in Vienna (both hostels). If I asked them something, they did understand and replied.
So it also could be a matter of putting that one English speaking person together with non-speakers. They will pick up some basic or most often used sentences at least in their line of work.
In LV it is funny - people are quite suprised that receptionists speak good English. But then again we have had a person giving a bad rating complaining that receptionist could not speak English or Russian, even if I know that English, Russian, Spanish and German speaking girl was working in reception that day. Go figure.
Related Pages
Log in to join discussion