Expanding your business into a global market requires hiring employees from new regions. While there’s no one-size-fits-all global expansion program, developing an effective localization strategy can help ensure that your teams are aligned and enabled with the right resources.
An effectively localized L&D strategy should incorporate what employees expect: a seamless, asynchronous or hybrid training experience. You’ll want to empower your new employees while considering different laws, regulations, and workplace expectations in each market.
In today’s blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of eLearning localization and provide a 5-step checklist to get started.
Employees need to understand not only the company values, but also their roles and expectations in the workplace. However, if not given in their language of choice, this information can get muddled and miscommunicated. That said, eLearning localization paves the path for global employee success by creating engaging and personalized training in languages they’re most familiar and comfortable with. The result? Higher retention of new skills and information that can be applied to their roles.
When entering a new market, you’ll need to take care of your employees and create a safe working environment. This means complying with up-to-date workplace safety and conduct regulations, and putting the proper safeguards in place to protect your employees.
It’s especially important that more sensitive topics, such as anti-harassment, aren’t misunderstood or lost in translation. eLearning localization ensures that your employees are properly trained to recognize and deal with workplace hazards. They’ll also better understand what is appropriate workplace behavior. As you foster a safe workplace, your employees will feel more valued and committed to your company.
You might’ve noticed that successful global enterprises pour a lot of resources into their HR department. Maintaining high employee satisfaction and retention can make a huge difference in reducing the amount of money and time spent on hiring and training new workers.
That said, creating locale-specific courses and open lines of communication channels that are in your employees preferred languages are key to making your workforce feel valued and empowered. As a result, your employees will feel safe and comfortable to proactively express any feedback or grievances to the company. Early signs of employee turnover will allow your organization to resolve any conflicts, such as poor management, lack of advancement, or limited work-life balance, before it becomes a widespread issue that hurts your bottom line.
It’s time to plan an effective approach towards your company’s localization and global L&D initiatives. Here are 5 critical steps to bear in mind.
The eLearning localization partner you choose should be aligned with your company objectives. For the best experience and results from your L&D translation strategy, you should ideally find a collaborative and active GX partner that can help you outline what success looks like.
When picking a vendor, ask what project management tools they use for optimization. Can they meet your budget and deadline needs through affordable pricing and reasonable turnaround times? How effectively do they track relevant key performance indicators (KPIs)?
Finally, you should find a partner that leverages AI-enabled technologies to optimize efficiencies, accuracy, and speed. A good GX partner will offer you the best bang for your buck, while ensuring translation quality, accuracy, as well as impact.
Market research is even more critical than usual in this case. Entering a market in a new region means you need to understand nuances in culture, laws, and regulations in each locale. Otherwise, you may be at risk of alienating your new audience and hires.
Respecting and addressing market-specific workplace expectations is often difficult without subject matter experts. For companies that want to cultivate a healthy work environment compatible with the new market, investing in market research should be a priority.
There are optimal ways to communicate and interact in every kind of relationship. For businesses, you need to understand the company-employee relationship. If your team is prioritizing employee training content it may be helpful to mirror successful teacher-student or mentor-mentee relationships or teaching styles in the region.
To create the foundation for success, consider the following questions:
• How should information best be shared between the parties?
• What work culture do you want to foster vs. what is the local attitude towards your kind of work culture?
• What are cultural differences to know and faux pas to avoid?
For example, in America, work-life balance is a priority. Employees expect to be able to clock out, and depending on the industry or team, it’s common for coworkers not to socialize often outside of work hours. However, Japanese work culture prioritizes team bonding to optimize collaboration and networking – it’s essentially socially expected for workers in Japan to hang out and party after work. If your company wants to succeed in a new region with new hires, it’s important to get a good understanding of expected differences.
To better understand your employees, you can hire a knowledgeable consultant. In post-pandemic times, many businesses have decided to offer hybrid and online training courses to facilitate learning and meet the needs of employees.
Scalability will enable you to grow as your sales volume increases in the new market. When it comes to eLearning localization and L&D, it’s a good idea to invest in future-friendly, advanced technologies such as:
• AI-enabled translations: skilled linguists review AI-generated translation suggestions instead of starting from scratch.
• Contextual AI models: retraining models enable higher accuracy, greater consistency, and closer alignment to each customer’s specific brand voice.
• Large language models: deliver translations with higher accuracy, ultimately driving improved translation quality and increased translation velocity.
• Connectors: send, receive, and monitor the status of translated content directly in existing systems (i.e CMS or LMS) and workflows.
This final step should be done over and over again. You want to continuously look at KPIs to ensure you’re on the right track and that your localized eLearning content is resonating with your employees. The businesses with the most impressive longevity, relevance, and success will repeatedly optimize their localization and L&D strategy based on the insightful metrics and data they collect.
KPIs to measure include:
• Employee Retention and Engagement
• Knowledge Retention and Application
• Business Productivity and Performance
• Training Efficiency and Pace (e.g. time spent on each course)
• Employee Feedback & Reviews
Engaging global experiences and successful L&D programs feed into each other to generate successful outcomes.
Lilt’s Global Experience platform is the leading AI solution for good reason: We offer high-quality, AI-powered localization services at an affordable price so you can focus on creating an exceptional global L&D program. Request a live demo today.