multicultural

That Latino employee that nods his head up and down and says: “Yes, yes, I understand…” may not really understand what is being said and that can be a real problem for your operation. 

So what’s the big deal, you might ask? 

This is a question that sometimes comes up when discussing the opportunities and challenges of having Spanish-speaking employees in agricultural operations. Often, the perception is that if you don’t know the language, it can be pretty hard to train these individuals to do what you need them to do. Knowing the language helps, but this by itself, won’t guarantee success when training your Spanish-speaking employees.

Sometimes, training is delegated to someone who may be bilingual, but may not have the skills or abilities to train. Other times, we are so busy getting things done, that we run out of time to do the training and when we get to it, we approach it without a well thought-out and organized training plan. Training should be viewed as an investment that will return employees that produce results with consistent quality and will help in your retention efforts.

Is Latino Labor in the Agricultural Industry a Thing of the Past? This past June I had the opportunity to address pork producers at the World Pork Expo (audio and slides). At that time, the key message of my presentation had to do with the idea that producers no longer had to worry about finding workers to get the job done at their farms.

Perhaps a sign of relief; at least something producers did not have to worry about during these turbulent times… It made sense… When you considered the high unemployment rates prevalent for several months and the number of displaced workers willing to do just about any type of job, most producers had a lot more job applications to choose from and fewer jobs to fill as employees “stayed put” waiting for the recession storm to go by.