Level 5 – Building for the long-term

What started as a few conversations about learning Finnish at work can end up shaping the core policies and practices of your whole organisation. This lifts the impact of your initiatives to a whole new level – resources can be allocated, special roles can be assigned, and prospective employees can be confident that their language-learning goals will be supported.

A woman is sitting in a beanbag and she is surfing on her mobile phone. — Photo: Anni Hanén. All rights reserved.

The order of these levels has been shaped to form a natural progression for you, an international employee in an all- or mostly-English work environment who would like to strengthen opportunities and support for Finnish learning on the job and, in the process, also strengthen the role of Finnish in your workplace.
You are ideally placed to take the grassroots, bottom-up approach presented here: trying things out with individual colleagues and helping them to speak clearer, then doing the same in team meetings or other small group settings, then seeing if these experiments work and catch on, becoming wider practices throughout the organisation.

All of this feeds into the top level – organisational policies and structures that are recorded in official documents and allocated sufficient resources. To have influence at this level, you need to start the conversation with your organisation’s management, if you haven’t already done so.

One way to approach this would be to share with them your motivation for the things you’ve already initiated and some of the positive results you’ve seen. You could then tip them off about the excellent Monikielisen työyhteisön opas (Handbook for Multilingual Work Communities), which provides both a broad perspective on the importance of language awareness as well as many practical tools for developing an organisation’s language strategy. Many of the ideas in these articles have been drawn from this handbook, which was developed by Language Boost and the Multilingual Worklife and Means of Participation research project.

The rest of this article is designed to give you a taste of what this top-level language policy can include. For more insight on these topics, and if your Finnish reading skills are strong enough, you can give yourself some good reading practice and dive into Chapter 8 of the Monikielisen työyhteisön opas.

Let’s start with the organisation’s overall document on language-related matters: the language strategy. In essence, this sets out
- what languages the organisation uses and when, and
- what the organisation thinks and does about language learning, multilingualism and parallel language use (using multiple languages in the same situation).

To get a sense of what this looks like in practice, one good example is the language strategy of Familia ry, the Finnish association for intercultural families.

Compared to the initiatives you have already taken, getting your organisation to draw up, or further develop, their language strategy can bring many extra benefits. Firstly, a good strategy will require a comprehensive process of gathering employees’ opinions on language matters and initiating organisation-wide discussions. This can help to clarify people’s thinking on these questions, get out into the open hidden tensions and discontent, and also stir up and release enthusiasm and energy for new initiatives and practices.

Secondly, shaping a clear, consistent language strategy requires an organisation to reflect on how its language practices relate to its core values and objectives. When a language strategy is rooted in values and objectives such as inclusivity, utilising all employees’ cultural capital, and supporting international employees’ social integration, it is then much easier to establish it as a core part of the organisation’s activities – rather than an ‘extra thing’ to be thought about if and when there is time for it.

Thirdly, by getting support from top-level management and drawing up an official document, resources and time can be allocated for new language-related practices and development work can become long-term and systematic. Below are two examples of such strategy-based practices, and more can be found in the Monikielisen työyhteisön opas.

In Sweden, the shortage of care workers has been effectively tackled for many years by training many care workers to also work as language advocates. These advocates support the orientation and Swedish learning of new, foreign-language employees and also encourage and guide the whole work community in how to do the same.

The same role can also be an effective tool in organisations where the main working language is English but steps are being taken to move towards more multilingual working practices. And you yourself, as someone who has been honing their skills as a language catalyst, may be the ideal candidate for the job!

Appointing and resourcing a language advocate can be a powerful way to raise the profile of a company’s language strategy and ensure that words get translated into action. Because work time has been allocated for their tasks, people can approach them with language-related questions without fear of overburdening them, and the advocates themselves can work steadily to implement and develop the company’s multilingual practices.

The tasks of a language advocate normally include
- supporting language learners in both written and spoken communication
- training new employees in language-aware working practices
- helping to resolve language-related misunderstandings
- raising the visibility of practices and questions related to language choice and communication
- supporting language-aware working practices throughout the organisation

One thing that a language advocate might find themselves doing is running language workshops. These offer a regular opportunity for language learners to develop their Finnish skills during work time with support from native Finnish colleagues or even external language teachers and other experts.

If your company’s working language is only English, these workshops could focus on Finnish for free-time activities or informal social situations at work. If the company is moving towards more multilingual working practices – in meetings or written communication, for example – then the workshops can focus on the particular language needed for these situations. This kind of focus on work-related Finnish can be powerful, because it offers specific language that learners can quickly put into use, and which can be hard to get from general Finnish language courses.

Whatever the topics chosen for the workshops, the important thing is that these topics arise from the participants own questions, challenges, and language learning goals, and that the learning takes place through group discussion and/or use of authentic dialogues and simulation activities.

The Monikielisen työyhteisön opas has many other practices and insights to offer for building and developing a language-aware and learner-positive workplace. And the ideas don’t stop there, of course. As you grow your role as a language catalyst, don’t limit yourself to the boundaries of your own company: reach out, network and share ideas with other companies that are on a similar journey, and get in touch also with the Language Boost researchers and coordinators. We’d love to hear from you!