At our three largest depots, about half of the permanent staff and most of the seasonal agency workers have a first language other than English. When we asked last year, the list ran to fourteen languages, with Polish, Romanian, Punjabi and Portuguese the largest. Every screen we provide, every security warning, every service desk article and every phone call to the desk is in English only.
For years I regarded this as a matter for human resources and site managers, who handle induction and safety briefings in several languages as a matter of course. Then we looked at our own figures. Staff at those three depots raised about a third fewer tickets per head than the company average, which I had once quoted as a sign of stable systems. Over the same period their supervisors raised tickets on their behalf at four times the rate of any other site. People were not having fewer problems. They were routing them through the one colleague whose English they trusted. Our phishing simulations told the same story from the other side: click rates at those depots were double the average, on messages written in fluent, idiomatic English that some recipients could only half read, which is exactly the condition an attacker would choose.
I think IT services for companies like ours will be multilingual by default within a decade, in the same way they gradually became accessible by default. The workforce in logistics, care, food production and construction already is. The cost of providing it has fallen far enough to remove the excuse.
We have started with the parts where a misunderstanding costs most. The handheld and warehouse screens now offer the five largest languages, with the text translated and then checked by staff at the sites who speak them, rather than published straight from a translation tool. Security warnings and the short guidance on reporting a suspicious message exist in all five. The service desk has an interpreting line it can bring into a call within a minute, and the self service articles most used by depots are being rewritten in plainer English first.
For most of my career, speaking English was an unstated requirement for using the systems my department provides. For a growing share of the people who keep this company running, it is no longer one we can assume.
– Serguey Shinder
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