 Know your team
The cultural knowledge and languages of your staff can be audited and mapped to the needs of your customers and workforce, creating a valuable resource for your business.
This can help to improve communication, open new opportunities and motivate your staff.
How to conduct a language and cultural skills audit
Read the key steps below and then download our sample audit form.
- Identify your target markets and the languages and cultures of your customers or workforce.
- Look at the job roles in your company and decide in what capacity and to what level languages are needed. Are they used in negotiations, general conversation or 'meet and greet'?
- Find out the languages spoken by your existing team and their level of ability - plus their cultural knowledge.
- Check whether your team have any specialist or technical language knowledge for your business sector.
- Remember to look at English language ability in this audit, as staff may need to improve these skills to carry out their job role more effectively.
- Record details of employees' experience living and working abroad or doing business with particular countries and cultures in the UK.
- Consider using the National Language Standards and National Occupational Standards for Intercultural Working to help you benchmark and record the range of abilities across the team.
- Collate the results of your audit to identify where you can share knowledge within your team or can fill language and cultural skills gaps through:
Useful tools and support
Sample language and cultural audit form
RLN London's audit form can help get you started with a language and cultural audit for your business.
Language by country
The infoplease website provides an excellent break-down of languages spoken by country across the world.
Export Communications Review
The Export Communications Review service is a UK Trade and Investment scheme. A registered consultant can visit your company to discuss your current business activities, look at the way you tackle the language and cultural issues that arise and make recommendations to improve your international communications.
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