Ensuring workplace compliance: Interpreting for HR departments

Businesses in a wide range of sectors rely on diverse, international workforces for their daily or seasonal operations. This work can support critical functions, keeping essential goods moving, feeding national supply chains and bringing valuable skills to the economy.

Key to ensuring smooth operations and continuity in workplaces is clear communication between employers and employees. On a practical level, no matter the working environment, when key information and working methods are fully understood by all, both team cohesion and productivity improve.

Employment compliance

An essential factor in employer-employee communication is ensuring legal and regulatory compliance. Ensuring that employment rights and obligations are fully understood can be more difficult when employees have limited English proficiency.

When it comes to compliance, employers are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their employees at work. This involves making sure that workers fully understand the conditions of their employment (such as pay, leave and break entitlements); and making sure that key safety information about the working environment (such as manual handling guidance, PPE requirements or IT safety training) is clear to employees.

This helps to set guidelines and boundaries to keep everyone safe and productive, giving companies the peace of mind that key legal obligations are understood and are being followed on the ground, while protecting employees from occupational risks and optimising their productivity.

Interpreting and HR departments

Human Resources (HR) departments, as the administrative and communicative link between the employer and employees, are responsible for ensuring compliance with the legal requirements mentioned above. This includes key responsibilities associated with hiring processes, employment contracts, employee training, parental leave, dismissals, disciplinary action and formal complaints.

When discussing important HR matters, it is vital that the employee in question understands the relevant processes of each HR operation. International HR departments therefore have a critical business need for information to be relayed in a comprehensible and unambiguous way to the employee.

That’s why, when discussing important HR matters with international employees with limited English proficiency – whether salary negotiations and queries about working conditions, or disciplinary meetings – investing in high-quality interpreting services helps to ensure that information is conveyed clearly and unambiguously.

How we can help

At AST, we offer the following interpreting services, available in 65 different languages, to assist with HR matters:

• Remote video interpreting
• Telephone interpreting
• Face-2-Face interpreting

Do you often have to communicate with international teams about important HR matters?

Get in touch here to request a competitive quote.