Whether your temporary foreign workers are French, English or Spanish speaking, we can help!
The challenges of reception and integration
Have you ever received temporary foreign workers in your company? Whether you have or not, you know it’s a challenge and there are tips to successfully integrate temporary foreign workers and capitalize on your international recruitment.
There are many ways to integrate them, some of which work better than others, and that’s why we’re going to tell you today about our experience in this area.
Our clients have recruited French, English and Spanish speaking workers through us. They chose their recruitment pool based on the knowledge and skills they were looking for for their company, but not only. They also chose it because they found candidates who were truly interested in settling in Canada for the long term, who had a real appetite for our Quebec way of life, and a deep desire to integrate.
Was the language issue a concern? Not at all, but because we helped the companies to prepare themselves. We helped them with the language issue when it was necessary, but also with the preparation of their teams.
The team in place: reassure them of your intentions
Understand the concerns of existing employees
To begin with, integrating temporary foreign workers requires reassuring the teams on site.
Imagine yourself as an employee of a company for which you have worked for several years as a day laborer. You like your job, your company, you respect the pace, the schedule and the deadlines. You know that your employers are short of workers to help you, but you are not directly concerned by this reality. How will you deal with the arrival of foreign workers if you are not prepared?
Some employees feel insecure about the arrival of foreign workers if they are not clearly reassured about the employer’s intentions. Employees will come up with explanations based on their fears. Without management to clearly state their short- and long-term intentions, existing teams may feel that they are at risk of losing their jobs soon.
When foreign workers come from countries where the cost of living is lower than in Quebec, the teams in place may assume that the employers plan to show the foreign employees how to do the work in order to relocate the company to another country to lower production costs.
An adapted communication strategy
That’s why the first step in welcoming foreign workers is to reassure the team in place about your intentions! Whatever the country of origin of your workers, this is important to ensure a good integration on the one hand, but also to keep your current employees confident and committed. And because we know these situations better than anyone, we can help you implement the right strategy for your company culture.
Organization of work
If you take on a large number of workers, you’ll quickly bring your production levels back up to what you’ve been waiting for. With our highly targeted recruitment, we will help you find the rare gems to take over these functions. They will have the necessary experience, knowledge, skills, and qualities to learn your own way of doing business. Depending on the type of position, they will need from a few days to a few weeks of training.
Who will train these newcomers?
There are several good answers to this question, fortunately! Depending on your situation, we will work with you to develop the best integration and training plan.
Here are some examples of training plans we have developed.
We have set up training plans in pairs with the current workers, we have also implemented internal training schools. They mobilize the employees of the existing team who like to pass on their knowledge.
What is important, however, and what we will consider with you, are your resources. How interested are your employees in passing on their knowledge? What is the best way to train and integrate that corresponds to your company culture, to your production rhythm? Is it better to slow down the pace while training new employees? Is it better to train them off-line and then integrate them into production?
These are some of the questions we ask you before accompanying you to the unique solution that suits you.
Integrating temporary foreign workers who are not yet fluent in French
Language preparation
Once you have considered these previous steps, which are important regardless of the native language of your temporary foreign workers, you can focus on their language, if that is an issue. The first point in this situation is to take advantage of the wait you and they will go through during the immigration process.
Clients recruiting from a Spanish-speaking country like to take advantage of their waiting time. To that end, some of our clients have trained managers and employees internally in the language of their future temporary foreign workers. One of them has trained four groups of eight people, including members of the human resources team and team leaders from different departments.
And it’s a winning strategy! By training your employee volunteers, they become ambassadors, you increase their employability, they are involved in a mission that is meaningful to them, and it is engaging and motivating for everyone. In short, it has many benefits.
Secondly, the candidates we recruit for you have a deep desire to integrate into the society they have chosen as their home. They are eager to master the language and are also recruited for their strong learning skills. They are eager to take advantage of the waiting time during the immigration process to start learning!
Translation services
Whether you have an in-house team trained in the host language of your temporary foreign workers, whether you have chosen to implement an in-house training school, whether we have started to Frenchify your future foreign workers from their country of origin or whether you are starting from scratch; with foreign workers of foreign mother tongue, you will love our translation services.
How does it work? We get completely in tune with your internal operations. From the moment of recruitment, we define together the operating mode that corresponds to your culture, your training pace, your production rate and your training method.
When the foreign workers arrive, we deploy the chosen operating mode, and we accompany your new employees to your human resources managers and trainers, translating the information until your teams are autonomous!
To remember
All of these ingredients are among our winning integration solutions, adapted to your corporate culture and internal operations. We evaluate your potential and propose solutions from the beginning of the process so that the recruitment of your workers is a lasting solution to your problem of qualified and motivated workers. And so that you can retain both your existing teams and your future workers. Let’s talk about it for more details!
Phoenix GMI offers international recruitment and immigration services for Quebec and Canadian companies, and for candidates wishing to make a life project in Canada.
Our multidisciplinary, rigorous and dedicated team implements concrete and personalized strategies for its clients.