PEOPLE ROUND THE WORLD
“At the moment I am working from our
New York office and I have been very busy helping my son move into his new
apartment here. It is very interesting to observe the different culture in
regard to customer service. Absolutely everything can be delivered from sushi
to sofas and from your favourite cocktail at 3am to your pets being delivered
back home after their walk and grooming.
I cannot get over the amount of little
doggies that live in a city of millions of small apartments. If you want to
earn good money and you like the fresh air, then dog walking seems to be a
sought after career - $20 per hour, per dog and up to 5 dogs at a time;
exercise is just a bonus. I know this is ridiculous and please do not tell
anyone that I am sharing this with you but I found myself tailing (excuse
the pun) a dog walker with 5 pooches walking around Central Park. No, it wasn’t
that I was considering a career as a dog-walker and wanted to get a feel for
the work but I was checking out to see if the dog-walker picked up the poo as
demanded by State law. To my horror…Uchhh, yuck, yuck, yuck the dog lady
collected 3 bags of poo. O.M.G not for me!
On a more serious note, thebigword is
very proud of the fact that we have won a number of awards for the training of
our staff. It is interesting to see that when our experts visit our global
offices how their style of training needs to be adapted to the culture of the
people that they are training. The Americans are very nurturing in their
training, encouraging people to talk and ask questions. The Germans seem to
take copious notes and listen very attentively. The British are more direct
with their delivery and the people in our Asian offices have a huge appetite
for good quality written material. However, the challenge that our company
and any other international companies have is that not only do you have
to adapt to cultural styles but you need to deliver written material in their
own language and to achieve excellent results you must also be able to deliver
the courses in the native language of the audience. This is something that we
have not always done enough but it is certainly going to be a rule for the
future.
We have so many new fantastic technology developments and so many new products that have been made available for our customers. Yet it is a total waste of time if the customers do not understand what we have available and this can only be achieved by training our staff and breaking the final barrier and that of course is language.
I am going to lie down now as my back
is aching from carrying boxes.
Have a lovely weekend- and I will be
in contact with you next week.”
Larry
