Charting roads to advancement can give employees an incentive to stick around. But language barriers pose roadblocks to that success.
At The Kati Roll Company, a five-unit Indian street food chain in New York City and London, the biggest obstacle to achieving management roles or even front-of-house positions is language, says Managing Director Anil Bathwal. “We feel that their potential is being stymied and blocked by their lack of English proficiency, and if we offer a growth plan for people, we believe everyone can go from dishwasher to general manager,” Bathwal says.
Many of the workers at Kati Roll Company are first-generation immigrants. The two main non-English languages spoken in both the front and back of house are Bengali (the national language of Bangladesh) and Spanish. Kitchen workers can get by without perfect knowledge of English, Bathwal says; but without it, many cannot get ahead.
To get over the hurdle, Kati Roll Company and other restaurants are investing in their staff’s language proficiencies to help streamline communication and accelerate career development within the organization.
At Curry Up Now—a restaurant group with food trucks, restaurants and bars in San Francisco—every member of the team is trained to do a multitude of tasks from cashier to cook. With that kind of dissolution between the front and back of house, the need to facilitate communication between a mostly nonnative English-speaking staff is even more important. “Communication is all about keeping [processes] very, very simple,” says co-founder Akash Kapoor.