Business communication is mainly happening using email. It is one of the important medium of communication within organisation, vendors, customers, suppliers for many technology and tech enabled companies. While selecting any managerial person or any senior person it would be essential for the organization to verify and assess proficiency of English Language.
Article Contents
The Grounds behind Promoting Business English
Knowing how to read, write, speak fluently, and listen to English is a persuasive skill. It’s just not enough anymore. Entrepreneurs, managers, and employees need to double-check the motive behind their words.
Even if you pay attention to grammar, punctuation, and tone, lacking in the department of sensible contextual communication in day-to-day workplace conversation can drown your prospects.
For instance, when you write a grammatically correct work email, you may still be making otherwise cloaked blunders.
- Obsolete salutations
- Long body text
- Irrelevant subject line
- Blunt or cold attitude of the text
- Weak call to action
- Gloating email body text where the reader isn’t clear of what you need or are offering
- A sloppy sign-off
In other cases, you can come off as culturally ignorant. Your discomfort in meetings and discussion because of the lingua franca can cause your self-esteem to dwindle while casting a terrible image of your work ethics on your colleagues.
Be it emails or to-face chats; Business English helps to communicate aptly in different contexts. Also, you must note that it is more than a collection of industry specific jargons. Business English helps you hold a conversation in a particular style without struggling for words or design.
How can you check Business English Skill during Hiring it self
In most cases, a promoted or hired employee has good enough basic communication skills. However, we have already established how English differs from Business English. The dilemma of upper management lies in assessing the managers’ Business English level and directing them based on the result.
Issues in Business English Assessment
Manual assessment often gets derailed. While hiring managers or lower level employees and examining their Business English etiquettes manually, following concerns could arise.
- Fluency can overshadow other language skills
- Both global and local communication needs are hard to analyze within a few minutes
- Language agility and high performance don’t go hand in hand
- 360-degree evaluations are difficult to find or create for employee evaluation per the company’s exact requirements
- Fragmented cultural awareness, divergent group norms, and expectations make it difficult to train employees for global behavior
For such reasons, many organizations are looking at online standardized tests to evaluate employees.
Online Business English Evaluation Tests- Why and Why Not
Online tests are easy to conduct, easier to assess. They consider different aspects of business communication while keeping cultural sensitivities in mind. Depending on the carrier who has created the tests, it is possible to align the tests with the standards of the business/industry and the company.
At the same time, online tests could be unreliable if borrowed from a dubious source. They could have loopholes, weak measurement standards, and may not focus on the skills that an employer wants to measure.
But more importantly, a fairly designed online test for assessment of Business English can come in handy in determining the weak links, if not the strongest ones. They can help identify the employees who did poorly but can be helped as well as the ones who are beyond improvement.
Companies can filter out a lot of employees Using these results and train them. This method works best with fresh hires. Studies, as well as industry history, has established that entry-level hires become the best kind of leaders when prepared from the beginning.
Such online assessments can be conducted in the form of voice based or even video-based assessments. In voice based assessments, the candidates are supposed to record their answers and save them before submitting them for evaluation.
In the same way, in video-based exams, the candidates are supposed to launch the exams and read the question displayed on the screen. To answer those questions, the candidates need to press the record button, record themselves answering the question and then submit the exam only after all questions are answered. These video footages will be reviewed and evaluated by the examiners later.
What Is Your Language Strategy?
Business English practices are critical for developing a global employee base that can collaborate on strategies to comply with the company goals over the years.
Undoubtedly, neglecting Business English practices is out of the question. What remains undecided is if companies will trust standardized online tests for the purpose or go back to manual evaluations.
Eklavvya.in is an award winning platform useful to design and conduct assessments for various purpose including Business English.
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