Employees in CleanManager. Signe Bernt Lindegaard to the right.
”Our teacher was very pleasant to work with. A nice person who makes people want to talk. And he was a Brit himself. That meant a lot to us,” says Signe Bernt Lindegaard, Account Manager at CleanManager.
Working with own emails and website was a great help
”We used our own texts as one of the starting points, such as emails, our website etc. We were able to contact our teacher from lesson to lesson with questions and ideas. And then we corrected the texts together. It was a big help,” says Signe.
The direct way to a Brit’s heart is an indirect style
In English, you rarely tackle a point head-on. Usually you talk around it first. This is exactly the kind of thing that is worth practising and honing when your job is to create relations to new customers on the British market.
This meant that aside from classic linguistic topics such as vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and sentence construction, the course also focused on topics such as:
- Regional language differences across the UK
- Cultural forms of politeness and levels of formality
- Technical terms, conditions of employment, working hours etc. within the UK cleaning industry
Bonus: Aligned communication in sales and support
Signe has been pleased that the course offered CleanManager the opportunity to work attentively with English communication: ”We already have clear and healthy values. It is our wish to listen, help, investigate and inquire with our customers and not be quick to draw conclusions! The good thing is that now, we have been able to work through all of that in English, too. That’s why we have become even better at maintaining the same tone in sales and support in English,” says Signe.
”It was also nice to speak English together in the group. Even though we already spoke English well, each of us got the opportunity to refine our English during the course with help from our teacher,” says Signe.
Colleagues and managers involved in the preparatory work
It’s a little easier to make everything succeed when you know your needs and wishes. And Signe says that she did thorough preparatory work before they started the course: ”There was a lot of us joining the course, so I chose to involve both colleagues and managers in order to uncover what was most important for us to learn before we sought a quote on an English course,” explains Signe.
”It is my experience that the course has lived up to our expectations. We needed a supplier we could trust. Throughout our collaboration with Studieskolen, we have felt heard in the process. And our English course was much more and much better than just a standard solution,” says Signe.
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You can read much more about tailor-made language courses for businesses here.