Saturday 3 August 2013

Reaching out to the non American nerd

Our CEO Stan's wife, aka, Wifey, read an article on the importance of reaching out to employees.
I received a text Friday night from Stan: "Glo, reach out to employees asap-Stan".

I googled the term and I immediately launched a "Dear Gloria" service.  Employees can now text me their concerns, and I text back an answer, in English, within 24 hours. Each week, I will publish a few of my answers so other HR managers can benchmark my wisdom.

Dear Gloria,


We are 3 Russian engineers in the algorithm team. Our names are Alexei, Svetlana and Vlad. Our boss calls all of us Igor, and sometimes he calls Svetlana by the name Galina.
Our boss Paul comes from Glasgow and it is hard to understand his English.
Please advise.
Alexei

My answer:

Dear Igor,
Thank you for your text. I appreciate your question and I value your reaching out to me. I also want to reach out to you.
As you know, English is the ONLY language of business in the world, and in our firm. NO ONE speaks Russian except a few Russians.
I will ask Paul to work on his accent in a timely fashion by putting him on korrective axe-tion for ``having a linguisti'k' disability. ``

As far as names are concerned, is there really such a big difference between Galina and Svetlana? For heaven sake!

Gloria

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