Tag: construction

Last week I wrote about ISSA and Tork spending 18 months to build one 30-minute bilingual training course for frontline cleaning professionals.

Well… the roofing industry said, “Go bigger or go home.”

The National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA) has partnered with The GLO Group on a six-course virtual program called the Executive Leadership Bilingual Pilot. The program offers one session a week for six weeks, with content available in English and Spanish.

The audience: owners, executives, operations leaders, HR professionals. Decision-makers. Not the crews — the people who lead the crews.

And here’s what it’s trying to build: field supervisors who can lead confidently in both languages. Sessions cover elevating Hispanic supervisors, psychological safety and cultural trust on roofing crews, recruiting and retaining Hispanic talent, and showing workers a visible path up.

One of the program’s co-founders cut to the core: a lot of people treat communication challenges as simply a language issue — in reality, they’re a leadership issue.

Two associations. Two verticals. That’s not a coincidence — that’s a pattern.

And notice where the money is going in each one. Cleaning is investing in the workers on the floor. Construction is investing in the supervisor layer — the people between the training and the floor.

Supervisors are the transmission belt of any operation. When someone learns a procedure in a classroom or on a phone screen, it’s the supervisor who turns it into how the work actually gets done that week. Invest in bilingual supervisors, and you’re saying the bilingual workforce is your future leadership pipeline — not a compliance checkbox.

Now the honest question — the one I’m asking every frontline HR leader I talk to right now: which layer is your company investing in? The workers? The supervisors? Both? Neither?

And the one behind it: one course here, six sessions there — who is building the day-to-day bilingual training for the rest of the workforce? Safety procedures. Equipment handling. The dozen other things a frontline worker needs to know in a year. The associations are proving the appetite. Who fills the gap?

And here’s the part that makes this mandatory, not optional. OSHA’s 2026 schedule runs $16,550 per serious violation — $165,514 when it’s willful or repeated. The agency has already cited companies for training workers in a language they didn’t understand: one case spelled out that a Spanish-speaking crew lead “was not provided training in a language that the employee could understand.” In 2015, at a St. Louis steel plant, OSHA proposed $366,300 in penalties, with the area director saying the company continued to “exploit its non-English-proficient workforce.” Training that workers can’t understand isn’t training — and the federal government has priced it.

I’m spending three more weeks talking to Texas HR leaders about what’s actually working for bilingual training on their floors. If you lead HR or safety at a frontline employer, let’s take 15 minutes to share what’s working or broken for you. Contact us – Comment below.