If you watch our blog, we’re a little obsessed with supporting new languages recently. I’ve heard from more than one person, “why are you bothering with Russian? How many people who use SYNCrew speak Russian?!?!” The answer is not many… but at least 1!

I was out training some new app users and explaining to a group how the app would automatically support Spanish if their phone was in Spanish. A guy who spoke English, but preferred Russian, asked if his phone would show Russian. Well, soon it will!

Why does this matter?

One of the key things I’ve seen in my life is that when you ask somebody to do something new, your odds of success of success are higher when you take away as many stressors as possible. In our case, many workers are nervous about using an app to track time. They are possibly nervous about putting a work app on their phone, how that app will track them, maybe they will make a mistake and get paid wrong, or any number of things. By putting the app in their language (and offering support in that language also), we are removing a reason to be concerned. Further, but being available to speak with them, we are able to eliminate ALL their concerns.

Here is another way to think about this:

I have been fortunate enough to travel overseas, to countries where English (my native language) and Spanish (a language I routinely butcher in attempts to speak it) are not spoken. For low risk things, where an error doesn’t matter that much, I am at ease. If I order a hamburger but a turkey sandwich comes out, I’ll survive.

However, as the “seriousness” increases, I get more nervous. What if, instead of ordering dinner, I was trying to learn how to shut down a nuclear reactor in that foreign language. Failure would mean death for millions and my odds of a mistake are HIGH.

Coming back to your workers, their timecards are connected to their paychecks and how they provide for themselves and their families – those are high stakes! Maybe not nuclear-reactor high, but about as important as things get in normal life.