Every year, around 13,000 adults attend German courses for foreign speakers at Zurich Square – regardless of their school or vocational training. However, because languages are learned most effectively in everyday life, the workplace is a suitable place to consolidate and expand German language skills. Employers are increasingly realizing that in this area the yield for the company is remarkably high with comparatively little effort.

The best language course is of little use if what has been learned cannot be used regularly. And as is well known, a language is learned particularly sustainably in everyday life. In the city of Zurich, by far the most frequently spoken languages at work are still Swiss and High German, followed by English. The workplace is therefore also an ideal place for foreign-language professionals to consolidate and expand their knowledge of German. Conversely, conscious company language support also brings a lot to the employer: smoother processes, fewer misunderstandings, mistakes and accidents, but also more identification and integration among the individual employees.

Swiss German and even more striking High German is used by significantly more people at work than at home on Zurich Square – although multiple answers were also possible for the languages spoken in a family context. So there is a considerable proportion of people in the city of Zurich who do not use German at home at all, but do so explicitly in the workplace. This circumstance gives additional weight to the concern of language promotion in the workplace.

The topic of "promoting German at the workplace" is anchored in the Integration Policy Goals 2015-2018 of the City of Zurich. As early as 2012, the Promotion of Integration published a basic paper and a factsheet on the subject on its website (see "More on the topic", German promotion in the city administration). With regard to the year 2015, the promotion of integration has obtained an overview of the needs and already implemented support measures in the city administration by means of an internal administrative survey: Around 2000 municipal employees have a "certain need for German promotion" as foreign speakers. This was the result of the survey of HR managers evaluated at the beginning of 2016. According to the survey, just over 10%, namely 221 employees, attended individual German language support measures in the same year. Compared to the effect that language support in the workplace has on the economic viability and integration of migrants, this is comparatively little.

Some service departments of the city administration, such as the care centers or the IMMO, have been taking on this challenge for some time and successfully implement tailor-made German courses for employees in different functions and positions. The following film about the courses at the retirement centres of the city of Zurich also shows that learning German can be fun.

Experience from pilot projects in different companies has shown that the greatest increase in language learning takes place with the simultaneous establishment of two interlocking further training measures: On the one hand, the provision of German courses tailored to the functions with action and participant orientation, focus on the concrete language needs and inclusion of the institutional context. And on the other hand, the consistent involvement of the German-speaking environment, in particular the German-speaking direct superiors, who can actively contribute to the success of the internal promotion of German by assuming special responsibility.

Within about seven half-days, German-speaking supervisors can be trained as internal process managers for the promotion of workplace-related German language skills of foreign-language employees. They are enabled to recognize the learning capacity of their own workplace and to use it with the aim of promoting the language and communication skills of foreign-language employees. This with simple measures: They create practical learning opportunities in the company, for example by labeling materials in a clearly visible and rotational way every fortnight, or by systematically and playfully practicing recurring dialogues with foreign speakers in variations. Depending on the workplace and team composition, they establish standard German instead of dialect as the company language and pay attention to the use of simple but correct German by all employees. German-speaking colleagues often also benefit from this. The process managers can also provide or poster small flashcards with the most important terms and illustrated documentation with central dialogue models in the break room. With little effort and appropriate sensitization, pleasing results can be achieved in this way.

The potential of supervisor training in this area is currently not sufficiently recognized and therefore remains a central concern of language promotion in the workplace. For example, as part of the "Integration Dialogue Work" of the Tripartite Agglomeration Conference TAK, a pilot project for events of professional associations or similar events with employers was launched for the period 2016-2018: A speaker mediated and financed by the State Secretariat for Migration SEM uses practical examples to explain what companies are doing specifically to promote language skills in everyday working life and how superiors can be trained accordingly.