A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Mostly cloudy. Low 58F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph..

A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Mostly cloudy. Low 58F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.

Pella employee Gloria Francisco Miguel converses with bilingual training coordinator Maria Salcedo on the production floor at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center. Salcedo has helped integrate Spanish-speaking employees into the workplace.

Retail banker Maria Flores discusses a banking matter with a customer whose primary language is Spanish in her office at Peoples Bank in Rock Valley on Thursday, August 11. Flores is one among several bilingual employees at the bank who are ready to assist customers who aren’t fluent in English.

Scott Pomrenke, department manager at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center, stands at his computer station. His stations in equipped with a headset that he uses to address the members of his team. Voice-to-text translation software provides a live translation of his words in Spanish, which are displayed on large screens installed high above the floor across the plant.

Matt Mellema, first-shift production manager at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center, stands next to Maria Salcedo, bilingual training coordinator, on the production floor on Tuesday, July 26.

A large screen displays a live translation in Spanish of the words spoken by Scott Pomrenke, department manager at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center. The screens are installed throughout the plant and are part of Pella's efforts to integrate employees whose first language isn't English.

Maria Salcedo demonstrates how to toggle between Spanish and English on a display used by equipment operators at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center.

Pella employee Gloria Francisco Miguel converses with bilingual training coordinator Maria Salcedo on the production floor at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center. Salcedo has helped integrate Spanish-speaking employees into the workplace.

REGIONAL—At 6:30 a.m. two days a week, Maria Salcedo meets with a small group of English language learners in a conference room at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center.

The students — Pella employees — are there voluntarily and not paid to attend. Along with basic conversation skills, they learn the more specialized language of the business — acronyms, proprietary processes, specialized equipment and parts. After 30 minutes of instruction, they head out to the production floor to begin the first shift.

On other mornings, in the same room, English-speaking employees convene to learn Spanish, trying out simple phrases and increasing their vocabulary word by word. At Pella, even a “How are you?” or “¿Cómo estás?” when genuinely meant, can go a long way toward overcoming language barriers and establishing goodwill.

Salcedo said the language classes, which also are offered evenings before the third shift, have been a success so far.

“It brings everyone together — everyone’s just trying to eliminate the language barrier,” Salcedo said.

Matt Mellema, first-shift production manager at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center, stands next to Maria Salcedo, bilingual training coordinator, on the production floor on Tuesday, July 26.

Salcedo makes a point to make daily rounds on the production floor, and she sees employees coming out of their shells, venturing a few words or a phrase in their nonnative language.

“It’s pretty cool how the classes helped them gain that confidence,” Salcedo said.

From a bird’s-eye view of the Pella production floor, there are a complex set of operations happening in discrete but interdependent locations. Across the vast, humming space, there are hundreds of men and women, working in tandem, carrying large panes of glass, drilling screws into wooden panes, forging windows from their component parts.

The activities appear seamless, but for the first time in Pella’s history, as employees work together in teams, communicating via radio or talking loudly above the thrum of the machines, they are doing so in two languages.

In the last five years, the proportion of employees at Pella who are not native speakers of English has grown from none to about a third of its roughly 400 employees, according to first-shift production manager Matt Mellema, who has been with Pella for more than 20 years.

Scott Pomrenke, department manager at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center, stands at his computer station. His stations in equipped with a headset that he uses to address the members of his team. Voice-to-text translation software provides a live translation of his words in Spanish, which are displayed on large screens installed high above the floor across the plant.

Language classes, which have been embraced by employees on both sides of the language divide, are just one part of a larger effort to establish relationships of cross-cultural, bilingual cooperation among the employees that show up each workday at Pella’s Sioux Center plant.

Bilingual employees like Salcedo have played a central role in those efforts. Salcedo is originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, and she started her career at Pella four years ago on the production floor, first in the wood shop, then later on the assembly line, where she kept production running smoothly as a so-called “water spider.”

She established herself as a valuable employee, and a little over a year ago, the Pella leadership team recruited her for a new role at the leading edge of a new endeavor. Salcedo became a bilingual training coordinator, and Pella began to tap into a new labor market — native Spanish speakers living in the region, eager for employment but not fluent in English.

Mellema said hiring Spanish-speaking employees came as part of a broader push for growth at Pella. One of more than 15 Pella manufacturing sites, the Sioux Center plant has doubled its team of employees in the last five years.

Those efforts to increase the plant’s production capacity accelerated around three years ago, and the business, facing the same tight labor market as other area businesses, shifted its hiring and recruitment strategies to tap into a new pool of potential employees.

“It’s a very tight labor market, and we have very low unemployment here,” Mellema said. “It’s very challenging to hire in this environment.”

Rather than focus on drawing new hires to Sioux Center, plant leadership decided to rethink its approach.

“We realized, we’re not tapping into a segment of talented individuals who are already here — because of language,” Mellema said.

Newcomers from countries in Latin America have been settling in the region for more than a decade, but just five years ago, non-English speakers would not have been considered for employment at Pella. The tools for training and communication simply were not in place.

A large screen displays a live translation in Spanish of the words spoken by Scott Pomrenke, department manager at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center. The screens are installed throughout the plant and are part of Pella's efforts to integrate employees whose first language isn't English.

“We saw it as a big need, and a big opportunity. We wanted our team to better reflect the demographics of our labor shed,” Mellema said.

In Sioux Center, Pella has historically hired employees that represent the regional majority — white and English speaking. However, as regional demographics have shifted, Pella is beginning to mirror that shift. Its labor force now includes some of the area’s newest immigrants.

Mellema said the work ethic exhibited by many first-generation immigrants aligns with the values of the business, which was founded in 1925 by a Dutch-American family in Pella. However, integrating non-English speaking employees in the Sioux Center plant proved to be a big undertaking.

To prepare for the new push in hiring, the Pella leadership team began to consider the variety of ways non-English speaking employees could not simply be accommodated but fully integrated into the culture of the workplace, from hiring and training through the ongoing acquisition of new skills on the job.

“It’s been a journey,” Mellema said. “We started by asking, ‘What’s it going to look like to open up the funnel — to interview, to train and onboard properly, and make sure they can be an integral part of our organizational culture?’ That’s important to us at Pella.”

Pella operates according to a philosophy of continuous improvement, meaning processes are tweaked and refined over time to increase productivity and meet quality standards while also enhancing worker safety and well-being.

The bedrock of continuous improvement, according to Mellema, is communication.

“Our brand is known for quality and craftsmanship, and quality was what we really needed to ensure,” Mellema said. “That means making sure that we can have conversations, and that we can give feedback about ways to improve.”

Conversation is a two-way street, and opening up lines of communication also allows Spanish-speaking employees to suggest new and better ways of doing things.

“That way, we can take their ideas and implement them,” Mellema said.

Rather than siloing Spanish-speaking employees on certain lines, or relegating them to the third shift, language learners at Pella are fully-fledged members of the team. On the production floor, communication across the language divide is facilitated, often improvisationally, by Pella’s growing number of employees who are bilingual.

However, there are other measures in place to bring Spanish-speaking employees into full communication with other operators and their managers.

One way this has been accomplished is through the use of technology.

Before each shift begins at Pella, employees gather in teams to go through a short series of exercises, warming up their muscles and touching base before work gets underway.

During this time, managers often communicate important information to employees, and recently screens were installed across the plant to display, in real-time, a Spanish translation of the words being spoken out loud by managers, who wear headsets while addressing their teams.

Mellema said the change was made after members of the Pella leadership team noticed the burden of keeping Spanish-speaking employees in the loop was falling to their bilingual co-workers. One day, Mellema noticed a bilingual employee relaying information to several of her Spanish-speaking co-workers as a manager was speaking.

“She was there, trying to interpret on the fly, telling them nuggets of information. You could see the relief on their faces and the smile on hers,” he said.

Maria Salcedo demonstrates how to toggle between Spanish and English on a display used by equipment operators at Pella Windows & Doors in Sioux Center.

As gratifying as it was to see employees helping each other, the leadership team determined a change was in order.

“It highlighted a problem we had,” Mellema said. The screens were installed shortly thereafter.

According to bilingual employees, those real-time translations are consistently 85 percent to 95 percent accurate. As apps like Google Translate improve, harnessing the power of machine learning to reinvent the technologies of translation, companies like Pella are poised to bridge language gaps through computing. That’s happening in other ways at Pella, too.

Across the plant, Pella employees are outfitted with Pocketalks, a hand-held speech-to-speech translation tool that allows employees to communicate with one another on the job.

Voice recognition technologies also are a crucial feature of a recent innovation in training. Rather than have employees read manuals — a tedious process even for native English speakers — the company developed interactive training programs that take employees step-by-step through complex processes. Those programs are now available in Spanish and English, and employees don headsets and work their way through tasks, asking questions and interacting with the program through speech.

“What used to take a couple weeks now takes a few hours,” Mellema said.

Taken together, Mellema said the efforts to integrate language learning employees have gone smoothly.

“Our safety record has remained strong, our quality metrics have been improving and productivity has been very, very strong this year,” Mellema said. “We’ve hired some really tremendous people, regardless of what language they speak, and we’re working together to help make our Spanish speakers successful here.”

In the last three years, there have been fits and starts, he said, but when language fails to create understanding, there are other means.

“Has it been flawless? No. We’ve had misunderstandings,” Mellema said. “But nonverbals are very powerful. People can understand raising or lowering a voice — they can understand a smile.”

In hiring a growing number of employees who are not fluent in English, Pella joins a number of businesses across the region that have been tapping into the immigrant labor force for years, including industries in agriculture manufacturing, machining and fabricating, and large farming and dairy operations. However, in recent years, that trend has accelerated as labor shortages lead to new recruitment practices.

According to Dave Miller, Rock Valley director of economic development, many Rock Valley businesses have begun to post job openings in Spanish and English, and businesses in manufacturing and service industries have placed a new priority on hiring bilingual employees.

In Rock Valley, Miller said, large businesses like Valley Industrial Powder Coat and Kooima Company are among the employers that are leading in the hiring of non-English speaking employees.

Lyon County development director Steve Simons said he, too, has seen shifts in the ways large employers operate now that a growing segment of the workforce is Spanish speaking.

Simons said those Lyon County employers often rely on bilingual employees to help “make things go smoothly and safely as they learn in the workplace.” Workplace signage and printed documents are increasingly written in Spanish and English, and over time, Simons said, language differences become less of a barrier. Employees begin to pick up some of the language spoken by their co-workers, and basic communication becomes possible.

The influx of newcomers from countries in Latin America also has brought changes on the service side of business, with many area businesses offering accommodations for non-English speaking clients and patrons.

At the Rock Valley headquarters of Peoples Bank, retail banker Maria Flores is one among several bilingual employees on hand to assist Spanish-speaking customers who come into the bank.

Retail banker Maria Flores discusses a banking matter with a customer whose primary language is Spanish in her office at Peoples Bank in Rock Valley on Thursday, August 11. Flores is one among several bilingual employees at the bank who are ready to assist customers who aren’t fluent in English.

Flores, who lives with her husband in Inwood, was born in California, but her mother is originally from Mexico, and she watched her mother struggle to navigate a world where no one spoke her language. In her current role, Flores helps make that world a little less daunting for nonnative speakers of English.

“We’re able to go a little above and beyond, and we can explain things in a little more depth,” she said.

According to Flores, when it comes to complex matters like personal finances or interest rates, even patrons who speak English fluently are sometimes more comfortable communicating in their primary language.

Bonita Van Otterloo, marketing director at Peoples Bank, said the hiring of bilingual employees became a priority in the last several years, and along with Flores and two bilingual customer service representatives, the Rock Valley location also has a bilingual employee in the informational technology department.

“These employees are a vital part of our team,” Van Otterloo said. “They help us better serve our communities.”

Given widespread labor shortages, however, it can be difficult for employers, especially small ones, to prioritize making bilingual hires, even if they would like to.

Jill Ver Mulm, co-owner of Mike’s Service Garage in Sioux Center, said finding and retaining bilingual employees is difficult in the current labor market, and she considered taking language courses herself to help bridge the gap. However, the language of vehicle maintenance and repair is highly technical, and she decided pursuing that degree of fluency in another language was not viable.

“To learn to describe an engine or a carburetor — all this automotive terminology — it would have to be very specialized,” Ver Mulm said.

Even with few bilingual employees, some area businesses are able to make do with apps. Mike Bonnema, owner of B&B Plumbing and Heating in Sioux Center, said he has one bilingual employee, and he is sometimes called in to help facilitate communication across language boundaries. However, in many cases, his service technicians have relied on translation apps like Google Translate.

“We do plumbing, heating and air conditioning, and it doesn’t matter what language you speak — everybody utilizes those services,” Bonnema said. “I’m very thankful for the things we can do, whether that’s having somebody that can speak Spanish help out or using the different translation apps. It all helps.”

According to Mellema, as N’West Iowa businesses adapt to the changing demographics of their communities, they participate in the long tradition of immigration and settlement that forged those communities in the first place. That is something he keeps at the front of his mind.

“We’re a nation of immigrants. I remember the stories my grandparents told about their parents coming as immigrants to this country,” Mellema said. “It’s a story of hardship and struggle, but it’s also a story of new opportunity.”

This is the third article in a series about growing linguistic diversity in N’West Iowa. Across social sectors — health care, criminal justice, business and education — a rising number of non-English speakers presents challenges, but also new possibilities. Many in N’West Iowa are working to overcome language barriers to create a welcoming community for all.

REGIONAL—When Ada Orta came to the United States from Mexico 18 years ago, she was a young mother. She spoke almost no English, and Rock Valle…

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