I keep noticing the same blind spot with companies moving into Latin America. They pour real thought into localizing the customer experience, the ads, the website, the checkout, and then they onboard their first local hires in English, through a US HR portal, reading policies written for a country those people don't even live in. My honest take is that onboarding is where belonging gets decided, long before performance does. If the training videos, the handbook, and those first-week emails all feel translated at someone instead of written for them, you lose a bit of trust you never actually see leave. People rarely quit over it out loud. They just stop leaning in. And the details are smaller than you'd expect. A benefits section that assumes US healthcare. A payroll setup that never mentions the “aguinaldo”, the legally mandated year-end bonus your Latin American team is already counting on. Internal Spanish that technically works but was clearly run through a tool, read by the exact people who spot that in a second. I want to correct myself a little here, because "just translate the handbook" isn't the lesson either. Plenty of internal content travels fine as is, and a short policy note really doesn't need much. But the onboarding flow, the manager conversations, and the moments where someone decides whether they trust you, those are worth doing properly, and it's a judgment call that usually costs far less than the turnover it prevents. So here's how I'd frame the whole thing. - Customer localization protects the revenue you're still chasing. - Employee localization protects the team you already paid to hire. Most expansion plans fund the first and assume the second will sort itself out, and by the time a resignation email shows up, you've already paid for skipping it. P.S. Hiring your first people in Latin America this year? Before onboarding starts, take a look at what they'll actually read in week one, and whose language it was written in. Visit my website for more information.