Why Communication Equity Matters In A Global Workforce
Shawn Zhang is Co-Founder & CTO at Sanas, a provider of an AI-powered real-time speech understanding platform.
gettyToday’s employees now collaborate across countries, time zones and cultures as a matter of routine. Companies recruit expertise regardless of location and support customers around the world. Yet, many still evaluate communication the same way they did years ago, with a far less global workplace.
When communication becomes difficult, the burden often falls on the speaker. A candidate needs stronger communication skills. An employee should be more articulate. A customer service representative needs to build better rapport. Sometimes, those assessments are justified. Often, they assume the challenge lies with the individual rather than the interaction itself.
From hiring to customer interactions, communication shapes how organizations evaluate people and exchange information. When organizations misinterpret communication challenges, they risk overlooking expertise, limit contributions and create barriers that have little to do with an individual’s ability to do the job.
As co-founder and CTO of Sanas, I’ve spent the last several years building real-time speech technology that helps people understand each other across accents and languages. That work has shown me how often good people get misjudged because of how they sound rather than what they know or how hard they work. In this article, I’ll explain why communication gaps are a business problem, not just a personal one, and share practical steps leaders can take to find hidden talent, strengthen global teams and improve customer conversations.
As work has become more distributed, the number of variables affecting communication has increased as well. Language differences, cultural norms, accessibility needs and technology all influence how information is understood and acted upon.
Research on global virtual teams found that communication practices, cultural differences and language-related challenges affect how teams collaborate and share knowledge. Yet communication challenges are still commonly treated as individual problems rather than shared challenges shaped by people, processes and technology. Employees are expected to adjust their communication style, improve language proficiency or adapt to workplace norms. Those efforts can be valuable, but they can also obscure the fact that communication is shared.
Accent bias provides one well-documented example of what happens when organizations fail to make that distinction. Researchers at the University of Queensland reviewed 27 studies involving more than 4,500 participants and found evidence of hiring discrimination tied to certain non-standard or foreign accents, despite no connection between accent and an individual’s ability to perform a role. People should be hired based on their talent, intelligence, experience and work ethic, not on their accent.
The consequences of these communication barriers are rarely obvious. They surface in delayed decisions, weaker collaboration and promising ideas that fail to gain traction. When communication becomes a barrier to participation, businesses gain a less accurate view of the talent and expertise already inside their workforce.
This has implications for customer experience as well. Organizations spend significant resources trying to reduce friction in customer interactions, yet many continue to rely on communication systems that place the entire burden of understanding on one participant in the conversation.
Progressive organizations recognize that communication is an operational issue that influences productivity, collaboration and business outcomes.
Communication equity doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means making sure the bar measures what really matters. The suggestions below combine technology, leadership behavior and simple process changes that any organization can start on this quarter.
Advances in real-time language translation, accent translation and other voice technologies are making it easier for people to understand one another without requiring them to change how they speak. These tools help improve understanding within the interaction itself. Increasingly, they can be deployed directly within the communications platforms organizations already use, helping improve conversations without introducing additional complexity for employees or customers. When adopting these technologies, organizations will also need to maintain appropriate safeguards for sensitive information.
As companies build global workforces, leaders should examine how communication influences hiring decisions, performance evaluations and advancement opportunities. They should ask whether expectations are tied to the actual requirements of a role or whether familiarity is being mistaken for competence. They should consider whether communication challenges are being addressed solely at the individual level when systems, processes and technologies may be equally important parts of the solution.
Modeling this starts with small, visible habits. Leaders can ask clarifying questions instead of letting a misunderstanding pass. They can summarize decisions in writing after meetings so that people working in a second language have something to refer back to. They can rotate meeting times so the same time zone isn’t always taking the late call. And when giving feedback on communication, they can point to the specific outcome that suffered, such as a missed requirement or an unclear handoff, rather than to how someone sounds. If a leader can’t name the business impact, that’s a sign the feedback may be about familiarity, not performance.
At Sanas, our teams are spread mainly between the San Francisco Bay Area and Bangalore, with researchers in Europe as well, so we deal with this every day. When we build an interview loop, we decide up front which skills each stage is testing and what a strong answer looks like, and we score candidates against that rubric rather than on overall impressions. A candidate is judged on how well they solve the modeling problem in front of them, not on whether their delivery matches the interviewer’s. Some of our strongest researchers would have been easy to underrate in a less structured process.
Companies have never had greater access to talent or relied more heavily on collaboration across borders, cultures and languages. But hiring globally means little if employees must still sound local to be heard, trusted or promoted.
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