5. The Hidden Costs in Global and Multilingual Environments
The obvious cost might be translation. The hidden costs can appear somewhere else entirely. In global organisations, communication has to move across languages, cultures, functions, management levels and locations. The cost may surface as additional clarification, slower decisions, information being filtered, reduced participation, duplicated work or knowledge that never reaches the people who need it.
Research gives us some useful examples:
Multinational teams: Research published in the Journal of World Business found two different types of language barrier. Visible difficulties with vocabulary and grammar reduced participation in team communication, while more subtle differences in meaning, tone and language use could impair shared understanding, even where people were fluent in the working language. Both affected how teams processed and exchanged knowledge.
Manufacturing productivity: Research using Norwegian employer-employee data from the manufacturing sector between 2003 and 2012 found that greater linguistic diversity was associated with lower workplace productivity, even after researchers controlled for cultural diversity. The authors identify increased communication costs as one mechanism through which linguistic diversity can affect productivity.
Management knowledge can get stuck: Research into multinational companies found that language barriers impeded interaction between foreign and domestic managers. In an experiment, reducing those barriers through language training increased interaction, supporting the researchers' conclusion that language barriers can restrict the transfer of management knowledge within multinational organisations.
And there can be a direct commercial impact: European Commission research estimated that 11% of exporting EU SMEs may be losing business because of language barriers. The Commission also stressed that language capability matters beyond sales and marketing and can affect wider business activity.
MC3 Method™ provides a structured way to diagnose where multilingual and multicultural communication is creating operational problems, select appropriate tools, apply them in the workplace and evaluate what changes.
What is multilingual communication actually costing your organisation and would those costs currently be visible?
Find out where to start. Download the free MC3 Audit Toolkit and examine communication across your own systems and processes:
MC3 Method™ | Practical tools. Measurable progress.
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