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As hinted at by the biblical Tower of Babel story, language barriers have long been an issue for humans. Thanks to technology and the globalization of business, it’s now more accurate to say there is a communications barrier problem.

During a TMCnet video interview with Erik Linask (News - Alert), TMC Group Editorial Director, Heidi Lorenzen, vice president of Marketing at GlobalEngish, noted that English has become the lingua franca of global business—but that doesn’t mean communications go off without a hitch. Far from it.

The issue is such a thorny one it is even potentially impacting the decision of whether or not to pursue the advantages of seeking international business—even as growth in emerging markets is back on the agenda for enterprises that weathered the recession. 

“Companies operating globally are actually performing poorer than counterparts staying closer to home, wherever home may be,” Lorenzen said during the video interview. “But globalization clearly is where the opportunities are, and we are highly connected. Communication is at the root of this problem.”

Lorenzen said the communication issue is well recognized, at least by employees; in a recent McKinsey Quarterly research report on the ‘globalization penalty,’ only seven percent of Global 2000 employees felt their English was good enough to properly do their job. Management, however, may be slower catching on to the problem, and the need for addressing it on an enterprise-wide scale.

“Companies are spending a lot of money building social business practices, putting in place unified communications and telecommunications systems without thinking about the quality of communication,” Lorenzen said.

In other words, conduits are in place for communication to take place, but the communication itself may be of poor quality.

She added that many of the conversations in question are between non-native English speakers, and that the issues is prevalent not only for verbal but also various forms of written communication—as well as videoconferencing. 

“Videoconferencing and other communication tools that are bringing people closer together are exacerbating the problem because you’re getting people face-to-face from across borders more than ever before,” Lorenzen added. 

GlobalEnglish’s goal is to help enterprises achieve desired outcomes by improving what it refers to as enterprise fluency—the ability of employees to communicate and collaborate effectively with colleagues and customers far and wide using the English language. This is done through software-as-a-service products that give employees easy access to language development tools, and aggregated reporting to enterprise management on the communication skills development of their workers.

This goes far beyond linguistics, which Lorenzen described as only half the battle.

“It’s one thing to be able to conjugate a verb,” she noted. “It’s a very different thing to be able to walk into a sales situation and persuade that customer to buy your service, or to give a presentation that people understand and are impacted by. These are the business outcomes we’re focused on.”