Why should you care about enabling collaboration? It’s simple. Fundamentally, enterprise collaboration helps companies perform more efficiently every single day, which significantly improves employee performance and your bottom line. Chances are, your employees across the globe are eager to collaborate with each other, but they face major barriers to collaboration, such as faulty systems and tools and especially poor communication. Communication is extremely challenging when employees are globally dispersed, particularly when they can’t rely on existing systems and tools.

So how are employees supposed to collaborate if they can’t even communicate? Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, defines “collaboration” as “people or organizations working together to accomplish shared tasks/goals, facilitated by the effective combination of communication, tools and processes.” He goes on to emphasize that people must be connected first for the collaboration process to work. Sara Roberts, CEO of Roberts Golden Consulting, Inc., agrees: “The key to building successful companies will be through optimizing and encouraging communication. … Many forward-thinking organizations are already using robust Web-based communities to connect company alumni and other employees together and to harness the power of the crowd.” And we couldn’t agree more. While it sounds like a basic concept, in today’s globally diverse business environment, this connection requires much more than just basic email or virtual meeting systems.

Unfortunately, we see the following mistake all the time: In order to drive innovation and productivity, corporations have spent billions of dollars to connect global workers through advanced IT networks and software platforms, but companies are often forgetting the most important piece of the puzzle. Without a common company-wide language, companies risk confusion, productivity losses and miscommunication on a grand scale. With a common language, however, business processes and goals can come together and ultimately enable people to communicate so that they discover a mutual understanding or gain access to peer insights and ideas from across the globe. This is reflected in the views of upper management. For instance, an IBM Global CIO Study from 2011 found that “66 percent of CIOs from top-performing organizations see internal communication and collaboration as key to innovation.”

Making sure you can actually understand each other means, at the most basic level, team members working and communicating with each other proficiently in a single common language, seamlessly applying what they’re learning directly to their jobs. And it’s clear today that, across the globe, the language of business is English, an understanding of which is becoming imperative for job seekers. Reuters reported on the “English Crisis” in Japan. Yuriko Tsurumaki, a spokesperson for the Japanese recruiting firm Recruit Agent, stated that “nearly half of Japanese companies planning new hiring require applicants to be ‘Business English users’—a huge increase from just 16% in July 2009.” 

Without communication fundamentals, collaboration becomes almost impossible. As Mahesh Ram, our CEO, puts it, ineffective collaboration makes it impossible for globally dispersed work teams “to deliver expected results because they aren’t communicating or working together effectively.”

Enterprise collaboration is the future of work at global companies. In fact, the market for social enterprise apps and related services will grow at a compounded annual rate of 61% to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016, according to a 2011 Forrester Research report by Henry Dewing. And since effective communication is key to achieving goals and increasing profits across the globe, you need to start using enterprise collaboration tools in your organization today. Growth in the collaboration industry is clearly accelerating, and businesses will surely need to adopt processes and technologies sooner than later to stay competitive. If you want to stay competitive in today’s global economy, we strongly urge you to consider adopting collaboration tools that are specially designed to support global business communications for non-native English speakers. Learn more about GlobalEnglish Bloom™, a unique enterprise social collaboration platform optimized for global business performance, now.

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We previously introduced the Enterprise Fluency™ Maturity Model designed by Bersin & Associates, which looks at the relationship between how a global organization approaches business communication and how that approach influences its performance relative to peers. At this point, if you haven’t taken the short Enterprise Fluency assessment, complete it now so you know which level your company occupies—and where you’d like it to end up.

Many people have taken the assessment already but want to know: What are the anticipated gains as you move up this maturity model? 

At the beginning, you’re improving productivity at the individual level. But as you move from Level 2 to Level 3, you can begin to expect a wider range of benefits—like happier customers who are getting issues resolved faster and the agility that allows you to get products to market faster. At Level 4, you begin to see some of the financial benefits in terms of market share. Consider these real-world examples of business gains:

• A large financial services company with massive numbers of people working in offshore delivery centers established an on-demand program to improve business communications. After doing so, it measured productivity gains of two hours per week per employee.
• One of the large broadband providers in Asia discovered that the top 15% of its sales force constituted its “high performers”—and this group made 70% of its sales. When the company looked at what made these people successful, the differentiating factor was not domain expertise; it was the ability to effectively communicate with C-level customers in English. As a result of establishing an on-demand Business English program, 25% of its employees are now high producers, a 67% increase!

More productivity, more profit—these are highly desirable outcomes. But how does a company get started? GlobalEnglish CEO Mahesh Ram recommends that companies consider these three steps:

1. Secure executive sponsorship at the regional and global levels.
2. Stop looking at improving Business English—and therefore advancing Enterprise Fluency—as just a language training initiative
3. Take a consistent global approach to advance Enterprise Fluency.

One way to do this is to run a global diagnostic; this identifies all the pain areas and gives a real sense of what specifically needs to be addressed and how to get started. After following these steps, companies will typically then run a pilot program and get real feedback from its employees.

At that point, you should be ready to proceed with an on-demand program … and toward Level 4 of Enterprise Fluency Maturity. As part of its research, Bersin found that organizations that reach Level 4 are significantly more likely to be high performers. They are:

• 16x more likely than Level 1 companies to be high performers at financial success measures, such as increased revenue and cost control
• 28x more likely to be high performers at customer success metrics, such as improved customer loyalty and satisfaction
• 35x more likely to be high performers at employee productivity measures, such as saving time and per-employee productivity
• 86x more likely to be high performers at business agility measures, such as speed to market
• 113x more likely to be high performers at all these business outcomes

Download your copy of Global Business Communications: A Strategic Imperative in Today’s Borderless Workplace today to read more.

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1. Where Does Your Company Fall on the Enterprise Fluency™ Maturity Model?
2. How Advancing Enterprise Fluency Achieves Business Outcomes
3. Resolving the Enterprise Fluency Dilemma

We were very fortunate to have worked closely with Bersin & Associates recently, a research firm that digs deep to discover the “secret sauce” that makes high-performing organizations high performing. In one of their latest high-impact studies, conducted over the course of a year, Bersin & Associates aimed to discover how global organizations support global communication. They wanted to know which companies support global communication more than others, and how that is predictive of business success.

What Bersin found was no surprise to us! According to VP of Research David Mallon, Enterprise Fluency™ is the optimal state—a concept that GlobalEnglish has been working hard to champion. From the year-long study, analysts at Bersin developed the Enterprise Fluency Maturity Model, which looks at the relationship between how a global organization approaches business communication and how that approach influences its performance relative to peers. Four distinct levels emerged:

Level 1: Fragmented and Reactive Business Communication Awareness

According to Bersin’s data, 41% of organizations take a fragmented and reactive approach, and they see communication as a local issue. Example: “A certain person needs some language training in how to write a business memo.” They think that it is fundamentally an individual’s problem, not the organization’s problem, and the company addresses it individually.

Level 2: Emerging and Inconsistent Business Communication Development

14% of organizations recognize the issue and are starting to think about it. It’s a growing high-level concern, but in day-to-day operations, it’s still treated as if it is a local problem. While there may be some organization-wide tools in place, it’s unlikely that there is a clear, common tools strategy.

Level 3: Coordinated and Consistent Business Communication Support

11% are beginning to address it in a more coordinated way. Executives have begun to wake up to the problem—there’s probably at least one champion at the executive level. The understanding is pretty clear; what is still developing is how the company is supporting it around the world. Local efforts at development and support have been consolidated.

Level 4: Strategic and Borderless Business Communication Enablement

34% of organizations have reached the optimal level. These are the masters of the borderless workplace—though they still have plenty of things to improve. But these organizations attack the problem head on and realize that Enterprise Fluency is a strategic differentiator.

So what are Level 4 organizations doing that others are not? GlobalEnglish CEO Mahesh Ram shares the three practices GlobalEnglish has observed among companies that are on their way to achieving Enterprise Fluency:

1. Executive sponsorship. This often is a combination of someone at the executive level at HQ and a general manager of a large region or territory who understands the pain.

2. They have stopped looking at this as training. The number of employees who need Business English communication capability is so vast that a training solution does not scale to meet the problem. It has to be a workflow-enabled, on-demand approach that, for instance, enables thousands of employees who need to send an email right now to do so using proper Business English.

3. They take a consistently global approach. They don’t think of English as a language, but as a common protocol for doing business. How do we have a single set of analytics across the entire organization? How do we create a dashboard through which we can communicate to the CEO, CFO, etc.?

Take a short online Enterprise Fluency Maturity Model assessment to gauge your company’s level of Enterprise Fluency. For a complimentary and detailed assessment, please contact GlobalEnglish via email at sales@globalenglish.com.

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1. How Advancing Enterprise Fluency Achieves Business Outcomes
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3. Don’t Forget Enterprise Fluency!

It was a forward-thinking move, but not a surprising decision: In March 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, told the 7,100 workers gathered at the company’s Tokyo headquarters that they had to become proficient in Business English—in just two years.

Tsedal Neeley, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who has followed and written about the aggressive plan, called the move “explosive.” Only 10% of the Internet services company’s employees spoke English, and many of them had a hard time accepting Mikitani’s directive. But according to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Mikitani was ready for that reaction and pledged to join the effort, speaking only in English himself.

And while many may have considered him crazy, Neeley explains that what’s truly crazy is a CEO of a global company—even an American-based one—who doesn’t follow his lead. “If they don’t have a language strategy, they’ll regret it,” she says. “One of the most powerful ways to globally compete today is to make your company an English-speaking company. This takes years to achieve.”

The good news is that company leaders can benefit from some of the lessons Rakuten has learned since that 2010 announcement. The company initially expected its employees to improve their English proficiency on their own time and at their own expense. Neeley helped the company identify some changes it could make to accelerate learning—and a big one was paying for or providing a language program.

Her recommendations are also borne out of her experience with a high-tech French company that instituted a similar English-only mandate. There, she found that workers with little English proficiency had a lot of anxiety about not being able to contribute or missing out on promotions. One such worker told her, “If you cannot express your ideas because you lack language skills, then collaboration becomes a nightmare. You lose interest to continue, and you feel you are being devalued.”

In cases like these, C-level and management involvement and motivation are crucial. Neeley recommends they emphasize that the company is making the effort together and that the company’s non-native English speakers don’t have a “problem.” She also notes that keeping workers aware of their progress can be a powerful motivator.

Does your company have an English-wide mandate? What are you doing to improve your employees’ Business English skills so that your entire organization runs like a well-oiled machine?

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The growth of social collaboration has undoubtedly made the mastery of Business English more important than ever. But our recent Business English Index research found that overall Business English proficiency decreased by 7% compared to last year. Could an increase in social media tools be exacerbating the gap in Business English skills of your workforce, or does social technology provide greater opportunity?

Our “flatter” economy certainly creates challenges for non-native English-speaking workers. Since there are now very few jobs that are individually focused, the need to collaborate is greatly infused into almost every part of an organization. Social communication tends to be informal, which causes social channels to be filled with slang rather than business-specific terms. Non-native English speakers may not be able to comprehend this language, causing time to be wasted in deciphering the message and contributing to overall confusion.

Social communication also exposes English deficiencies because mistakes are more visible. And a poorly worded email to a supplier or a negative customer experience (like United Airlines breaking guitars) can be instantly shared online for worldwide consumption. All these challenges can potentially be very harmful to your company, your employees’ performance and your bottom line.

On the other hand, workers now also have greater opportunities to collaborate using technology that didn’t even exist five years ago. As we wrote in a blog post last October entitled Collaboration and Innovation Have Always Been Social, there are now opportunities to strengthen the informal networks within companies, creating resources for every employee who can now more easily get help from others. In that blog post, we quoted a Harvard Business Review article that said: “Tapping into the collective wisdom of everyone creates a new source of competitive advantage, agility and future innovation.”

Forward-thinking leaders are now realizing that they can—and should—integrate work and learning. And it’s never been easier or more beneficial to “put English to work” at your company. Products like GlobalEnglish Bloom™ and GlobalEnglish LinGo Pro™ leverage the strengths of social collaboration and mobile technology so that non-native English-speaking workers can integrate Business English development into their day-to-day tasks!

Does your company have a cost-effective way to improve your employees’ Business English skills? What technology do you use?

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In a recent article for AlterNet, Sara Robinson presents an argument that your employees would likely support: “The single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits…is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill and back onto a 40-hour footing.” That’s right—it’s time your employees started working less.

If the words “no way” just popped into your head, let’s listen to what Robinson has to say. She understands that the recommendation “flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work.” Which is why Robinson supports her argument by taking us out of modern times and back to the past, traveling some 200 years back to the time when unions were championing the 40-hour work week in the first place.

As employers began to give in to their demands, cutting days to 10 hours, then nine, then finally eight, the remarkable happened: Profit and productivity increased! And not just anecdotally. Literally hundreds of studies conducted in the early 20^th century proved that America’s factory workers have a solid eight hours a day in them, and, as Robinson writes, the studies found “you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day.”

As for knowledge workers at global companies, they tend to have only six good work hours in them. Explains Robinson, they “turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work, and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering email, making phone calls and so on.”

So if your workforce isn’t being effective in the, say, 10 hours it puts in per day, where is time being wasted away? As Robinson notes, “in meetings, answering email, making phone calls and so on”—and at the root of that problem lies a solution—better Business English skills.

As more and more multinational companies are learning, lack of a common language leads to countless inefficiencies—and longer days—as miscommunication leads to duplicated efforts, errors, extra meetings and disgruntled customers. Emails take longer to write; co-workers who are more proficient in English are taken away from their own duties in order to assist colleagues; and employees sit through meetings, only to leave without fully understanding what was discussed.

GlobalEnglish has been proven to change that: In the case of Emerson’s Latin American operations, the company’s VP reports “on average about two hours per week in efficiency gains in our employees.” Gains like that allow your employees to do more in less time, maximizing productive hours and minimizing wasted ones. And to what company leader would this not sound appealing?

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It’s time to change how you think about English in the global workplace. Why? Because our new index that measures Business English proficiency in the workplace uncovered the fact that a worldwide lack of Business English proficiency is threatening the productivity of companies, industries and country-specific economies.

Click to enlarge the Business English Index infographic

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The infographic above gives you a snapshot of this year’s results. You’ll see that some of the highlights include:

• The overall average Business English proficiency level is 4.15 (a drop from 4.45 in 2011), which illustrates the fact that Business English skills at global companies aren’t sufficient to meet today’s business requirements.
• Four out of ten international workers tested can’t understand basic information on conference calls or read or write emails in English.
• The struggling economic powers of Japan, Italy and Mexico, and the fast-growth emerging market of Brazil, performed below a basic Business English level—a severe disadvantage when competing in the global marketplace.
• The BEI score for global workers in the U.S. declined from 6.9 to 5.09 since the 2011 BEI benchmark. This is attributed to a majority of test takers being foreign-born engineers and scientists.

It’s highly likely that the inability of your company’s employees to communicate in English is having a real impact on your company’s business performance. And with 92% of global employees reporting that English is required or important for their jobs, companies competing in the global economy should see this issue as critical to their high performance that can no longer be ignored. The BEI reinforces the fact that there is a very real need for companies to have the right Business English development and support tools to successfully improve global performance. Today, we’re proud to be the only provider that offers a truly comprehensive solution that addresses 100% of customer organizations’ needs to create immediate performance gains and long-term proficiency improvements.

Download this year’s BEI report for the complete findings, or see how your industry and country stack up against the rest of the world using our interactive Business English Index wizard. You can also read our press release about the 2012 Business English Index online.

Related posts:

1. Business English Communication Gaps: The Brazil Edition
2. The Top Three Trends Shaping Global Business Success
3. Business English Communication Gaps: The Malaysia Edition (Part II)

See why top companies are 113 times more efficient, flexible and profitable

Tomorrow at 12:00 noon ET/17:00 GMT, Bersin & Associates’ VP of Research, David Mallon, and GlobalEnglish’s CEO, Mahesh Ram, will introduce the Enterprise Fluency™ Maturity Model designed by Bersin & Associates. Register now for the webinar.

It’s very likely that the majority of your workers are non-native English speakers, yet most of them must work and perform while using Business English every day—and that reality can have serious consequences. In fact, the new Enterprise Fluency™ Maturity Model designed by Bersin & Associates found that ineffective global communication in English causes major problems for global companies, from poor productivity to slow time to market to sharply reduced profits.

Join this webinar to see how you can immediately create a competitive edge with a company-wide focus on global communications. It’s a conversation you don’t want to miss!

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Join us on March 29 at 12:00 ET/17:00 GMT for a conversation with Bersin & Associates’ Vice President of Research David Mallon and GlobalEnglish’s CEO Mahesh Ram. They will introduce the new Enterprise Fluency™ Maturity Model designed by Bersin & Associates, which shows that ineffective global communication in English causes serious problems—from poor productivity to slow time to market to sharply reduced profits.

The model was developed after Bersin & Associates conducted research with global companies asking them to rank their performance and support across a variety of dimensions ranging from business communications to people development to innovation and change. The assessment showed how organizations with a strategic approach to enabling effective, global communications are:

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It’s a stat that’s both exciting and daunting: According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook published in April 2011, 70% of the world’s corporate growth is expected to come from emerging markets. That presents great opportunity, but also a great challenge: These emerging markets are filled with graduating students who are unprepared for work at multinational companies due to poor Business English skills. Which is why we thought we’d share two recent articles that show how critical better Business English skills are to youth in the Philippines and India.

Outsourcing Opinions looks at the Philippines’ Cebu province, where business process outsourcing companies are making an investment in the English skills of the region’s youth. “Better English, Better Future,” a pilot program that launched in January 2011, saw volunteers from one such BPO provider working to stem the decline of English skills of new grads by teaming up with elementary and high school students to teach them vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation skills. A second BPO provider participated in the program this month, by way of storytelling and classroom management sessions at another elementary school.

The overall hope is that “Better English, Better Future” will continue to improve the skills of Cebu’s youth with the help of BPOs and other groups so they can be better prepared for work in global companies.

The Times of India takes a look at a program focused specifically on women—and begins with the story of Vandana, the 17-year-old daughter of a parking attendant who dreamed of having a career. She joined the ILSC “Learn to Earn” program in Malviya Nagar, South Delhi, which is designed to build girls’ Business English skills and confidence.

“For us, this is more than just teaching English and equipping them with language skills. We want the girls to have a holistic development and make them aware of the world”—which is good news for would-be employers in the area. Better still, the program also includes training in employment skills such as interview preparation and email writing. The girls ultimately receive a one-month internship in the service or hospitality sector, and ILSC is continually looking to expand to new sectors.

While both of these programs’ impacts are tightly focused regionally, they’re also a step in the right direction and reflect a growing awareness of the importance of Business English for employment in global companies.

But is it too little too late? Do you think programs like these will be effective in preparing youth for work in global companies?

Related posts:

1. The New Emerging Markets
2. Business English Communication Gaps: The India Edition
3. Business English Communication Gaps: The India Edition (Part II)