The power of understanding: From local voices to global performance

One of the great advantages of working internationally is access to a much wider pool of knowledge. People understand their local markets, notice different customer behaviours, bring different professional experiences and often see problems from angles that colleagues elsewhere might miss.

But having that knowledge within an organisation and benefiting from it are not necessarily the same thing.

For global businesses, language is part of that equation. A shared corporate language may be essential for working across borders, but it does not mean that everyone participates in it on equal terms. When people are learning new concepts, discussing unfamiliar ideas or trying to explain something nuanced, working in a second language can require additional effort. That can influence not only how easily information is understood, but also how confidently people contribute what they know.

For L&D teams, this raises an interesting question. We tend to think of global learning in terms of getting knowledge out to people. Perhaps we also need to think more about what helps knowledge come back.

Global learning should not be a one-way street

Most international learning programmes begin with a central need. An organisation is introducing a new way of working, developing a particular skill or preparing its people for change. The learning is created and then distributed across regions, often in several languages.

That makes sense. But the flow of knowledge in a healthy global organisation is rarely one-directional.

Employees do not simply receive information from the centre. They interpret it through their own experience, apply it in different circumstances and often discover things in the process. A sales team may see that customers in one market respond differently. A local manager may adapt an approach because of cultural expectations. Someone close to a process may spot a problem or an opportunity long before it becomes visible elsewhere.

Those observations become valuable when people can share them.

Research into multinational teams gives us some insight into what can get in the way. Helene Tenzer, Markus Pudelko and Mary Zellmer-Bruhn studied how language diversity affects communication and knowledge processing. They found that more visible language barriers can reduce participation in team communication, while less obvious barriers can interfere with the shared sense-making that helps people understand one another. Both can make knowledge processing within multinational teams more difficult.

The study was not about eLearning, so we should not stretch its conclusions beyond what it examined. What it does show is that language has consequences for the way knowledge moves between people. That is highly relevant when we think about what global learning is ultimately there to support.

Who gets to join the conversation?

Participation is an important part of this.

A 2024 cross-country study by Wilhelm Barner-Rasmussen, Claudine Gaibrois and Natalie Victoria Wilmot looked at language and participation in international business communication. Based on 82 interviews across Finland, Switzerland and the UK, the researchers found that attitudes and expectations around language could either support participation or create friction and discourage it.

This does not mean that international companies should abandon a common working language. In many organisations, that would be neither practical nor desirable. It does suggest, however, that we should be careful not to confuse having a shared language with giving everybody the same opportunity to express themselves through it.

There is a difference between being able to follow a meeting in English and feeling comfortable enough to interrupt, challenge an idea, explain something complex or suggest an alternative. The same is true of learning. Someone may be perfectly capable of completing a course in a second language while still having to devote more energy to processing the language itself.

Localisation can reduce some of that friction at the learning stage. It gives people the opportunity to engage with new concepts in language that feels more immediate, particularly when the subject is complex or unfamiliar. The goal is not to remove the shared language of the business, but to make sure language does not become an unnecessary obstacle to acquiring the knowledge people are then expected to use.

Language and creativity are more complicated than they look

This becomes particularly interesting when we move from understanding information to generating new ideas.

A 2024 study by Anja Loderer and colleagues explored the effect of using a foreign language on creative processes within teams. Their findings were nuanced. Participants described difficulties including reduced comprehension, additional mental effort and anxiety around using a foreign language. At the same time, the researchers also found potential creative benefits, with unfamiliar language sometimes encouraging people to make different associations or move away from established patterns.

That complexity is useful. It reminds us that multilingualism is not a problem to be solved. Different languages can bring different ways of thinking and expressing ideas. The challenge is making sure people have enough linguistic confidence and understanding to contribute those ideas in the first place.

Another study, published in 2025, looked more directly at creative performance. Katrin Muehlfeld and her colleagues randomly assigned 95 two-person teams to complete creative tasks either in their native language or in a foreign language. They found that working in a foreign language reduced creative performance in their experiment, while stronger foreign-language proficiency helped to lessen the effect.

Again, this is not evidence that localisation automatically makes organisations more innovative. What it does reinforce is the idea that language can affect the cognitive and communicative work involved when people develop ideas together.

For global L&D, that is worth paying attention to.

Localise the learning, keep the shared ambition

There can sometimes be a concern that localisation works against consistency. If employees in different countries receive learning in different languages, are we still building the same organisation?

Done well, localisation should support consistency rather than weaken it.

The organisation still defines the objective. People still need to understand the same strategy, develop the same core skills or work towards the same standard. What changes is the way that meaning is carried to the learner.

That may involve more than replacing one set of words with another. Examples may need adapting. A scenario that feels immediately recognisable in one market may feel remote in another. Terminology may need to reflect what employees actually encounter in their working environment. Tone matters too, particularly when the learning is asking people to question established behaviour or participate in discussion.

The aim is not to create separate messages for every market. It is to preserve the intention of the original learning while giving people a fair opportunity to understand and use it.

When that happens, employees are in a better position not only to absorb information, but to respond to it.

What valuable knowledge gets lost when people do not feel confident enough to join the conversation?

Give more people the confidence to contribute

If we see global learning simply as content that needs distributing, translation can easily become the final stage of production. But organisations do not invest in learning because they need more files. They invest because they want people to know something, do something or think differently as a result.

In a global organisation, the best outcome may go further still. People understand the learning, apply it in their own context and bring something back: a question, an improvement, a local insight or a different way of approaching the problem.

Localisation cannot promise innovation, but it can help remove unnecessary language barriers that make participation harder. When people can engage with learning clearly and confidently, they are in a stronger position to contribute their own knowledge too.

At Accentua, we help L&D teams adapt learning for the people who actually need to use it, while protecting the purpose and integrity of the original content. Because global learning should not simply reach people. It should help them take part in what happens next.

Sources and further reading

All sources listed below reflect established academic research or recognised institutional guidance on learning, language and organisational performance.

• The impact of language barriers on knowledge processing in multinational teams (2021), Helene Tenzer, Markus Pudelko and Mary Zellmer-Bruhn. Journal of World Business, 56(2), 101184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2020.101184 Experts@Minnesota
• Perfection, hybridity or shutting up? A cross-country study of how language ideologies shape participation in international business (2024), Wilhelm Barner-Rasmussen, Claudine Gaibrois and Natalie Victoria Wilmot. International Business Review, 33(1), 102189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2023.102189 ScienceDirect
• The language barrier as a springboard towards (team) creativity: An exploratory study of foreign language use in teams (2024), Anja Loderer, Katrin Muehlfeld, Robert Wilken, Alexandra Moritz and Véronique Slomski. International Business Review, 33(2), 102247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2023.102247 ScienceDirect
• Foreign Language Use, Virtuality, and the Creative Performance of Dyadic Teams (2025), Katrin Muehlfeld, Anja Loderer, Thorsten Semrau and Robert Wilken. Management International Review, 65, 145–173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-024-00557-1