Speaking another language has thousands of advantages, one of them is that it permanently changes your brain structure, that’s why bilingual people are more creative, better critical-thinkers and have a longer attention-span.
As we well know, businesses prosper where there is a diversity of ideas created by a multicultural workforce. That’s why multicultural awareness is just as important at work as it is at home, and this goes beyond office culture and profit margins. According to a poll by “The Economist”, 67% of international companies say that the multicultural nature of their staff boosts innovation. The article highlights that when it comes to workplace relationships there is more than just cultural sensitivity in play. According to a school of thought called linguistic determinism, our mother tongue affects the way we see the world. This means that people from different linguistic backgrounds think, act and communicate differently. A native German speaker, for example, might interpret a situation in a different way to a native French speaker, simply due to subconscious associations.
Studies of multilingual workforces show that groups with mixed-language members have a tendency to find innovative solutions to practical problems. This has been put down to them using a variety of communication strategies in a flexible and dynamic way. When speakers of different linguistic backgrounds work together using a common language, they have a base of subconscious ideas found under the surface of the language they speak.
These studies show that bilingual people can have highly valuable attributes as employees: critical-thinking, capacity for conceptualisation, working-memory and dexterity. They are even better decision-makers because thinking in a non-native language allows the bilingual person to be able to put distance between their emotions and their memories, allowing for more rational conclusions than impulsive ones. This is what makes them better employees as they possess characteristics that are vital to complex management and conflict-resolution.
Language is a vital part of life, but until now economics had never thought of it as anything more than a tool. Forming a multilingual workforce is like having different cognitive tools in a kit; the more diversity we have in our staff, the more we can achieve. Ask us about how Glorick can help you with this matter.
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