Voices of Diversity: Embracing Accents in the Workplace with Heather Hansen

00;00;07;27 - 00;00;40;04
Wayne Turmel
Hello everyone, and welcome once again to the Long Distance Work WorkLife, the podcast where we try to make sense of remote and hybrid work in people not being in the same place at the same time and helping people thrive through all of that. My name is Wayne Turmel. My usual co-host, Marisa is not here today. It's an interview show and I'm very, very happy and fortunate to be talking to Heather Hansen.

00;00;40;06 - 00;00;53;15
Wayne Turmel
And we're going to be talking about accents and working across languages and all kinds of good stuff, and she knows of which she speaks because she is joining us from Singapore. Hi Heather.

00;00;53;17 - 00;00;56;18
Heather Hansen
I Wayne great to be here. Thanks for having me.

00;00;56;21 - 00;01;06;01
Wayne Turmel
Well, as always, thank you for being had. Tell me, what does the Global Speech Academy do?

00;01;06;03 - 00;01;27;01
Heather Hansen
We are a global communication training company working with Multination is primarily headquartered here in Singapore, in the region, but working internationally. So we focus on everything from presentation skills to cross-cultural communication to articulation, training and clear speech, anything that can help us be better communicators in global environments.

00;01;27;03 - 00;01;54;01
Wayne Turmel
Well, that sounds like worthy work and important stuff. Now you are a little bit of a disturber because I see that. I see that with great affection. As somebody who has been accused of disturbing more than my share of stuff. You're in a talk recently called How to Speak Bad English, perfectly in which calm.

00;01;54;03 - 00;02;23;06
Heather Hansen
Yeah, people don't like hearing that. They don't want to hear, Well, why would you want to speak bad English? The whole point of that talk is the fact that there is no such thing as good or bad English. There's only communication that works. So either you get your message across successfully or you don't. And I it just pains me that so many people come to me and say, Oh, my English is so bad, my pronunciation is so bad, and we're having a full on conversation in actually fully grammatical English.

00;02;23;06 - 00;02;53;23
Heather Hansen
And I'm thinking, Who made you think that you don't speak well? What kind of perfectionism are you searching for and looking for? Because as far as I can tell, you speak just fine. But there's so much bias, so much negativity. We use power. We use language as a power for maintaining privilege in the world. And so as as native English speakers, it's very easy to maintain our privilege and power in the global economy by focusing on how bad people speak English.

00;02;53;23 - 00;03;35;21
Wayne Turmel
And well, this is all part of that. You know, you need to lighten your skin and not cover your mouth when you laugh and and make all of that cultural stuff that that goes with being and all of that imperialist that's going to go, Yeah, yeah. But one of the things that I know that you feel very passionate about is besides all of those other things, this notion of having to eliminate accents and the idea of accent bias, tell us what that looks like right in the workplace and then why does that make you so crazy?

00;03;35;24 - 00;04;00;29
Heather Hansen
Yeah. So we'll never eliminate accents so it's not so much that it's more of a bias against them, Right? Because first of all, we have to understand every single person in the world has an accent. I mean, I grew up in central California believing I didn't have an accent. It was everyone else with an accent. Right. And those of us who think that way have actually never experienced the bias that is there for people who sound different than the culturally accepted, prestigious norm.

00;04;00;29 - 00;04;22;13
Heather Hansen
So I hit the lottery, right? Being born into this variety of English that's globally recognized, seen as educated and eloquent. And I've based the whole business off of it, and I've been very successful due to the fact that I speak a type of English that people recognize and and believe is prestigious. And now it's not like that for everyone.

00;04;22;13 - 00;04;43;10
Heather Hansen
When when I went abroad, I first started learning about accent bias because I was living in German speaking society and Danish speaking. I'm fluent in both languages. My German is very rusty now, my Danish. I'm married to a Dane, so we speak it daily. And living in Denmark, for example, speaking fluent Danish, I'd be stopped in the middle of business meetings like, Oh, how are your accent?

00;04;43;10 - 00;05;05;21
Heather Hansen
So cute. Oh, more. Oh, I love you and your accent. It's like we're in a business meeting. Why aren't you listening to what I say and taking me seriously? You would never say that to me if we were speaking English right now. Right. But that shows the privilege that I have because I would say we can do this in English if you want, you know, and then like, Oh, no, no, no, it's okay, it's okay, because that would give me my power back, my respect back.

00;05;05;23 - 00;05;44;03
Heather Hansen
But what about the people who speak Mandarin or Tamil or Malay or Indonesian or languages that aren't global languages? They don't have that option. They're dealing with this every single day, day in and day out, trying to compete in a world that is dominated and run by English speakers. So that's what fuels all of my work. It's how can I help these people to better compete, to feel just as confident and to get the rest of the world to actually start listening to what they are saying and accepting them for who they are instead of constantly thinking about, Oh, that's funny the way they said that, Oh, their English is so bad and oh, why

00;05;44;03 - 00;05;53;04
Heather Hansen
don't they speak better? And oh, you've lived in America 40 years. Why do you still have an accent? All of these kinds of biases that come to the surface.

00;05;53;06 - 00;06;10;29
Wayne Turmel
And I know I'm not trying to steal your thunder, but one of the things that occurs to me is with the rise of asynchronous work, you know, you encounter a little bit less of that because as you know, in cyberspace, no. One, you don't type with an ex.

00;06;11;02 - 00;06;47;20
Heather Hansen
Yes and no. Right? Because the type of English is spoken globally. There are there isn't just one global English. And that's one of the problems. Singapore English has its own rules, its own grammatical structures, its own vocabulary. Indian English has many different varieties, English spoken in the Philippines, slightly different, and some are more British English, some are more American based, depending on who colonized them first and so even in the writing, when you when you write with someone from India, the terminology they use, maybe some of the different grammar markers that you find will be different.

00;06;47;22 - 00;07;13;14
Heather Hansen
And so if you think of it that way, there's is almost a written accent as well where we're thinking, Oh, why can they never put an F on the third person singular key works. Not he work like, Oh, their English is so annoying. It comes up both in writing and in and in speech. I mean, just look at the comments section of any social media site and the way people will will break down the writing of what someone said, usually because they have no real argument.

00;07;13;14 - 00;07;31;25
Heather Hansen
So they go to the language as the way to make themselves superior. So the grammar police I'm talking to you, it's that is not necessary because if you understood the message, then communication happens and that's where we have to start approaching all of our communication, especially in the working world.

00;07;31;28 - 00;07;45;13
Wayne Turmel
Well, and I love that you are not trying to educate the individual workers so much as the leaders and the organizations who.

00;07;45;16 - 00;08;11;07
Heather Hansen
It really does start from the top. It needs to the leaders need to fully understand this in order to make it quite clear that, listen, we're accepting of everyone. Now, the problem in organizations is that we talk about everything. And I from age to race to gender, to sexuality, Abel is an all of these things, but language is never discussed, and it's the foundation for all of them.

00;08;11;07 - 00;08;33;10
Heather Hansen
When you hear of someone on the phone, you're immediately categorizing. You're giving them the gender you believe they have, not how they identify you are deciding what race they probably are. You are deciding their education levels, probably where in the world they're from. You have decided all this information and created a vision of that person without even seeing them, without knowing them.

00;08;33;13 - 00;08;53;21
Heather Hansen
And and this is not discussed in the workplace. It's not included in the policy. It's not protected by law unless you can link accent, bias and discrimination to national origin. So that means, okay, if you're a foreign language speaker in America and someone is discriminating against you and saying, Oh, you can't speak English, go back where you're from.

00;08;53;23 - 00;09;17;08
Heather Hansen
Well, that's an easy link to national origin and you have a court case. But what about the the white American man from Alabama who is going up to work on Wall Street and is being made fun of because of his accent or isn't taken seriously? What kind of national origin clause can he fall back on? So this is not only a native non-native foreign speaker.

00;09;17;08 - 00;09;34;04
Heather Hansen
We experience this within the United States. And if I say, you know, the South, New York, New Jersey, Boston, California, Valley Girl, Florida, we have immediate ideas of what these accents sound like and what the characteristics for those groups of people are.

00;09;34;05 - 00;09;36;28
Wayne Turmel
Right. And the humans attached to them.

00;09;37;01 - 00;09;50;09
Heather Hansen
Yeah. And so this is this is an issue for everyone. It isn't only a native non-Native, although we see it happening even more when we're trying to deal with people from a different culture and background as well.

00;09;50;12 - 00;10;25;06
Wayne Turmel
Well, that obviously gets to the point of in an increasingly global world, right? This notion that, you know, you can't really you can't get the benefits of globalism without dealing with other humans from other places, and it goes with the territory. And you said something and I'm dying to get into what the heck you mean by this, because as somebody who has spent 30 years teaching communication skills, your big battle cry is communication is not a skills problem.

00;10;25;13 - 00;10;28;00
Wayne Turmel
And what?

00;10;28;03 - 00;10;47;24
Heather Hansen
Well, that statement comes from my frustration as a corporate trainer where every october i get phone calls from h.r. Saying we really want to commit to changing the communication culture in the company. Can you come and do a two day program on presentation skills? And it's like, that's not going to cut it. That's not going to change anything.

00;10;47;24 - 00;11;17;14
Heather Hansen
That's not going to move the needle even a little bit. And this is not simply a skills problem. It's much more than that. It has to do with the entire culture of the work environment. Are people conscious communicators? Do we have cultural intelligence, cross-cultural skills? Are we good listeners? Are we aware of our environment? And when we have the loud voices and we're dominating and when we aren't letting people in, when we're interrupting and do we have connection in the company?

00;11;17;14 - 00;11;42;09
Heather Hansen
So is there psychological safety? Are we building strong relationships? What do those social networks look like inside the company itself? And, you know, do people have a fear of failure? They're not speaking up because they're always ridiculed or they're put back down. So they press mute and they they don't want to contribute. And then the last piece of the puzzle is the confidence piece, and that's both skills, confidence and self confidence, self-worth.

00;11;42;11 - 00;12;10;25
Heather Hansen
So it's only that very little sliver of the skills, confidence if you truly don't know how to communicate, you truly have such a heavy accent. No one on earth can understand you. Then we do need to work on some skills, but that is a very small part of the puzzle. I could teach you everything I know about a great presentation being a good presenter, but if you're in a toxic environment with a boss who doesn't listen, you could give the best presentation in the world and it's not going to do anything for you.

00;12;10;27 - 00;12;26;23
Heather Hansen
So. So the skills is just one teeny little piece of the puzzle, and we like to focus all of our attention there and place all of the responsibility on the individual to say you're not a good enough communicator when really so much more is based on how those messages are being received.

00;12;26;26 - 00;12;54;23
Wayne Turmel
I'm going to take us off topic for a moment because I'm fascinated by this. Having taught presentation skills in your corner of the world, does the expectation of what makes a good presentation from the leadership standpoint, how much work is it to take somebody from a what's called South east Southeast Asian culture and have them present to the white guy from New York?

00;12;54;25 - 00;12;59;01
Wayne Turmel
You know how traumatic and dramatic is that?

00;12;59;04 - 00;13;35;24
Heather Hansen
This is the entire problem because and this is why I run a successful business in the whole hypocrisy of my career is that why should that individual from Southeast Asia have to change the way they communicate their style of communication, their their personality, even to fit the expectations of the white westerner sitting in New York? Will that white Westerner ever even consider ever in a million years changing the way they speak, adapting their style, being more adaptable in general to cultural difference when they come to Southeast Asia?

00;13;35;29 - 00;14;18;14
Heather Hansen
And this is exactly the problem in the world right now, is that this Western ideal, the way leadership ideas, communication, you name it, business strategy is very Western dominated and we don't value the different styles that are coming from the East. So my whole job is trying to help these people to fit in to this global expectation that is a very western, western world and completely move them away from who they are, how they normally communicate it, how they articulate sounds to fit that picture, because that is the goal and it still is, especially in these countries that are old colonies that have just grown up with this feeling of somehow being inferior.

00;14;18;17 - 00;14;42;20
Heather Hansen
And Singapore itself has a government campaign called Speak Good English, implying that Singapore English is not good and it is a native variety. They grow up, they grow up speaking it, they're fully educated in English, they work fully in English. The government is run in English. And I don't think people outside Singapore really understand that the English is their language, but it sounds very different and their cultures.

00;14;42;21 - 00;15;06;07
Wayne Turmel
And so I'm giving you 10 minutes in a room with the average white Anglo American, Canadian project manager or division manager, you have 5 minutes and we have duct tape him or her. Yeah. So you will not be interrupted.

00;15;06;10 - 00;15;10;07
Heather Hansen
Captive audience So the mouth is duct tape. That's the most important.

00;15;10;09 - 00;15;18;21
Wayne Turmel
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'm giving you every advantage for the next 5 minutes. What do you tell this person?

00;15;18;23 - 00;15;48;01
Heather Hansen
Oh, it's about shifting our entire view of the world, of us not being in the dominant position. First of all, understanding that we do not own the English language. We speak one variety of it. We also have an accent that is different from everywhere else in the world. We have to completely change that mindset that we're walking into global conversations in the powerful position and look at people as our peers and listen for understanding.

00;15;48;04 - 00;16;15;22
Heather Hansen
So the focus has now shifted that when we go into a global environment, we are also speaking a foreign language. The way that English is used, the way that we communicate in global settings is not the same as how we communicate with each other. Over coffee at home, we must learn how to adapt, how to change our speech, to drop idioms, to try to remove as many phrasal verbs as possible, which is incredibly challenging.

00;16;15;25 - 00;16;16;15
Heather Hansen
It's hard for me.

00;16;16;15 - 00;16;18;10
Wayne Turmel
To do over, not be.

00;16;18;13 - 00;16;37;16
Heather Hansen
A verb, plus a preposition that has a completely different meaning. So for example, I pass out verses, pass on verses, pass over one woman was an immigrant, and I believe this is in the UK. The story I heard called from the school. The school says your son is passed out on the playground, you need to come pick him up.

00;16;37;18 - 00;16;57;11
Heather Hansen
She didn't know what pass that was that she knew passed on and so she was distraught. She thought she was picking up her dead child at school. So this is how easily misunderstandings can happen. And we don't think of this as a native speaker born and raised in America, you know, we rule the world. We're so amazing and and to a degree, that's very true.

00;16;57;11 - 00;17;19;04
Heather Hansen
Globally, we have a huge reputation. We do have a lot of power in the world, but we can't abuse it. And we need to remember that there are people all over the world just as well-educated with us who have grown up speaking English, who sound different, but are just as educated, have just as many good ideas. And if we don't start closing our mouths and listening to them, we're losing so much potential.

00;17;19;04 - 00;17;38;14
Heather Hansen
We're losing our talent. We aren't taking advantage of the skills that are right in front of us. And because we have this chip on our shoulder that we think that now while you sound different, you must not be as good. And this comes from all the way back to the movies we watch as children, Disney movies, the bad guys all have accents and people are other.

00;17;38;14 - 00;17;43;14
Heather Hansen
We we try to create that distance and we make an enemy out of them.

00;17;43;16 - 00;18;07;06
Wayne Turmel
You know, this is so important and we can keep going forever. It occurs to me that Kevin and I have said for all of these many years that managers of whatever help, wherever they are, often forget that there is an inherent power difference. Yes. Even on your team between you and your direct reports, you can be as benevolent in kind of thinking.

00;18;07;06 - 00;18;39;23
Wayne Turmel
You're being open and understanding, and that exists anyway when you add the complications of working overseas accents. Not really listening to understand it only becomes that much more complicated and in a perfect world, the responsibility falls on us as leaders. So, Heather, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We are going to you says pushing the right button.

00;18;39;25 - 00;19;00;26
Wayne Turmel
We are going to have links to heather and global speech academy and all that good stuff in the transcript of the show on long distance work life icon. Heather, I'm going to remove you from the room just long enough to finish wrapping up here, but thank you so much for being with us. It's been a fascinating conversation.

00;19;00;28 - 00;19;03;19
Heather Hansen
Yeah, thank you. Really fun to be here. Thanks so much.

00;19;03;24 - 00;19;46;04
Wayne Turmel
And if you didn't fact like this show and with this one, there wasn't much not to like. I found this fascinating. Please like subscribe to your podcast listeners. You're seeing this on YouTube. You know how this works. By now, I was delighted to come across this topic and if you have a topic that you would like us to talk about or interview somebody about, or you just have a pet peeve that you want Marisa and I to riff about while we're at it, contact us on LinkedIn, Wayne Turmel, Marisa Eikenberry or Wayne and Kevin Eikenberry dot com, or Marisa and Kevin Eikenberry dot com.

00;19;46;07 - 00;20;09;27
Wayne Turmel
And of course, if you are putting together a team please contact us and Kevin Eikenberry group or you can pick up in my new book The long distance Team Designing your team for Everyone success that is it. Thank you for joining us on the long distance work life. Don't let the weasel ski get you down. We will see you next episode.