Our stories that discussed learning a foreign language and DEI led to several phone calls from call center and sales supervisors in the worlds of insurance and financial planning.
One pointed out, “The market of people speaking an alphabet soup of languages has greatly increased, and we are concerned about lost sales and reputational damage inadvertently caused by employees who lack cultural competence. We’ve observed some who speak a second language well enough to get into trouble by using the wrong vocabulary — known as false friends, which are words that are identical or resemble each other in both languages but have vastly different meanings.”
