Alexei Koveshnikov: Toward and/or away from an inclusive workplace: the role of language and informal networks

Speaker A: Ter et tulo eva ita etl nuento sarian um Tamaniakson kielena on Englanti. The theme of this episode is toward and or away from an inclusive workplace, the role of language and informal networks. Our lecturer is Alexei Koveshnikov from Aalto University. Additional materials can be found at www.aalto.fi en futurework and by choosing PODC.

Speaker B: My name is Alexei Koveshnikov. I do work here at Aalto Bees. Um, I'm an associate professor at the moment, uh, in management organization. I'm also unit head, uh, head of management unit. And um, I'm here to talk about the role of language in inclusion or exclusion uh, at the workplace. So I'll kind of highlight a couple of things um, that I think are important to consider once we think about the role of language and inclusion. Um, a few words about myself. Um, who am I? Um, well, Associate Prof. Here at Management. Um, I've published quite extensively on various topics, um, related to cross cultural management, leadership and hrm. I've been teaching quite a bit as well. Uh, not only in Finland but also internationally, um, in different countries. Originally I'm from ussr, the country that doesn't exist anymore. Um, my mother tongue is Russian, um, but I was born in Latvia. Uh, so that kind of complicates things a little bit. And then I'll tell you a story about from my childhood as well to complicate things even a bit more. Um, I got my PhD from Hankin and that's also kind of something that um, relates to the topic of this lecture because you know Hankin is a Swedish speaking school and there's this Swedish speaking Finnish minority in Finland and it's quite an interesting group of people. Um, not very large, um, but they speak their own language and they also uh, enjoy some benefits I think because of that in Finland. Um, talking about the role of language, um, another thing I wanted to say about um myself is uh, to promote a little bit what I'm doing currently with a couple of colleagues, uh, of mine. Uh, we're also doing a podcast. I think nowadays almost everyone is doing something in podcast M. So we have a podcast called Finnish Leadership Team flt. We started um, doing it in the beginning of this year. Um, on the picture there you can see that uh, there's a couple of people involved except myself. There's um, uh, um, Mark Hayton and Anderle Carlstadt. Um, you might know them. So they had a long experience from Nokia. Um, and then we have um, Bell and Kelly Helping us in producing those, uh, podcast, uh, episodes. And basically the idea of this is that we meet with interesting people and we talk about the, the essence of Finnish leadership, uh, in a kind of relaxed atmosphere. And the episodes have been really fun. There's a lot of interesting things coming out regarding leadership, but also in general, people tell their stories, uh, their successes, their failures, their learnings. And um, we published a new episode every two weeks. And just one, um, episode was published, actually our latest just yesterday on Tuesday. So if you're interested, please do check it out. Flt. All right, but now to the topic of today language. And I'll approach it through two stories and then I'll kind of elaborate on some of the learnings from these stories, uh, and then I'll try to conclude. And the first thing will be part one, uh, categorization and inclusion. So I'll talk about categorization and I would like to start with a, um, very personal story. Um, so I would like to take you back to ussr. That's, you know, it's a very typical picture of, um, you know, place somewhere in Ukraine actually back in the day. So my dad is from Ukraine, uh, and I spent all my summers, uh, in Ukraine in a place like this, uh, you know, couple of these so called Khrushchevskas, Khrushchevkas, very typical buildings where people lived in Soviet Union in 1970s, 1980s. And every summer when I went there, actually one of the summers when I went there as a kid, uh, I ended up playing with a girl, like playing, um, intensively every day for many hours and so on. We played for weeks, um, and so on, until one day, and things were great until one day I came home to my grandmother and she asked me, so how's your friendship going with this girl? And I said it's great. Um, and then she said, and it's okay that uh, she's actually black. She said, and only back then when she mentioned that, I realized that yes, this girl had a different color, uh, of her skin. She was a daughter of one of the, uh, African students. Uh, because nearby where my grandmother lived there used to be an institute for, um, African students. Uh, Soviet Union was doing a lot of these things back in the day, educating, um, students from, uh, friendly countries. And she was the daughter of one of the students and well, she lived in the same area and we ended up playing. But m. My point is that before my grandmother mentioned that actually there's some kind of difference between us, I never realized that, uh, it didn't matter at all to me how she looked or what was the color of her skin of this girl. But unfortunately that's how we as humans are. We tend to categorize ourselves and others based on all kinds of attributes. Color um, of the skin is one of them. Um, as we go on in our lives. It's kind of a natural mechanism or ability of humans to do that. Um, but of course it also backfires. It creates all these kind of boundaries between us and so on. And that's how, that's my kind of. I'm trying to get into the topic of language in this way. So that's us playing. Well not exactly but uh, you can imagine it was something like that um, in a happy Soviet Union, um, back in the day. So self categorization. As humans we do um, categorize ourselves and others into groups, into in groups and out groups. And uh, we talk about identities, right? So uh, every one of us has number of different identities. And one of them would be our personal identity, who we are. For example in this case, um, well one female might kind of differentiate from other females by being Amy or Beth or Johanna. Uh, but then as we get into groups we start to form social identities. And usually social identities form so that we find some kind of common trait, um, that supposedly unite us all, make us kind of in some way distinct and unique from others. And in this way we form a social identity. In this case us women, uh, so Amy and Beth, Johanna, uh, and we're different, we have something in common with females, but we're different from males in this way. We categorize ourselves into the group of females, uh, and as being different from others, males. Um, we create uh, in this way boundaries between us and them. We create groups in group now group uh, memberships. So we ourselves belong and people like us start to belong to in groups. And those who don't belong into out group, uh, start to be seen as members of out groups. So we create these boundaries between us and them. That's the essence of uh, categorization process. We ah, do that all the time as humans. There are many different attributes or dimensions how people do that. You can see here that for example there's race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, uh, sex, sexual orientation, but also language. Language is an important kind of category that we use to uh, self categorize or categorize ourselves and others. This is important then categorization and language. Um, you might think that language is just some kind of job related skill, but it's not. It's actually a key factor for self categorization, um and the categorization of others. Um then a shared language is regarded or can be seen as a key social category that shapes individuals social self identities. What I was talking about like us women versus uh males or us Finnish speakers versus Swedish speakers. Um then language diversity organizations can separate employees into groups based on shared language, uh, thus giving rise to language boundaries in organizations. Usually these language based clusters, uh, they form within organizations where we have several languages based on some kind of homophily. That's a concept that basically um, is defined as a tendency to interact with similar others. So we like to interact with people who are similar to us in some way. That's homophily. Um, because these in group memberships are formed then that's where members of this group start to interact more. They exchange knowledge, they exchange ideas, they exchange information, they exchange favors. Um, so the in group membership becomes stronger and the separation from everyone else becomes kind of stronger as well. Um, a good example would be the Swedish speaking Finns here. So being at Hanken in my good old days, um, while I saw how really strong bonds and ties are formed during uh, those days when students come to Hanken and study in Swedish and then they go out and actually continue all these relationships and they keep them going and uh, it's really important to belong to this um, group of Swedish speaking Finns in Finland. I think people who belong to that, who truly belong to that group, they benefit quite a bit from that. There's a lot of social capital embedded in this. So therefore language is not just a resource, a skill that can be acquired or learned, um, but it's an important dimension of inclusion, exclusion and diversity in organizations. So that's kind of my point. Um, I uh suggest that we see language as an important dimension of this kind of social categorization. Not just a skill that people might have or not uh, in their workplace. Uh, and then when we look at how organizations usually approach um, the role of language and inclusion or exclusion. So basically the general approach would be that well once you learn the language, inclusion will follow. That's the kind of a bit simplistic but tends to be the idea that organizations follow. Right, we just offer opportunities for employees to learn the language and then if they make this effort, if they succeed, inclusion will follow. And language learning becomes always seen as a personal responsibility of an individual who wants to be included. Um, so if you do that you're welcome then if you fail to do so, um, you easily become marked as you're ethnocentric. You're lazy, you're not willing to integrate, uh, your arrogant, maybe all these things, um, start to be associated with you. Uh, and in a way it also legitimizes various, um, forms of exclusion and discrimination based on language in organizations. So if the person is not willing to make this effort, if he or she is too lazy, so why she or he should be included in what's happening in the organization in a way. And on top of that, um, we also know that language has really strong effects on intergroup relationships, social evaluations, stereotyping and things like that. Uh, people use language and accent to infer traits such as intelligence, warmth, even hide for people they have never met. And my good example here is that I like to follow football. Uh, when you watch, let's say English Premier League, uh, there's somebody commenting always how the game goes. And based on the voice and how people express themselves and what they say, you kind of imagine the person, how he or she looks like. And it's always a kind of amazing revelation for me when I actually see this person in real life. Like once in a while you actually see these commentators. They look, well, quite different from what I imagine. But I think a lot of this happens in this situation. So based on how a person talks, you know, what kind of accent in English he or she has, you uh, would imagine that you know, him or she or her being more intelligent or less intelligent, I don't know, bigger, smaller and so on. So we do these kind of things all the time. And um, think about this expression of uh, Queen's English. So those who speak English with this kind of Queen's accent, well, we tend to attribute some kind of royalty, um, qualities to that person, even if we haven't met this person. And there's a bunch of examples in the literature that show that um, how we speak actually or how we hear others speaking, when we hear others speaking, we actually tend to, um, also it kind of gives rise to a lot of ideas about the person, quite often stereotypical. So for instance, Canadian adults, um, rate the personality characteristics of someone speaking in English as more positive than the same person speaking in French. In US both white and Hispanic, um, uh, people evaluate American accented speakers as having more favorable personality characteristics than Spanish, uh, or people with Spanish accents. Um, and then again in the U.S. the studies show that speakers with non native accents have fewer employment opportunities and lower salaries, um, and in low courts less credibility in more discrimination, um, kind of in their cases. Right. So think about Finland. Probably some of these things can be Applied to Finnish context as well. So it matters how we speak, what language we use and so on. Again, it takes us back to this categorization, um, and implication of this categorization for how we draw boundaries between ourselves, our in group and out group. Um, then you would think that if we believe in this approach that if um, organizations create opportunities for people to learn the language and they take it and then everything else will follow. All the nice things, uh, again things even in that case are not that simple. Uh, so there are studies that actually show that um, even when in some societies, even when foreign people do learn the local language really um, kind of at the professional level, the language proficiency is really high. It actually backfires for them as well. Because what happens is that um. Um, here's a study which was done in Japan, quite homogeneous society, it's been a closed society for a long time with a very strong kind of uh, cultural identity. Um, our colleagues Vesa, uh, Pelticorpi and Marco Podelko did this study in Japan. What they found that basically they studied um, expatriates in Japan. And um, they tried to establish the relationship between the proficiency in local language of these people of expatriates and the extent to which they were categorized as uh, outsiders by the locals, by Japanese people. And logically. Well when they started doing this they noticed that in the beginning when the foreigners were learning the languages, the proficiency was increasing from basically non existent to something Things uh, were looking kind of good and as expected, so the tendency to categorize uh, foreigners by locals as outsiders was decreasing. So more you speak the language, less you perceive this an outsider by the locals. But then what happens here, this is, sorry, a bit academic but so you see a curvilinear relationship here. So what happens here? At some point when the proficiency becomes too high in the local language uh, of the foreigners, then the locals start to feel threatened. So the argument here is that. And they start to kind of categorize the outsiders as um, uh, outgroup members again, um, more. Right, so that's what this curvily linear relationship actually implies. So the interpretation of this is that once you become really good in the local language in a closed society with the local identity where the local in group membership is really strong, uh, local people start to feel threatened, uh, it's an identity threat to them and they actually start to kind of. That's a defensive mechanism. They start to still, despite of the high proficiency of the foreign person in the local language, they start to kind of again start to Categorize this person as an outsider. So you cannot become full member of society in Japan even if you learn the language really well. And um, they did another kind of one more iteration of this and found that uh, in cases of people with high uncertainty avoidance, so those who actually really don't like uncertainty, um, this relationship was even stronger as the one here. So if people are afraid of uncertainty, they feel this identity threat from people, from foreigners who really learn the local language really well, even stronger. Well this is Japan, but again Finland is quite a homogeneous country as well. Um, so maybe some of this can apply to Finnish context, um, as well. So this is interesting. So what we see is that again kind of problematizing this idea that you just create an opportunity for a foreign employee to learn the language and nice things will follow. Well, it looks like even if they do invest in this, uh, and they develop this high language proficiency, uh, it can also create an identity threat for locals. Um, and then that's the backfiring element. And on top of that it also leads, this is not directly from this study, but there's another research that shows that high language proficiency can lead to higher self stigmatization of the person who learned the language. So basically it happens because once you become really proficient in the local language, uh, and you think that now good things, all the doors will be open for you, you actually realize that that's not the case quite often. And, and then you start to really blame yourself. You start thinking that maybe there's something wrong with me. Um, but I'll come back to this point in my second part of the talk. So language is an important um, dimension of social categorization. Uh, it has strong implications for how we include or exclude people, how we build in group and out group, uh, memberships, how we build, construct boundaries between different groups. And uh, things are not as simple as they might look like. If somebody learns the language and things will work. No, apparently there are a lot of complications and things are more complex than just that. Now part two, I would like to talk about so called unintended consequences of language policies. Um, so now I kind of tried to problematize a little bit, uh, the simplistic idea that learning language is the solution. So to continue that I'll talk about the contextual nature of um, language and its implications for workplaces and then the unintended consequences. And here comes my second story. It's not a personal one anymore, it's an imaginary one. So let's imagine we're at Aalto, um, we actually are at Aalto. And um, let's say you are a non western academic with really high level of ambitions and you get a job at Aalto. Well, you speak English, obviously, that's your main working language. You relocate to Finland, you're full of optimism and looking forward to a great career in Finland and so on. Um, and you start working at Aalto at tenure track. And basically people tell you that to integrate you need to learn the language. Um, and this is going to be really good for you, for your career, for your work here at Aalto, also for integration into the society and so on. So you start doing that. You invest a lot of hours, um, into learning the language. It's not an easy language. Um, but you do that because you are told that this is a good thing, that's what you should be doing. And after some time there are all these evaluations that you go as a tenure track, um, candidate through. And little by little you realize as you do your work, as you go through all these evaluations that somehow all your efforts to learn the language, they're not paying off. Um, somehow whatever efforts you're investing in this, they're not rewarded. Nobody pays attention to them. Nobody's saying, okay, except maybe somebody says good that you made this effort, your friend or your colleague. But actually in your evaluations it doesn't feature a role, um, has no impact on how you are seen as an academic. Um. Second thing is that basically as you go about doing your daily work, you realize that there's no way you can use Finnish in your daily work. I mean, everything you do is in English. You teach in English, you interact with your colleagues in English, you write academic research in English. Even some of the, um, events outside of Aalto are usually the ones you participate in English. Um, so it's kind of, you don't really get. And even when you try to speak to your colleagues, they prefer to do it in Finnish, uh, sorry, in English, because it's easy, you know, it's international place, so you cannot even don't get a chance to practice it. And on top of that, you're hoping that by learning the language will really help you to create a social capital in Finland in Aalto and so on. And it will open the doors. And after investing into learning the language, you realize that it still doesn't happen. It still somehow things at all to work in the same old way, that um, those old networks that existed before you started learning the language, they still work in the same way and you are not part of that. Despite of all your efforts. So you become quite frustrated in the end. And this is something that, okay, it's an imaginary story in a way, but, um, maybe a bit over simplistic, but something that we learned as we did quite an extensive, uh, series of studies at Aalto of foreign academics at Aalto and actually other universities in Nordic countries. Um, I'll basically go quickly through some of the results here because I think they're important, they illustrate this unintended consequences of language policies and then the contextual nature of language. Basically the point is that the importance of the implications of language, uh, are likely to be different or vary in different cultural professional job contexts. So we need to always, when we kind of think about language policies to be applied to employees, we need to understand is it really needed, uh, for this type of work, uh, will it be useful for this type of work? And so on. So we need to think about person, job fitness. So a person who does the job and the characteristics of the job or expectations and demands, they should fit together. The capabilities, abilities, skills that the person has should fit the requirements of the job. There has to be a good fit because if there's no fit, uh, the person will not be happy. Um, what I'm going to talk about here, we did a study, it's been published last year. Well, we looked at the influence of the host country's language proficiency. So how well the person spoke or speaks the local language on social support in the workplace. Does it help this person to get social support from colleagues and perceived overqualification? Um, so whether the person feels that he or she has some skills or competences that are not required at the job, and this is not a good thing because usually when you feel in this way, it tends to decrease your job satisfaction. So we studied foreign academics in Nordic countries and uh, then how all this actually affects the job satisfaction of these people and well, you can tell me that, look, you studied academia. This is like kind of unique type of setting. But I would argue that actually academia is a great setting to understand the influence of language and implications of language for work. Uh, first of all, any academic job includes a wide range of different distinct job roles. So as an academic, you're supposed to teach, uh, you're supposed to do research, you're supposed to engage in societal impact, you're supposed to engage with society. Uh, there's admin jobs, um, and language wise, all these roles have different language requirements. While teaching is mostly done in English research as well. But if you want to do some societal engagement, probably Finnish would be quite useful uh, in this case. Right, local language. And then second argument is that academics actually among the most internationally mobile employees you have, um, these are really international organizations uh, and academic careers are the kind of so called most boundaryless. Uh, so whatever we can see, um, in the case of academics I would argue can be applied to quite a lot of professions actually where people move around the globe quite a lot. So quite a nice context to understand some of these um, kind um, of nuances about the role of language um, in inclusion and exclusion. Okay, so uh, when it comes to person job fit, um, that's a bit of theory for you. There are two dimensions of person job fit. The first one is called um, demands abilities fit here. So basically um, it looks at the fit between the skills of an employee and the demands of the job. So if the person has a certain skill like language skills, so there should be a possibility to use this or apply this in the job. Right. If there's no possibility to do that then the person will feel that this skill is not um, required in the job and he or she will feel that there's some kind of overqualification happening. Second dimension of person job fit is so called needs supplies fit. That's a fit between the expectation and aspiration of an employee and the attributes of a job. So if the person wants uh, or is keen to learn the language uh, while working or doing a specific job, there has to be opportunities to do that, to practice the language and so on. So when it happens while the person is doing the job, then you do have this needs supplies fit. If it doesn't happen then fit is absent. Um, employees express more positive attitudes at work when their needs are addressed and the abilities can be applied to fulfill their job demands. And if personal job fit is there then it usually leads to higher job satisfaction. As simple as that. So now what we did. So I told you, we've done a couple of colleagues of mine, we've done a couple of um, series of studies and this specific study builds on two data collections. One uh, quantitative, one qualitative. I'm not going to go into details but um, in a quantitative round we actually collected um, close to 500 responses from quite a large number of universities and Finland, Sweden and Norway. So it's a Nordic sample really. Um, and um, quite a large sample as well. 500 academics. That's actually quite a lot if you think about this. Um, they're quite representative. And the respondents from whom m we collected the data come from quite a wide range of countries. From Europe, North America, other Nordic countries and the rest of the world. So that's the quantity part. And then we actually followed up with a qualitative study where we interviewed around 40 foreign academics working in one large major Finnish university. Uh, and we asked people about what is their current knowledge of Finnish language, how do they feel, um, about it, do they feel disadvantaged or advantaged, um, somehow because of their level of Finnish language? And do they think that knowing Finnish is important for them to succeed in a tenure track position? Uh, and in what ways, if so. So now a bit of stats. Um, I'll just highlight a couple of things here. So what um, I would like to kind of pay attention to is that basically, if you remember, we looked at the role of language for social, uh, support and perceived overqualification. And quite surprisingly actually the local language skills had no relationship with the workplace, uh, social support. So basically knowing Finnish or Norwegian or Swedish didn't actually help people to get more support from their colleagues. Maybe just speaking English is enough for that. And knowing the local language was not adding anything to this. So the relationship was not significant. There was no relationship here. But when it comes to perceived overqualification the relationship is um, strongly, uh, uh, significant and positive. Which means that local language skills added to perceived overqualification. So people somehow, for whatever reason felt that uh, they are overqualified because they do know the local language and probably they're not able to use it. So they feel that this is like a useless skill that they have and it contributes to this perceived overqualification. Um, then there's a bunch of other results. Maybe I'll just highlight this one. So again, local language skills and the direct relationship with job satisfaction. So you would think that knowing the local language would increase your job satisfaction. In fact in this study again 500 academics in three different countries in Scandinavia shows that there's no relationship, so it doesn't affect job satisfaction at all. Local language skills somehow do not play a role. Um, but there is this indirect relationship between language skills and job satisfaction through perceived overqualification and it's negative. So basically, um, in fact local language skills to some extent even decrease uh, job satisfaction because they contribute to perceived overqualification. So quite thought, uh, provoking results. Then with our qualitative um, second uh, study we tried to understand some of the mechanisms behind these relationships. That's what we found out. Well in this case we interviewed only Finnish, uh, or foreign employees in Finnish universities. So we realized that the majority of the interviewees working at the Finnish University had very Limited knowledge of Finnish. Um, only a few believed that knowing the local language was directly beneficial at work. Um, well, they saw some benefits in terms of interacting with students. So sometimes they thought it would be useful to know Finnish because then you can talk to Finnish students, um, and maybe get access to some kind of external organizations and things like that. But again it was not like the main part of their work. Um, so some of the quotes here, uh, well, work versus social life. They acknowledge that probably learning Finnish would be beneficial for integrating into Finnish society, for building life in Finland. But actually work wise, um, when it comes to your work that you do at the department was not required and nobody really cared about this at all. Um, was there a need? Because now again we talk about person job fit, was there a need for language? Uh, and people were saying that 99% of my interactions are with people either at the department and nobody there would expect me to speak, uh, Finnish. And if there is a need, then people said that maybe there is a need for Finnish language, like maybe interacting with students. But also in case you would be thinking about becoming some kind of dean or something like that of the school, then you would need Finnish language. But how many of us are dreaming about becoming a dean? That's quite a job to have. Um, so then, well we concluded this clearly poor demands abilities fit in this case. Now looking at the second dimension of this, uh, person job fit. Um, we also got this kind of um, input from our interviewees. So they differentiated between career and language, saying that, um, well, for instance, this person saying that I set myself right from the beginning, I will not start to think about learning Finnish before I get a permanent position. So they perceived investing in language just taking away their time, uh, from building their career to actually focusing on something that was important, um, to make it on tenure track here in Finland. But once the person said I get tenured I might start learning Finnish. Then uh, some people interestingly said that being outsider might be beneficial. So if you don't speak Finnish, you might avoid some of these administrative tasks which are done in Finnish. And they thought it was a nice position to be at. You will never be asked to sit in certain committees and things like that. Then last but not, I think a really important point here is, um, the argument that we got that still local language doesn't open all doors. And especially the last quote here I think is quite illustrative what the person saying that I would distinguish between the formal and the formal knowledge structures. Uh, so the formal knowledge structure, not knowing Finnish is not a Disadvantage because the formal knowledge structure is in English, um, but that's not where the real information lies. Um, so formal knowledge structure is only a small part of the whole, let's say information framework. And then in the informal knowledge structures, knowing Finnish might help, but I think that's also not a ticket to getting access to that informal universe or network. Finnish is a, I think that's the really great quote, is a necessary but not sufficient condition to gain access to being internalized as part of that informal community or that informal network. And I think that kind of summarizes really nicely this argument that even if you learn the language, um, it's not guaranteed that you become part of those um, structures and networks that exist. This might still be left outside. So it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. But the outcome of this is that we can also say that there's a poor needs, supplies feed, at least in the case of uh, academic jobs. What does it all mean? Um, well there's contextual nature of language and its effect on foreign employees. Uh, so the role of language varies across different cultural, professional and job contexts. Local um, language skills affect how foreign um, employees perceive their competence profiles fit for their job and job related tasks. And the role of language is really complex. Right. So it looks like it does contribute to this perceived overqualification at least in the case of academics. So, and then that kind of concludes my second part. Um, as a um, postscript and conclusion, I would like to say a couple of things in the last five minutes is that when we think about language and the role of language and inclusion, I think we should. One perspective which is quite useful to take would be this intersectionality perspective. So we should always remember that um, inclusion is in the eyes of the beholder and people are different, they have different backgrounds, they have different qualities, different histories and they do perceive and experience this differently. And the point of intersectionality is that um, well it recognizes that um, different forms of discrimination and privilege uh, often intersect and create unique challenges for people with multiple identities. We all have multiple identities. I'm um, academic, I'm male, I'm white, I'm Soviet born, and so on Russian speaking. And you continue. Father, uh, husband. But from this intersectionality point of view, uh, for instance a woman of color may face obstacles that a white woman or man of color might not. So that's important to remember that. Also how language plays a role in inclusion exclusion differs for different people depending on their backgrounds and where they come from. When we think about language, it has a few attributes that make the intersectionality perspective relevant. So again this is um, not rocket science but. Well, people have different abilities to learn languages, right, Depending uh, on age. Well it's apparently easier for younger people than for more senior of US education. So if you've been studying before, probably makes things a bit easier. Gender, there's research on that. Well, religion, socioeconomic, uh, status and things like that. Uh, people have different linguistic backgrounds as well. So some of us come from environments where it's natural to speak in three, four languages. So adding one more language that is relatively easy versus like myself, all my life I was using one language, not all my life, but uh, a big part. And then learning something in addition to that, uh, becomes a challenge. Um, and then languages vary in difficulty levels. And Finnish of course is quite an interesting case here because it's not an easy language. Um, there's not many languages in the world of, of this similar how you call group or uh, family. And so different languages require different efforts to learn. Um, and then on top of that, of course languages have hierarchies, right? This one thing, if your mother tongue is English for example, and you travel around the world, um, and the extent to which you can use your mother tongue, uh, and kind of the um, kind of status that comes with this is different if you come from some other country with a more marginal language which nobody knows basically and is not used anywhere. So this intersectionality perspective is important or relevant here as well when we look at what we think about language and its role in exclusion. Inclusion. So when next and um, what can we conclude based on what I was talking about in the last 40 minutes? So language is a key categorization factor, um, and it does play a key role for inclusion and exclusion. That's something that I think should be clear based on what I was talking about. But things are complex. I'm an academic, I never give simple easy answers. I always complicate things. Things are complex here as well. We do have unintended consequences of language, uh, policies and we always need to pay attention to the contextual nature of language. So different jobs, different contexts. Language might play out differently. It has different implications, might have different implications. So you need to look at the range of different outcomes. So in our study we looked at social support at uh, overqualification, perceived overqualification and job, uh, satisfaction. But there's a bunch of other things where language might be beneficial for some things but might have more negative effects on other outcomes. Uh, formal, informal structures. Again I keep coming to this point that um, there's all these informal structures out there that as the quote goes, even if you learn the local language really well, you become really proficient. Well, it's a necessary condition to get access to these networks. Uh, but it's not a, uh, sufficient one. So um, that's something to remember as well. And then intersectionality, perspective, intersectionality matters. Uh, inclusion through language use in the eyes of the beholder. Uh, so what organizations can choose based on this? Uh, well it seems that there are two different approaches one can think about and the most common one is this kind of forcing the common language policy on employees, creating opportunities for employees to learn the language, uh, providing some support in this respect and so on, and hoping that the person will take this opportunity. I will invest in this and we'll learn the language sufficiently enough and then inclusion will follow. But as I tried to show, things are not so straightforward. It's not that simple. Um, the second option could be talking and walking. Uh, this idea of multiculturalism. So if we do talk, there's a lot of discourses in Finnish society, for example that we should be more open to foreign employees, foreign talent is important, uh, should be more welcoming and so on. So kind of advocating for this multicultural approach, then organizations should really do that. Uh, but again if the first approach doesn't seem to work or is not that simple, the second one is not simple either. Because the second approach to really talk and walk, the multicultural kind of approach requires a true cultural change in organizations. Uh, and it's not easy. As we know, any cultural change is a long, very painful process. Um, be that agile transformation, be that some kind of, um, more customer orientation in the organization and things like that, or cultural change, changing our culture values so the same changing the attitude towards language policies and really kind of creating multicultural uh, environment in terms of language. It's going to take a lot of time if organizations really want to do that. Uh, so not only policies and practices, but first and foremost attitudes and mindset of employees and especially leaders have to be changed for organizational members to become more aware of the inclusion exclusion implications of language use in the workplace and to nurture and develop the organizations as truly multicultural places and inclusive spaces. How to do that, well remains to be seen. Um, it's going to be probably a long process but work is not over. So that's kind of what I would like to leave you with and thank you for your attention.

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