Language and accessibility shape who you hire, how safely they work, and how long they stay. Most organizations have no way to measure it, which is why the business case never gets made.
Key Takeaways
- HR leaders are managing increasingly complex workforces. Multilingual teams, accessibility needs, regional requirements, and changing business demands all need to work within the same employee experience.
- Language and accessibility barriers have measurable consequences. For LEP, Deaf, and hard-of-hearing employees, gaps can contribute to turnover, safety incidents, poor onboarding, and limited career growth.
- A language-accessible workplace enables every employee to fully participate and thrive at work, regardless of language, literacy level, or communication-related disability.
- An SGO replaces a patchwork of disconnected solutions. One strategic partner can bring language operations, interpretation, accessibility, and multilingual staffing together under a unified workforce strategy.
Language Is a Major Workforce Variable Most Organizations Do Not Measure
That is why the business case never gets made. HR leaders own every process where language decides an outcome: recruiting, onboarding, safety training, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, investigations. None of those processes were designed for the workforce they actually have. The cost is real, and it is already sitting inside metrics reported every month under other names: turnover, incident rates, workers’ compensation claims, time to productivity, engagement scores.
Ask an HR leader whether language barriers have cost them people and the answer is usually that they probably have, but there is no way to know. That is not a data problem. It is a missing field.
Roughly 68 million U.S. residents age 5 and older, about one in five, speak a language other than English at home. More than one in four U.S. adults lives with a disability. Both are already on your payroll.
Where Language Breaks Down for Employees with Limited English
Language does not fail in one place. It fails at every stage, and each failure lands in a number you already report.
- Recruiting: English-only job descriptions screen out qualified candidates before they apply, and interviews conducted in English disadvantage those who apply anyway.
- Onboarding: The HCM portal, new-hire paperwork, compliance training, employee handbook, and benefits enrollment are usually only available in English. Only 12% of employees strongly agreed their organization does a great job of onboarding, and that is before considering a language barrier.
- Training and safety: Language gaps can leave critical safety instructions misunderstood or missed entirely. In 2024, Hispanic and Latino workers had a fatal injury rate of 4.3 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared with 3.3 overall, with more than two-thirds foreign-born. A single workplace fatality carries an estimated societal cost of roughly $1.5 million.
- Performance and advancement: Reviews and coaching are where careers open up or stall, and they are the touchpoints least likely to have language support attached. A high performer who cannot fully participate does not get advocated for.
While organizations have tried to address language barriers, gaps persist. Free machine translation often misses cultural context, technical language, and operational nuance. Multilingual HCM platforms may translate the interface while policies, handbooks, and training remain in English. Bilingual colleagues – or even employees’ family members – are left to interpret critical information like healthcare coverage. Treating language access as a diversity initiative rather than an operational imperative puts it under the wrong budget, while the costs show up in safety, turnover, and compliance.
Organizations spend years perfecting the customer journey. But the employee journey happens first. For millions of workers, that journey begins in a language that is not their own. The organizations that design for that reality, intentionally, systematically, and humanely, will build stronger teams, safer workplaces, and more resilient organizations.
Mary Grothe | Chief Revenue Officer, Piedmont Global
Where Access Breaks Down for Deaf & Disabled Employees
The same lifecycle with a different set of barriers across three groups: Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Blind and Low Vision, and Mobility and Physical Disabilities.
- Recruiting: Application platforms that do not work with screen readers, interviews offered without sign language interpretation or CART captioning, and digital portals that fall short of WCAG conformance.
- Onboarding: Orientation videos without captions or postproduction interpreting, benefits portals incompatible with assistive technology, and training materials built for employees who can see and hear them.
- Day to day: Meetings without interpreters or real-time captions, and internal communications in formats that assume full hearing, mobility, and sight as the default.
- Advancement: Performance reviews running on those same inaccessible systems, and development pathways that exclude people from the start.
The nuance that trips up most employers is that sign language is not one language. American Sign Language is a distinct language with its own grammar. Signed English (SEE) and Pidgin Signed English (PSE) are manual codes that follow English word order, and Protactile is a tactile mode used by many DeafBlind people. An interpreter who does not match an employee’s dialect fails to provide access.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed in 1990, required employers to provide auxiliary aids and services such as interpreting and captioning, and framed the obligation as “reasonable accommodation.” Reasonable was an enormous step then, and it became a ceiling: an entire service industry organized itself around clearing that bar rather than exceeding it.
Today, most organizations sit in one of three postures:
- Reactive: Requests handled informally as they arrive. Quality depends on who happens to be free.
- Policy-driven: Written policy, assigned roles, a list of vendors to call. Compliant in intent, still fundamentally response-driven.
- Proactive: Access built into standard operating procedure, so a new hire meets accessible systems on day one. Readiness is the default, not the exception.
The difference between reasonable and real-time is the difference between checking a box and actually providing accessibility. Your employees and your customers know the difference immediately.
Brian Birnbaum | CEO, Birnbaum Interpreting Services
Building a Language-Accessible Workplace
A language-accessible workplace ensures employees can fully engage with and thrive in their work regardless of the language they speak, their literacy level, or any communication-related disability.
The organizations that are really getting this right aren’t doing it because they have more resources. They’re doing it because they made language access a workforce strategy priority.
Leah Grant | VP of Staffing Solutions, Piedmont Global
Four moves get you there:
- Audit and design: You cannot prioritize what you cannot see. Map which languages your workforce speaks and which access needs exist, by location and team. Survey multilingual employees in their own language, and survey managers separately, because managers will tell you where communication breaks first. The question that reveals the most: where are bilingual employees already being used as informal interpreters? Then sequence by consequence rather than volume, starting with safety training and onboarding.
- Implement, for the written journey and the spoken one: Translated documents cover the paperwork. Interpretation covers the conversation. Start with the onboarding set, because the first 90 days are your highest-leverage window, and keep a workflow that updates translations when policy changes. Then put professional interpretation behind the moments where clarity is not optional: benefits counseling, disciplinary meetings, investigations, safety briefings, performance reviews. For Deaf and disabled employees that means sign language interpreting and CART captioning, intervener services, and WCAG conformance.
- Build internal capacity: The most durable fix is capacity you own. Recruit bilingual professionals into the roles where that competency changes the experience for a whole team, from HR generalists to first-line supervisors to safety officers, and build those roles into headcount planning rather than backfill.
- Sustain and measure: Track language and access alongside turnover, safety incidents, benefits utilization, and performance data. Identify which roles, teams, and locations carry the highest turnover and their language demographics. Set a baseline before you spend, because that baseline turns the second budget request into a straightforward conversation.
The payoff shows up in metrics you already report. Shorter time-to-fill, lower turnover in the roles where it runs highest, comprehension you can document instead of assume, and fewer incidents traced back to miscommunication.
Why One Partner Beats a Patchwork
Most organizations run this framework through disconnected vendors: one for translation, another for interpreting, a staffing agency for bilingual hires, and no shared strategy or data between them. When something goes wrong during onboarding or a safety briefing, nobody owns the full employee experience.
Piedmont Global is a Strategic Globalization Organization (SGO), which means one point of accountability across the whole framework rather than a different vendor at each phase.
- LangOps: Multilingual HR content with glossaries, style guides, and version control, so translations stay current when policy changes rather than after the next incident.
- Connexus™: Our enterprise interpretation management platform offers on-demand and scheduled human interpretation across 300+ languages, including American Sign Language, alongside our Speech-to-Speech AI Interpreter. High-stakes conversations reach credentialed human interpreters, while routine volume runs on AI.
- MedConnect™ Staffing: Bilingual and multilingual placement across healthcare, government, and enterprise, so the competency resides within your team rather than on a vendor list.
An employee does not experience your vendor list. They experience one first day, one safety briefing, one benefits conversation, one review that either lands or does not.
If you want to talk through what a language-accessible workplace would take in your environment, all three contributors are reachable directly.
→ Mary Grothe, Chief Revenue Officer, on the multilingual employee experience and building the internal business case.
→ Brian Birnbaum, CEO of Birnbaum Interpreting Services, on accessibility infrastructure for Deaf and Hard of Hearing employees.
→ Leah Grant, VP of Staffing Solutions, on global talent strategy and bilingual workforce planning.
