What is your experience with global organisations in terms of effective communication?

I have a few recommendations, based on experience in working with European, Chinese, Indonesian and Indian suppliers and clients.

Try to communicate in a single language among all group members, if possible. It’s not always possible, of course, but it’s helpful for our organization that the decision was made years ago to make English the common language.

Define non-standard terms. Don’t use too many shortcuts that aren’t fully understood – explicitly – across all of those being communicated to.

Use simple verb tenses and simple sentences. People who don’t normally work in English and who don’t have complex discussions in that language (or whatever the common language happens to be) can be easily led astray by compound complex sentences, especially if the writer or speaker isn’t perfectly clear in pronoun-noun coordination, subject-verb agreement, dangling participles and incomplete sentences. Write as if you’re still in sixth grade, writing an essay that’s going to be graded, and you’re writing for the comprehension of other sixth-graders.

Don’t try to exercise your vocabulary to impress (or confuse) people who aren’t conversant with your language. Don’t try to show off, especially when you yourself may not understand the works you use as well as foreign speakers, who may have actually “studied” your language more than you have. I’ve seen a lot of US English speakers embarrassed because they use words that their foreign listeners understand better than they do.

Standardize the date format in writing, and stick to that. I recommend a completely clear format such as 4-July-2011 (or an alternate: 2011–07-04, with YYYY-MM-DD in descending importance) rather than the American 7/4/11 shortcut, which will be confused in Europe and Asia to mean 7-April-2011. (Which is why I don’t like using the European / Asian format, either, which gets mixed up in the USA.)

Thanks @CWOTUS there are some really good ideas to introduce there. In your work, did you come across any companies that managed the communication process across cultures/diverse communities well? I can pull in all the usual suspects, Macdonalds, Apple, Microsoft, but I think it would be interesting to point to some lesser known organisations who perhaps do things very well. Real life examples I can use as examples.

Thank you for your input. Very valuable.

As @CWOTUS said, use English.

You can try here on me to know if I understand it. Frankly speaking, I consider Fluther English as high level. Simple and short sentences would do to effective comprehension, and thus effective communication.

Considering India, we grow up talking and learning two or three languages – mother tongue (almost each state has different language), national language – Hindi, and English. India follows British English to be precise, but people here seldom differentiate between the two. Since, we learn vernacular languages by talking, reading, and writing, we perform well in all three. However, we learn English first by reading or writing, and talking follows after many years. So, we are usually good at writing as compared to speaking (and thus listening to some extent). Even in multinational companies here, employess usually talk in vernacular languages. Use of English is limited to formal meetings, conferences, presentations, or when communicating with foreigners. This is about speaking; all writing now occurs in English, except Government.

One of my friends in a multinational IT company falters when he has to take a call. He can write well, but faces difficulties while speaking.