In 1999, NASA lost a $200 million Mars Climate Orbiter.
Nine months of flight time. Years of planning. Hundreds of millions of dollars – gone. All because one engineering team used metric while another used imperial. A tiny disconnect with astronomical consequences.
Most organisations will never vaporise a spacecraft. But they will lose deals, stall launches, and push teams to burnout because of the exact same issue: misaligned communication.
HR and L&D often try to address this through communication training programmes. But then? Nothing, in some cases. Engagement stalls, behaviour doesn’t change, and the same misunderstandings keep happening.
The pattern is frustratingly familiar: the cost of poor communication keeps rising, but communication training fails to deliver the desired results. So what is actually going wrong?
If your communication training isn’t creating change, it’s likely falling into one of three traps.
When communication training is framed as a benefit or compliance requirement, employees see it as “here’s something else you have to do.”
They’re already overwhelmed and juggling competing priorities. It’s hardly surprising that a mandatory training programme sent out by the HR team gets pushed to the bottom of the list.
On the contrary, the programmes that break through make the value immediate and obvious:
“This will make that difficult stakeholder conversation easier.”
“This will help you show up confidently in your client presentation.”
“This will reduce the roadblocks you keep experiencing when collaborating across regions.”
Employees don’t engage with abstract promises of becoming “better communicators.” They engage when training solves the actual problem they are facing every day.
In many organisations, communication training only pops up once the technical skills are covered, the product knowledge is sorted and the compliance boxes are checked.
It should be the other way round.
Communication is the foundation that everything else builds on. When employees can’t effectively communicate about new systems or collaborate across distributed teams, your change and transformation efforts stall before they start.
In other words, effective communication is not the final step in a learning process. It is a foundation that employees need to build on from the start.
Most communication training focuses solely on language fluency—vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
That’s important, but it is only one layer of effective communication.
Communication happens at three interconnected layers, and the most effective learning programmes address them all.
Yes, employees need proficiency in your business language—often English for global organisations.
But there is an important difference between language proficiency and actually communicating with confidence.
You might have employees with B2 or C1 level English, but their confidence and communication style make them come across as A2 or B1. The gap between a person’s actual capability and their perceived capability creates a significant barrier.
That high-potential employee who stays quiet in strategy meetings? They may have plenty of ideas or business acumen, but they lack the confidence to articulate those ideas.
The consequence? The critical question that could change a project’s direction or prevent a roadblock goes unasked.
This is where the real complexity of global collaboration lives.
If I say “Let’s grab lunch”, what does that mean?
In the UK it could suggest a quick, light meal around midday. In Spain it’s the biggest meal of the day, starting at 2pm or 3pm and continuing for hours.
Same phrase, completely different expectations.
In the workplace, that difference becomes even more important when it comes to decision-making and collaboration.
In Spain, decisions often come top-down – leadership decides, teams execute. In Sweden, it’s all about consensus – everyone has a chance to voice their opinion, discuss, and come together around a shared view.
When Spanish and Swedish colleagues work together, the difference in expectations can lead to frustrations. The Spanish team feels that meetings mean endless talking with no decisions. The Swedish team feels steamrolled without proper consultation.
Both teams speak excellent English. The breakdown is not a language problem. It is different fundamental assumptions about how work should happen, what collaboration looks like, and what respect means in a business context.
The teams have the right vocabulary – they just don’t have a shared framework to understand each another correctly.
The third layer is about self-awareness and the ability to adapt your communication style based on your audience and context.
Can your coworkers recognise when they need to be more direct or more diplomatic? Can they read the room and understand how their message is landing? Can they tailor their communication to meet their audience at their level, not just communicate in their own default style?
This layer helps employees to recognise their own strengths and areas for improvement and deal flexibly with different situations.
That’s the difference between technically good communicators and genuinely effective ones.
These three layers aren’t separate programmes you can bolt together.
Language skills give you the foundation.
Intercultural awareness helps you to create shared meaning across different contexts.
Interpersonal skills give you the self-awareness and adaptability to be effective with both.
When you evaluate communication training, look for the way these three elements are integrated.
A language programme with intercultural content tacked on isn’t the same as a truly comprehensive approach in which language, culture and interpersonal skills are linked from the outset.
It may seem that AI has made communication skills less important. The opposite is true.
The rise of AI has made strong communication skills even more critical.
Many organisations are now investing heavily in AI training. They want to avoid falling behind, so they are requesting budgets, and leaders want to see adoption metrics.
But there’s a fundamental problem with treating AI as separate from communication.
Large language models work with language. The quality of their output depends largely on the quality of input. If someone can’t clearly articulate what they need to a colleague, can’t provide proper context, or can’t refine their thinking through dialogue, they won’t be able to get the best from an AI tool either.
The organisations that will succeed with AI aren’t necessarily the ones that invest most heavily in the technology – they’re the ones that have invested in the foundational communication skills employees need to use this technology effectively.
New AI applications are emerging all the time, but you have the opportunity to build something more valuable: a workforce that can actually leverage new tools as they become available.
The organisations haemorrhaging the most money are the ones that assume communication automatically goes well – that people will naturally share the same expectations, collaborate well and understand each other.
The ones that succeed recognise communication for what it truly is: infrastructure. The foundation on which every strategic change and every major initiative has to be built.
This creates a real opportunity for HR and L&D leaders.
The conversation shifts from: "We should invest in communication training."
to: “We must build communication capability because our strategy cannot succeed without good communication.”
Frame it that way, and communication training is much more than a one-off workshop. It supports change processes, helps employees to use new technologies like AI effectively, enables collaboration and makes it easier to align different teams and areas of expertise.
Then, HR and L&D can do more than just provide training. They can also help to prevent misunderstandings and delays, and to implement strategy faster.
Effective communication doesn’t just happen by itself. Whether you are getting hybrid teams to work together, communicating across different languages and cultures, or preparing employees for a workplace where AI matters more and more, the right skills make all the difference.
At BLCC, we help organisations to strengthen language skills, intercultural awareness and interpersonal skills through learning programmes tailored to the realities of the workplace.
Wondering which communication skills could make the biggest difference in your organisation?
Contact us. We would love to help you identify the challenges facing your employees right now and find the best approach.
What is the difference between language training and communication training?
Language training focuses on language skills like vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and business language. Communication training goes a step further, adding skills like active listening, giving feedback and presentations, negotiation and handling difficult conversations. In an international working environment, intercultural skills are another important aspect.
Why does communication matter in the modern workplace?
Hybrid working, digital communication, AI and collaboration among different teams are changing the way we work. Employees must be able to convey information, and also listen, empathise, give feedback and adapt their communication style to different situations and the people they are talking to.
What communication skills are important for employees?
Key skills include active listening, clear communication, giving and receiving feedback, giving presentations, negotiating, dealing with conflict, stakeholder management and managing difficult conversations. Which skills are most important depends on the role and the working environment.
How do you ensure that communication training really makes a difference?
Effective communication training is tailored to real-life situations at work. Employees need to acquire knowledge, but they also need opportunities to practice, get feedback and use those skills again and again. Personal guidance and follow-up help with long-term consolidation of new behaviour.
What is the role of AI in communication training?
AI can provide more opportunities to allow employees to practice, get feedback and simulate new communication scenarios. However, it does not replace the human guidance that is needed to understand context, nuance and personal development. Combining AI, digital learning activities and guidance from a trainer can enhance the learning process.
Is communication training relevant for Belgian SMEs?
Absolutely. Effective communication is not only important for international organisations. Belgian SMEs are increasingly adopting hybrid working models involving multilingual teams and colleagues from different backgrounds. Communication skills also have an important role in customer relations, teamwork, leadership and change management.
*This blog is based on the original article “Why most workplace communication training falls flat (and what you can do about it)” by Rafael J. Schwartz, Head of Client Experience at Learnlight. The article was translated, edited, and adapted to the Belgian context by BLCC.