How Do You Give Feedback on Accent?
English is my 3rd language so I definitely have an accent :-) I work with some brilliant smart engineers, but also English is not their native language, and sometime they use incorrect grammar or just pronounce words incorrectly during business meetings. My question is: what’s the best way for me to give feedback on how to improve communication skills and language (since I did myself!) without being an asshole or hurt their feelings?
This is tricky. English is not my first language either, though i started learning it at an early age and do fine despite the accent. Many others at work are somewhat less proficient. in general I have seen people ask someone to repeat themselves if they had trouble understanding them due to accent /grammar/vocab. America being the melting pot it is, this is fairly common. The person with low English proficiency will have communication trouble though, and that will be a hinderance for their work. You can bring it up as a “area of improvement: communication “ and hopefully that will be taken as constructive feedback. Give examples of specific email /write which could have used better English.
You can use the SBI feedback framework: Situation Behavior Impact; avoid judgement statements Ex. In the last meeting with marketing (situation), I noticed that you used incorrect grammar and vocabulary to describe your project (behavior). This caused a good amount of confusion and we spent most of our time clarify what you meant, so we didn't get as much accomplished in be meeting as we had planned (impact). Pause to see how they take it. Hopefully they see this as constructive feedback... you can also soften the feedback by saying something like "hey I just wanted to pass along some feedback because I'm trying to look out for you... hopefully you don't take it the wrong way" You can then follow up with advice: In the future, it would be more effective if you rehearsed your talk track before these meetings... I'm happy to wordsmith with you to prep
The real issue here may be to improve your hiring practices
-1. Engineering skills are more important than English. If you can communicate but have a thick accent and sometimes mess up past perfect, it doesn’t make you less helpful at your job
You can always schedule a pre meeting with that person. I do this with people who tend to talk in circles. This happens more with speak fluent English who talks to much.
Just correct the person right away, we can take it.
I would love a feedback on my accent and grammar. But a constructive one, not just “go improve yourself”. How else can I learn other than from my colleagues who speak better than me? I’m on a full time job and don’t have time for grammar courses. And for us immigrants here we usually either don’t have friends outside of work, or our friends are of our nationality and we don’t speak English to each other. So work is the only place to improve English
Well, how would you want to be told? And would the feedback actually help? Accents mostly improve with time and practice, don’t they? I also find that I have an easier time understanding someone’s accent with time and practice. After awhile, I just don’t really notice it anymore. Regardless: I recommend that you first establish rapport. Make sure they know that you like and respect them. Then empathize. “When I was learning X language, it was really hard for me to pronounce Y sound or remember some grammar rule, so I ____.”
How does it matter? As long as they can communicate the point across, it should be fine. You can always ask them to repeat what they just said.
It’s usually fine if the meeting is internal. When you run a scrum meeting and have business stakeholders, you need to say things clearly otherwise it goes into an infinite loop of “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that” etc
Never say "You know what, just give it to me in writing."