Technically strong, globally stalled: The communication gap in cross-border teams
- Josephine Tan
Expanding into a new market has rarely been simpler for organisations in Asia. Making that expansion work is another matter, particularly when teams with strong technical expertise struggle to carry it across languages, functions and borders.
Research by IDC published in 2025 puts numbers to the problem. Some 42% of Asia-based businesses said poor English communication limits their ability to expand internationally, while 32% said language-related communication issues directly damage employee relationships and team morale.
Pearson’s global workplace research points to a similar gap at the level of the individual employee. Only a quarter of employees surveyed feel confident using all four English skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) at work. For organisations hiring, managing and growing teams across several markets, that shortfall can surface as slower collaboration and missed opportunities, as well as talent that never reaches its full potential.
These issues will be the focus of Competing Across Borders: Building Talent for a Global Workforce, a webinar run by HRM Asia in partnership with ELSA Corp on 17 November 2026. Over the hour, speakers from Pearson, ELSA and HR teams in Indonesia and Thailand will look at where cross-border communication is quietly costing organisations, and what employers are doing to close the gap before it holds back growth. The session will close with a live Q&A, giving attendees the chance to put their own cross-border challenges to the panel.
Paul Franklin, Regional Lead for South-East Asia, Enterprise Learning and Skills at Pearson, will set out the business problem behind cross-border talent gaps. Based in Kuala Lumpur, he works with enterprises, governments and institutions across the region on workforce readiness, talent development and credentialing, and will draw on Pearson’s research and that regional work to outline what HR leaders need to know about building a workforce able to compete globally.
He will be joined by Will Polese, Vice-President of Revenue at ELSA Corp, who leads the organisation’s global B2B business, and two practitioners with direct experience of cross-border teams. Sandy Surya Nugraha, Senior Vice-President of People and Corporate Affairs at Artajasa, leads people and culture at the operator of Indonesia’s ATM Bersama interbank network, and has spent more than 15 years in senior HR roles across financial services, fintech and manufacturing. Theeraporn (Claire) K., Office Manager at Bolton – Tri Marine International in Thailand, runs HR and operations for the office of the global tuna raw materials trader, bringing a ground-level view of what it takes for teams to work across languages and cultures.
Discussions will cover why cross-border competitiveness is emerging as a priority for HR leading into 2027, and how friction in language and communication can drain productivity, slow decisions and weigh on morale. The speakers will also look at why technical skill on its own falls short when talent has to perform across markets, and at the levers HR and L&D teams can pull to build a globally ready workforce at scale without taking people away from their jobs.
