When Workplaces Favor People Who Sound the Same

Do managers reward workers with familiar communication styles and speech patterns—and limit opportunities for those who don’t fit the typical mold?

It’s a question that Harvard Business School’s Kadeem Noray has pondered often as the son of Caribbean immigrants raised in Canada by his Black Christian mother and White Jewish stepfather. After mining 40 years of census and labor market data, as well as audio recordings of workers, he found that employees whose speech patterns matched the workplace’s dominant communication style were more likely to be viewed as having stronger social skills.

“It’s not surprising to me the extent that being culturally rooted and matched well to the kinds of people in your workplace actually matters,” says Noray, an assistant professor. “The action item is really doing the hard work of creating an environment that is open to many cultures.”

Growing reliance on artificial intelligence across many organizations has heightened the importance of communication and social skills in many roles, including those that require negotiation and persuasion. Noray argues that workplaces often organize around the communication norms of the majority group, putting them at risk of squandering promising talent. As a result, employees whose speech or mannerisms differ from the group's norms may struggle to win the communication-intensive, people-facing roles that could help them succeed and advance.

The April working paper “Workplace Communication as Systemic Disadvantage” shows how workers with Southern accents—regardless of race and gender—landed positions that demand more social savvy, such as consulting, in regions where their dialect is common. Noray coauthored the paper with Savannah Noray, a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program who is also his wife.

While Noray admits that the conclusions might seem “depressing,” they point to opportunities to structure environments so that talent is maximized and workers from many cultures can be productive.

Understanding social fluency

Noray says his ability to communicate across cultures set him apart from his older brother, who spent more of his childhood in a majority-Black neighborhood and formed close friendships there. The family moved to a different town predominantly comprised of upper-middle class White people when Noray was in elementary school, allowing him to make connections across racial and cultural backgrounds more easily.

“I see the way I communicate makes things easier for me,” recalls Noray, who started to wonder whether the factors that made it easier for him to communicate translated broadly into success in the workplace—and whether jobs that prized social fluency were harder for some to access than others.

People are drawn to familiar speech patterns

The researchers turned to two main data sources to test their hypothesis.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a trove that began adding audio recordings in 1997, tracks occupations and social skill measures in over 40,000 worker records. The researchers used the recordings to test the connection between how people sounded and whether they worked in fields that valued social skills.

To isolate race and gender, the researchers looked at Southern speech patterns and their impact on careers in the South and Midwest compared to the Northeast and Western parts of the United States, where the dialect is less common.

“The nice thing about the Southern dialect is that it's so unevenly distributed across the US that it allows us to do these geographic comparisons to see whether or not some of the predictions from our hypothesis seem to bear out,” says Noray.

The researchers found that Southern speakers:

• Were more likely to work in people-oriented jobs in regions where their accents are more common.

• Sorted into jobs that valued sociability and extraversion in the South and Midwest, but not on the coasts.

The researchers also enlisted reviewers to listen to the audio recordings and answer questions about whether the speakers sounded White, male, and non-southern.

When employees’ speech patterns matched those dominant in the workplace, they were more likely to be employed in social-task intensive jobs. In fact, the relationship between social skills and the level of social interaction in one’s work was at least 2.5 times stronger when workers spoke like the cultural group most dominant in the workplace.

Who benefits from socially intensive jobs?

Census data collected between 1980 and 2016 shows that more jobs became people-focused in those 36 years. However, the shift was uneven, with majority groups benefiting consistently and labor market minority groups gaining advantages mostly where they were already more populous.

Pairing that with US Labor Department data, the researchers studied cities between 1980 and 2000 to show how many occupations became socially intensive. They then examined who actually filled those jobs and found that minority groups benefited most when they were already strongly represented in the local economy.

Black workers saw about 12 percentage points more growth in socially intensive work in areas with high Black populations, and roughly flat growth when they were not the dominant group—patterns the researchers also found among women and Latin American immigrants as well.

How can companies check themselves?

AI may be increasing the value of communication-intensive work, as bots can take over solitary and rote functions, so Noray says businesses need to make sure they’re not unintentionally steering the best opportunities toward employees just because their speech and mannerisms are familiar.

“Especially as we get these AI technologies to do more analytical tasks at a faster rate, we seem to be moving to an economy where these things that are uniquely human are the things that are in demand,” he explains.

Noray sees this as a call to action for business leaders to look beyond traditional notions of cultural fit so they’re not overlooking talent. The findings highlight several considerations for leaders:

Be aware of different communication styles

While people might assume that a particular communication style will succeed, context and other variables can change the scenario. In fact, a person with a different communication style might be better suited for certain situations, so managers shouldn’t judge a person’s abilities based on speech patterns alone. “There could be some underlying social skill that is masked by the fact that I don't communicate in exactly the same way this person does, so I might be reading [what they say] wrong.”

Challenge the notion of “fit” when making talent decisions

Managers often rely on gut instinct in making hiring decisions or promoting talent, often unaware of their own biases. They may be better off applying a neutral lens to a person’s communication style, evaluating candidates’ skills and experience more holistically, and establishing clear standards around communication to level the playing field.

“Relax the constraint on the kind of talent that can do well in your firm,” he says. “That should give your company a competitive advantage. If workplaces hired and developed people who enjoyed and learned from the complexities of interacting with people who are different from them, this might allow organizations to better harness the power of cultural diversity.”

Seek diverse points of view at work and beyond

Noray’s research illustrates the more covert disadvantages that are still common in the workplace, which can reinforce economic disparities and limit opportunities for historically marginalized groups, in particular. Like Noray’s childhood experience, getting to know people from different cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds can be a powerful antidote.

“Exposing yourself to lots of different kinds of people is a big way of mitigating against these kinds of challenges,” he says.

Illustration by Ariana Cohen-Halberstam