One team lead always builds a monoethnic team – what to do?

I worked for a place once that was essentially a US satellite office of a Chinese company, although it was technically registered as a US company. I'd guess roughly 75% of the company were Chinese. We had a "meetings should be in English only" rule to benefit the US minority who were not multi-lingual. The English proficiency of the Chinese guys ranged from "passable" to "perfectly fluent". It was not always easy to discuss technical concepts or project requirements using English-only, with the majority of the team translating in their heads in real time. So the English-only rule kind of slowed everyone down, for the benefit of diversity. It was a trade-off the company deliberately made with eyes open.

To help this, there was a norm where, if something needed to get done quicker or some technical point was not getting across, the Chinese eng manager would say "OK, we are going to speak Chinese for a minute" and the team would deliberate some point in their native language. Then, when it was resolved, we'd continue on in English with the better English-speakers summarizing. This seemed to work pretty well, and was not awkward for anyone. It allowed the majority-Chinese team to contribute as full team-members regardless of their English proficiency, and also allowed the monolingual US minority to contribute equally.

For OP, it might be good to suggest leadership sits down and figures out good "rules of the road" for language use in the office, and to make sure they enforce them.

Two "issues," not to be conflated:

>Meetings with such team is always awkward as they internally discuss the topic in their own language during the meeting.

If English/lingua franca is to be expected, then that can be asserted thru HR or thru placatable means.

>Also their hiring practices are essentially discriminatory.

"essentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The alternative is blind hiring, which may not "solve" the "problem" - because equal opportunities does not guarantee equal equitable results. Anything else is intentionally discriminatory.

If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to achieve it.

I'm having a hard time reconciling a complaint about a lack of diversity with the notion that the problem is rooted in certain members of a team speaking languages other than English. Is the only allowable monoculture the Anglo one?

update: to the person asking how it is helpful to have team members speaking different languages: I don't know. It's a different question. We started with the premise that the team should be multiethnic, and the way it shakes out is that that often means being multilingual. We can ask that question, but it changes the whole thing. That's the problem with these topics.

I think it's just very common in SEA. It's a self perpetuating problem too. When I see monocultural team photo (including gender), I don't apply for that team. Eventually the team fills up with people who don't care or actually love it.

One possibility is bringing up the benefits of a diverse team. First is holidays - nobody has to sacrifice Christmas/CNY/Eid/Diwali, because there's someone there who doesn't celebrate it.

More importantly is talent. Talent is not a commodity here. It's randomly distributed across different ethnic groups. Someone doesn't become a 10x-er by reading in only one language or hanging with a specific group of people. People on the high end of the talent scale tend to favor multicultural environments.

> I am not sure how big of a problem this is in the US/North America

It is, at least in startups. At one startup I worked at, the entire engineering team in the US was Indian. At another one, my counterpart team in the US was almost entirely Chinese. IMHO though, even if the manager/lead doesn't do this intentionally, once there is a "critical mass" of one ethnicity, people of different ethnicities may hesitate to join the team.

I was not in as bad a situation as OP though as we still used to conduct our meetings in a common language (English) only.

> How do you approach this problem and how do you even talk about it?

This is one of the few times I'd recommend talking to a senior HR person. Ask them if that behavior is a problem, and then if it is, tell them about the specifics. If it is not a problem, you might want to go work somewhere that values diversity.

Unless there is some compelling reason (that you haven’t shared) for you to stay, just leave. Find another job.

Life is too short to put up with shit like this. Or to stay and fix the problem. Maybe let them know politely the reason when you leave, but that is likely to fall in deaf ears too.

If I were experiencing this, I would not consider it a problem. This is because I, like you, have the ability to adapt to a wide range of social situations.

If dealing with awkwardness is your biggest concern, congratulations on your wonderful life.

One theory of management is to hire people who understand each other via common culture and language. Sounds like this manager has done that. Such a monolithic team can more easily work together in certain respects. A different approach is to hire diversely, which reduces a certain kind of cohesion while possibly creating more interdependence. I have become a fan of the latter way, but it does bring a lot of headaches for a manager.

This definitely exists in the US as well. You can see a variety of caste discrimination lawsuits against tech companies.

I'd say: What's managements position? are they happy with it? unhappy with it? Without support from above? you're screaming at the air.

If they have support? Then I would say a restructure should happen. People get switched around in teams to start to "balance out" the "diversity" so it's not all one ethnicity in a pot.

Second... hiring should happen with multiple inputs. That manager is biased? Are all the managers biased? No? Then he doesn't make the decision alone anymore. If it's a 3 manager panel that decides? 5? and there has to be consensus or majority rules votes?

Third... teams in my company come with a maximum size. If the team has no more room then new hires go elsewhere. If his team is too big? Time to break it up or move some program from his group to other groups. Something to "rebalance" the equation.

But really, these are decisions that are generally make or break by corporate culture and without buy-in from above? Then there's nothing you can do.

Be also aware that many contracting companies that supply staff pay big backhanders to hiring managers, 10%+ of salary, a few hires quickly grows to big money. Maybe this could be the reason.

If you're talking about the Singapore side of things, is it possible that it's not intentional? The working hours for that team are likely going to be whatever convenient for the Singapore team, so they might only have Singapore locals applying. There could be other factors like maybe the pay rate isn't good enough for expats in Singapore to apply (assuming they make more than the locals).

Why not ask the company to pay for lessons in that non-English language? And ask your colleagues to teach you informally as well.

Here at croit.io everyone instantly switches to english as soon as a non native language speaker is joining a chat. There is active inclusion and not exclusion. However I would say it's totally OK and understandable that if they are alone, they speak their mother language for more efficient conversations.

Considering you didn't mention once if the results of this team are good or not I would say this is pure racism.

Unless you're working in an English-speaking country, speaking English on the workfloor is actually quite tiring. Speaking a second language requires more thought and more deliberate speech to get the message across. I can understand why people coming from another country, who likely already need to speak their second language all day anyway, might not realise this, as this is "normal" for them anyway.

I work within a team of mostly Dutch people, with a few Eastern European/West Asian people. We try to stick to English, at least when our foreign coworkers are around, but everyone automatically switches back to Dutch every now and then. Some of the Bulgarian people in our team do the same when they're talking amongst themselves and I can't blame them!

I've only started noticing the mental impact of speaking a second language all day when there were days that there were only Dutch speaking people in the office. At the end of the day, I didn't feel as tired as during the "English speaking" days, even though I feel my English is good enough to express myself most of the time. This makes me think there's a subconscious toll in working with internationals that might not be apparent to some.

However, having a meeting with someone who doesn't speak the local language and not even trying to stick to English is just plain rude and unprofessional in my opinion. I can understand someone making a quick comment to a colleague, but switching between languages to have an actual discussion is just rude.

It sounds to me like the goals of the company and the goals of the individual teams don't align. The teams seem to want to talk in their native language, but the company seems to want to attract international workers.

In the end, productivity of the team is based on how well people work together. People from similar backgrounds, with similar experiences, tend to have fewer hurdles to get through. A team of ethnically diverse people, sharing the experience of moving to another country and culture, might have more in common as well; they might just work together better than if they were to be mixed homogeneously across the company.

I don't know what people apply to jobs in your company so I can't say if they're being discriminatory or not. Maybe the "diversity hiring manager" likes to accept inferior applicants to fill some diversity quotum; maybe the other ones are actually discriminating against applicants. If you think they're actively discriminating against foreign applicants, you should probably tell someone.

However, I wouldn't call preferring someone who speaks the local language fluently "illegal discrimination", although the distinction is often difficult to make. Just because official policy says that English is the language on the workfloor doesn't mean people will want to speak it all day. If you try to enforce a policy people don't seem to like, you'll probably only end up seeing the policy get changed.

Lastly: the EU may be somewhat culturally connected, but these issues will be different from country to country, region to region, and even city to city. There's a running joke on how the Germans won't speak anything but German, even during corporate meetings with other companies. I've heard stories of CEOs meeting with other companies where they spoke English and their German counterpart only answered in German, requiring someone who spoke both languages to translate for them, for example; this was such an alien concept to me that I laughed at the story, but I wouldn't ever want to work in such a situation!

There are just ways in which the Dutch do business differently from the Germans, the French, or the English, despite centuries of close trade and cultural exchange. I'm not saying this makes your situation right in any way, but you should know that your experience might not apply to the entire EU (or even the country you're in).

As a hiring manager across all departments at a US tech company (fully remote), the biggest challenge creating a diverse team is a lack of candidates from diverse background/ethnicities/etc.

We’re able to balance male/female across most departments without overtly favoring one gender over another, but for some reason it’s different for engineering roles. 95%+ of applicants are male, and an overwhelming majority are white.

We try to do things like post and advertise jobs on minority-targeted job boards, but still, it’s very difficult to find minority applicants.

Aside from lowering our hiring standards for minorities, I’m not sure what else we could be doing better.

Edit: just to clarify I’m not trying to undermine your concern, just raising that it’s possible the problem has to do with the candidate pipeline rather than overt discrimination. Your specific case may be different, of course. Building a diverse team is very difficult even when it’s made a priority.

Isn't it desirable to have the team function in one language?

Communication is hard in an organisation. Anything you can do to make it easier is going to improve outcomes for the business.

I have seen similar things several times. When the business language is say english and there are people who use any other langauge at work that is a big red no-no. This applies to any language not just english.

First, people do gossip and "talk shit" about other team members in their presence by using another langauge. I have seen an english speaking team member who was previously married to a speaker of a certain language but at her current role several team members were speaking that language at work and she heard all the terrible comments they made about her and it was overall a terrible situation. That person was the only person I have ever seen get bullied at work and I am truly ashamed for not having done something about it at the time.

Second, even if what is discussed in the second language is something innocent, it will be interpreted as anything but eventually. You will never have adequate trust and synergy between teams and team members because of this. I had a person who spoke yet another language on the team tell me his conspiracy theory about the second language speakers and how they conspire. he even told me a person who started in the company at the same team as him and did everything he did but got ahead of him because he learned a certain language.

Third, even if no one interprets the second language conversation as malicious in nature it will make team members feel excluded.

There is simply no need for it, if everyone is required to speak the first language. Work is work, off work no one cares what langauge you speak.

The last sentence you said about discriminatory hiring practices, I believe you even if it may be hard to prove. In the US you have a lot of options to fight this, generally speaking HR would do a lot for you just to stop a potential lawsuit.

In my experience, this issue is mainly caused by english speakers who are afraid to be considered racist or something for requiring english. They only see racism as coming from a white english speaker while in reality just about every person is racist unless taught otherwise and it gets worse when nationality and race are the same thing to some people. The same standards that apply to prevent discrimination by majority white english speakers should apply everywhere.

If I was betting on diversity of departments blindly at any US bigcorp I am fairly confident my guesses would be mostly right. This isn't right or sustainable.

Tribalism is a cancerous disease at the work place.

For any corporation, people who work within a specific country should be required to use a specific language while at work unless speaking to a client. This should be an immediate firable offense.

Speaking for the US, I wish this is something that everyone could think about slightly differently. There are a lot of white males in this thread who take the lack of diversity in tech so personally. As if those in favor of diversity blame THEM for the lack thereof. The truth is that this is an old, deep, and very complex problem that goes WAY beyond the borders of tech. The solutions to the problem do not start and end with how tech companies hire. Honestly, if a company is even making a small effort to hire more diversely, they are ahead of the curve.

There are some great things that people can do to help the situation. Mentor young engineers, try to expand your recruiting pipeline. For larger companies, who have the most latitude, bring in more diverse interns, etc.

We're not going to solve this alone, but we can make a difference.

What exactly is wrong with that?

As long as the team works good, doesn’t do any harm, doesn’t break any laws, doesn’t hurt other teams performance etc.

I am really trying to understand.

Instead of downvoting, please explain to me what is wrong with people tending to work with other people whose language and mentality they understand better (with best intentions in mind)?

Make it clear that picking the best people for the team is part of the job. Excluding good candidates or including worse ones is a decrease in job performance, and will be a negative in performance reviews. Decreased pay, demotion, and termination are all on the table here because this is materially hurting the company.