Fluency Is Not the Finish Line: Why International Talent Quietly Leaves
Collaborative post with WaterMensen
Part 1 ended on an uncomfortable idea: that language looks like the answer, and is only the beginning of one. Reaching a high level of Dutch is real progress. It is also not the end of the challenge.
Research by Jinju Xie and Vesa Peltokorpi, published in the Journal of International Management in 2025, makes the point in its own title: it is not only what you say, but how you say it. Even when international professionals reach genuine language competence, culture-related differences in communication style continue to shape how colleagues perceive and treat them. Someone can speak Dutch well and still be the person the lunch table forms around rather than includes.
So the glass wall does not disappear when someone passes a language exam. It moves. Into the informal spaces. The coffee machine. The Friday drinks. The thirty-second conversation in the corridor that leaves someone feeling either part of something, or outside it.
There is a second barrier that works alongside it. The wall keeps someone out of the room. A glass ceiling keeps them from moving up inside it, and the two reinforce each other. The pattern shows up in the data on English as a workplace lingua franca: in an EF Corporate Learning survey of more than a thousand HR and L&D leaders at multinationals, seven in ten said employees with lower language proficiency struggle to participate fully and are less likely to be promoted. The mechanism is not unique to English. When participation in the informal life of a team is limited, visibility for the next role tends to follow. A ceiling assembled quietly in the margins of the working day, far from any boardroom.
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The exit you are trying to prevent looks nothing like a resignation.
Here is what makes this a retention problem and not a soft one. International talent rarely leaves over a conflict. They leave with a decision that accumulated slowly, over months, sometimes years. An employee who lives in an English-speaking bubble inside a Dutch-speaking country is not integrated. They are in a comfortable exile. And comfortable exiles leave.
These are capable, senior people. They did not fail at anything. They stayed in English because it was the efficient choice and everyone was relieved when they did. Their engagement scores may even look fine. Then a recruiter calls, they start exploring options in London, Berlin, Dublin, and they tell themselves it is about career growth. Asked honestly, the answer is usually simpler: “I never really felt at home”.
By the time it surfaces in an exit interview, the decision is old. Research in the Brainport region found that only a quarter of international employees feel connected to their neighbours or local community, and that after housing, language support and employer support rank as their highest priorities. The employee experience that drives retention is being shaped, or left to erode, in exactly the places a dashboard does not reach. And when it erodes, replacing someone is rarely cheap: the Work Institute puts the cost of losing an employee at roughly a third of their annual salary, with harder-to-measure costs accounting for more than two-thirds of the total, while Gallup places it higher still, at one-half to twice the salary once recruitment, lost productivity, and departed knowledge are counted. For a senior international hire, that lands well into five figures before anything intangible is added, and the gap takes time to close. McKinsey found new leaders can need more than a year to rebuild trust, set direction, and assemble a team.
The exit does not announce itself. It is a slow drift. And it is preventable.
Most leaders only see the cost at the moment someone leaves. The earlier losses never reach a dashboard: the meeting where someone had the better idea and stayed quiet, the project they were qualified to lead and were not considered for, the borrel that felt like watching through glass. Retention is the number leaders understand. Belonging is what actually drives it.
What actually changes the outcome
The answer is not another classroom course that nobody finishes. Research on language acquisition is consistent on this point: grammar studied out of context does not reliably transfer into confident, real-time use in a social setting.
What transfers is practice in the actual moments where the language lives.
The five minutes before the meeting starts. The coffee machine. The elevator. The hallway conversation that lasts ninety seconds and decides, quietly, whether someone walks away feeling like an insider or a visitor.
When employees get structured, achievable practice for exactly these moments, low-stakes, repeated, tied to the people they actually work with, something shifts. This is practice built into the working week itself, the opposite of a course that runs alongside the job and quietly gets abandoned. The first real exchange in Dutch at the coffee machine is not a grammar milestone. It is a belonging milestone. The moment it happens, the sentence in someone’s head changes. It stops being “I should really get better at Dutch” and becomes “I think we’re staying”.
None of this is on the employee alone, and that is the part most companies miss. The solution is not to stop speaking English. It is to make Dutch feel available, achievable, and genuinely valued, supported rather than merely expected. That is an employer move, not an individual one. Regions are already building it into policy: in Brainport, employers co-fund language programmes for international staff and their partners, paired with a language policy inside the organisation so the learning has somewhere to land. When an employee feels their Dutch is actively supported, they stay. Not because they have to. Because they want to.
For HR and People leaders, the strategic question is this: what would it take to make Dutch genuinely achievable and valued in your organisation, as an investment in the conditions that let international talent put down roots, rather than another compliance exercise?
The ones who feel at home, stay.
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