Remote work changes the balance of which English you need. Writing carries far more weight, calls are harder than meetings in a room, and the informal contact that used to happen by accident now has to be deliberate. For second-language speakers that's a mixed deal — some of it is easier, some considerably harder.
Writing becomes most of your presence
In an office, people form an impression of you from how you are in person. Remotely, they form it from your messages.
That's good news if writing is your stronger skill, and it raises the stakes on habits that were previously invisible — tone in short messages especially, where there's no face to soften anything.
Short messages are a register of their own
A one-line Slack message is harder to get right than a paragraph, because there's no room to adjust.
ok reads as curt to many readers. Will do, thanks takes a second longer and reads completely differently. Can you fix this? with no greeting lands harder than intended if English isn't your first language and you were being efficient.
Worth knowing: in most English-speaking remote cultures, brief is fine but bare is cold. One softening word usually does it.
Video calls are harder than rooms
Genuinely, and not just for you. Audio compression removes some of the frequency range that makes consonants distinguishable, there's latency, and you lose most of the body language you'd normally use to read a room.
Practical things that help: headphones rather than laptop speakers, asking people to repeat without embarrassment, and turning on captions where available — most platforms have them now, and they're a reasonable accommodation for anyone working in a second language.
Interrupting on a call
The entry gap that's already short in a meeting is shorter on a call, because of latency and because nobody can see you drawing breath.
Two things work. Use the chat — a one-line question there gets picked up without competing for the floor. And say the person's name first: Sorry, James — cuts through in a way that starting your sentence does not.
Async is an advantage
The part that genuinely favours second-language speakers.
In written async discussion you have time to compose, you can re-read before sending, and you can look something up. People who struggle to be heard in fast meetings are often much more effective in a written thread, and it's worth noticing if that's you and using it deliberately.
Being visible without a corridor
Remote work removes the accidental contact that used to tell people what you were doing. If nobody sees your work, it's not that they've dismissed it — they don't know.
Short, regular, unprompted updates on what you're working on solve it. This feels like self-promotion to many people and isn't; it's replacing information that the office used to carry for free.
The small talk problem
It doesn't disappear, it just moves — the first two minutes of a call, a reply to someone's message about their weekend.
Those exchanges are what make the people you work with know you slightly, and remotely they're the only mechanism available.