Your English Is Fine. Here Is What Actually Matters on a Call.
People spend months worrying about accent and almost none on the four things that genuinely affect whether you are understood.
A great many capable people hesitate to apply internationally because of how they think they sound. It is worth separating the real problem from the imagined one.
Accent is not the issue
Distributed teams are full of accents — Indian, Brazilian, Polish, Scottish, Nigerian. Nobody is expecting a particular one, and the idea that you should sound American is both untrue and a waste of your energy.
What people genuinely struggle with is different, and it is fixable.
The four things that actually matter
1. Audio quality, by a distance
Most "I could not understand them" is a microphone problem being mistaken for a language problem. Laptop microphones pick up the room; Bluetooth earbuds compress and drop. Wired headphones with a microphone solve most of it for very little money.
If you fix one thing from this post, fix this one.
2. Pace
Nervousness speeds people up. Speed is what makes an unfamiliar accent hard to follow, not the accent itself. Slowing down by roughly twenty percent — with actual pauses at full stops — does more for comprehension than anything else you can change.
Pauses also make you sound more senior. Fast talking reads as anxious.
3. Structure
Say what you are about to say, then say it. "There are two reasons. The first is cost. The second is timing." A listener who knows the shape of your answer follows it even if they miss a word.
This matters more than vocabulary. A structured answer in simple words beats an unstructured one in impressive ones every time.
4. Local idiom, in both directions
Some Nigerian-English constructions are perfectly correct here and puzzling elsewhere — "I am coming" when you are leaving, "well done" as a greeting, "on seat", "do the needful", "kindly revert". None of these are wrong, they are just regional. Know which ones to swap in an international meeting.
The same applies to them. "Let us circle back", "table it", "ping me", "EOD". Ask when you do not know. Asking makes you look attentive, not deficient.
Written English carries more weight than spoken
In a distributed team, most of your communication is text. Which means clear writing matters more to your reputation than how you sound on the fortnightly call — and writing is easier to improve, because you can edit before sending.
Short sentences. One idea each. Read it once before you send. That is most of it.
The honest bottom line
If you can read this post comfortably, your English is not what is standing between you and a remote job. Fix the microphone, slow down, structure your answers, and stop spending energy on the accent.
Written clarity — the zero-follow-up framework, tone across text, and the Working With Me manual — is Stage 3. See Stage 3.