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Using an examination of corporate communication manuals, this article analyses the notion of ‘common language’, a specific type of workplace language control which emerged in the 1980s as a way of improving employee motivation and thus ensuring a company’s success. The manuals’ authors believe language practices in the workplace can be perfectly horizontal and symmetrical. Language is thus seen as a linguistic and sociocultural ‘code’ which, if learnt by all players, will lead to perfect mutual understanding. We argue that this vision ignores the conflict inherent in all social relationships, particularly in the workplace, and that it is based on a particularly rigid linguistic and cultural homogeneity, which accompanies a neoliberal perspective consisting of a society devoted to free exchange, in which sociocultural and sociolinguistic factors are underestimated.