Studies interpreting frequency-based linguistic and socio-pragmatic features of professional registers have increased extensively over the past two decades. Research on settings such as offices; outsourced call centers; healthcare facilities; and hotels have focused on improving our understanding of workplace communication and developing training materials to enhance service quality, avoid miscommunication, and facilitate successful (business) transactions. To demonstrate how linguistic features of (mis)communication in professional, multimodal workplaces can be investigated using corpora, a corpus of workplace interaction from various settings was explored. Features associated with task-oriented, polite, elaborated discourse were compared for each setting and found to be most notable in hotel and call center customer service settings. Polite professional discourse was more prominent in call centers in the Philippines than in other countries, and least frequent in the United States in general. The results demonstrate how corpus distributions can show discursive practices across sociocultural structures and task dimensions of talk in professional settings, reflecting speakers’ understanding of role relationships, discoursal goals and objectives, cultural and/or racial identities, and power dynamics at work.