Happy 2019, Highroaders! I hope the year has started off well for you. While I am not a big fan of New Years resolutions, I do enjoy having a marker on the calendar to reevaluate the way I work.
To kick off a great year of working across cultures, time, distance, and mindsets, here are a few ideas for potential new ways of collaborating:
- Do a virtual coffee hour with your team members in other states or countries
- Take inventory of technology across cultures in your company to ensure equity
- Set up an anonymous suggestion repository so that associates from all geographies can share ideas without fear or hesitation
- Make an agreement with your team on how you will handle conflict
- Make a plan for when members of your team do not understand each other due to accent
- Reevaluate an old process to see if it can be made more cross-culturally appropriate
- Learn the names of the president or prime minister of the countries you work with
- Create new virtual meeting etiquette agreements such as rotating notetaking, sending an agenda, or sharing information with all countries on the team
- Take the Harvard Implicit Association test to uncover unconscious biases within yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
- Watch Facebook’s excellent company training on unconscious bias: https://managingbias.fb.com/
- If you are a leader, speak at your next meeting on the importance of diverse voices in the company and also role model inclusive behavior yourself
We hope that 2019 is an inspiring year for you.
“I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.” – Vulcan Surak, Star Trek
Highroad is now serving clients working across many kinds of difference, including culture. We have expanded our solutions to the barriers that keep companies and teams from collaborating at their best.
Want to find out more? Contact us at 770-936-9209.
