End of Week Roundup! [Issue #70]

Happy Friday from Beem!

Another week, another Roundup here for you: let’s see what’s been shaking the Tech, Comms and HR world this week! But before we dive in: don’t forget to send us an email to hey@wearebeem.com if you have a story you want to share! Whether it’s about leadership, HR, innovation, company culture or communications or even your own story, we’re keen to learn, so share it with us and we may feature your post in our upcoming issue.

Right, what’s been making waves this week? Check this out and join the discussion below!

Enjoy!

 

 

3 Ways to Improve Your Cultural Fluency

 

 

Cultural fluency in leadership is critical for building trust and is a competency that has been repeatedly linked to financial performance. Building long term cross-cultural relationships leads to increased creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. It is an essential ingredient for driving productivity and innovation while also staving off the kind of uniformity that can lead to “groupthink” – which can limit a company’s ability to reach a global customer base.

So why don’t more corporate leaders possess this skill? Often, they want to, but they don’t know how to translate their good intentions into leadership practices. It is very difficult for managers to diagnose their own blind spots, and even trickier to fix the ones they see.

For leaders to engage their workforce to deliver maximum value, they must learn how to fully utilize the talent of all employees, not just those who are similar to themselves. But how do they successfully build cultural fluency?

 

 

Why data will underpin the transformation of modern leadership

 

 

Organizations have become hugely data-driven around their finances and operations and more recently around their customer processes. Data is real-time and sophisticated, allowing a business to segment customers down to the nth degree and engage with them in a tailored way to optimize revenue.

With the advent of sophisticated HRIS systems, they’ve now started to do the same with their broad employee base, learning more from their people metrics to maximize engagement and drive performance. When it comes to leadership, however, too many decisions are still based on ‘gut feeling’ and assumptions, and very few based on smart data or accurate insight.

If leadership is to transform to keep pace with the evolution of the workplace as a whole, organizations must adopt a more structured, data-driven approach – just as they do with every other aspect of their business.

 

 

Apple and Google are fighting climate change. And sorta winning

 

 

Google and Apple both claim to be 100 percent carbon neutral. Last year, Microsoft sunk a data center into the ocean, and last month, announced it was ahead of schedule to hit its target of 60 percent renewable energy in its data centers and would get there by 2020 while settling on a new milestone of 70 percent by 2023.

That’s great. But there’s a but: Research suggests about two to four percent of carbon emissions are from computing, be it the internet or cloud computing or corporate data centers. The environmental impact could rise as technologies such as 5G, the internet of things and driverless cars mean more data is collected, analyzed and stored.

How are these two giants planning on facing these challenges?

 

Did we miss something? Let us know in the comments section below and we’ll feature your article in next week’s Roundup!

Also, let us know what type of content you guys want more or less of, we’re all ears!