Cultural Diversity - It all starts with yourself

Season 1, Episode 7
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In this episode, we touch upon a cultural aspect of Tech within bol.com, Cultural Diversity. Over the last couple of years, our international community especially in IT in bol.com grew from 5 in 2014 to 120 in 2019 out of a total of 450 people in Tech. As a former Dutch company, you can imagine that this brings a lot of potential and it also has its challenges. In the week of the 21st of May, the World Day of Cultural Diversity, bol.com celebrated this with Cultural Diversity Week.

What the episode covers

For us a great occasion to have this topic discussed in our podcast.

We touch upon a lot of different aspects. It starts with the onboarding. The language barrier discussed a couple of times and is a red line in this talk. Our guests explain in a passionate way what ‘live-translation’ and ‘headphones’ do with the feeling of ex- and inclusion. What we liked most was the way they explained what they had to overcome to really feel included. Realizing that to become more valuable they need to be more included, so asking for inclusion was the next step.The open mind and withholding judgement are key as well as awareness in this transition from a Dutch to a multicultural organization. The Cultural Diversity Week was part of that.

Never realized we introduced new languages in bol.com, we call this ‘European English’ and ‘European Dutch’.

We hope that the commitment to this subject as presented by our guest come across in this podcast. Happy Listening and let us know what you think, using techlab@bol.com

Guests

Show notes

Inclusion framework; the explanation of exclusion and inclusion with a clear model.

Four grid matrix that shows what Values in Uniqueness and Belongingness does to Exclusion and Inclusion (captures from a study, Inclusion and Diversity in Work Groups: A Review and Model for Future Research)

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The video of our colleagues discussing their move to the Netherlands and in this Blog, Volkan describes his life as an expat in the Netherlands

Workplace; our internal facebook

Peter Brouwers

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Peter Paul van de Beek

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