Happy Songkran!!

April 13-15 is the celebration of Songkran in Thailand. A new year festival, it is also celebrated in Laos and Cambodia at this time, unlike Chinese New Year (known as Tet in Vietnam), which is a lunar new year celebration in late January or early February.

So hey, since it's a holiday in Southeast Asia, why not give your employees a holiday??? Is it possible you might have some Thai/Lao/Khmer Creatives in your firm who might like to spend the day getting soaked with water with their family?

A recent article in Diversity-Executive magazine points out that many firms are bad at cross-cultural communication within their own firms. In fact,

Organizations tend to lose out on the opportunity to capitalize on a variety of business impacts — such as improved recruitment and retention and having access to new ideas and business practices — when they don’t carefully navigate intercultural workplace issues.

So, even though it seems like taking an extra holiday might cost you money, think about how much money you might be losing by not taking that holiday, and generally ignoring the diversity within your workplace.