Episode #6 – How cultural competency is vital to our DEI work and to our profit with Seema Jain

Seema Jain started out her journey working with cultural understanding when she launched a Culture Day program for Marriott International in 2014. She designed it to be an innovative program to help market teams be more culturally competent when working with multicultural guests. 

The Culture Day program grew from 7 to 35 presentations per year, with a library of content for 14 different cultures and Seema was traveling all over the world to help others lead with a global mindset. Due to the pandemic, Seema was furloughed and it was then she realized she could be sharing her knowledge with other companies and industries around the world, so she founded Say-va Global to help organizations become more culturally competent.

In this podcast, Seema and I talk about:

• Her background and range of experiences that lead her to start working with cultural competency
• How appealing to different cultures of hotel guests lead to an increase of number of guests as well as revenue
• Why something as simple as providing guests with foods from their home country can do loads for overall guest satisfaction
• How she successfully integrated her cultural competency program into 4000 Marriott hotels and later to a range of different companies and businesses 
• Ways in which cultural awareness and cultural literacy aids community building goals
• Her advice on becoming culturally competent and her favorite cultural competency story 
• An inspiring acronym she created of things to strive for when working with people of different backgrounds