Which days get the email

Easter today, and in Cairo it is a working Sunday.

Which is the first thing a company spread across Dubai, Riyadh and Cairo has to notice about it. Dubai is off, because the week there runs Monday to Friday. Cairo and Riyadh are at their desks. Next Sunday the Coptic calendar has its own Easter, with a public holiday in Egypt on the Monday after it, so one office is away on a day the others have never had to think about.

Somebody decides whether a company-wide greeting goes out for any of those days. Usually one person, usually sitting in the largest office, usually in a hurry.

I have watched staff read that decision far more closely than anything in the values deck. Nobody believes a slide about belonging. Everybody believes the pattern of the last twelve months of all-hands emails, because it is a list, it is dated, and it was written by the people who decide things.

The list says who the company thinks it is made of. When two Easters pass unmentioned in a business where a real part of the Egyptian team keeps one of them, that is a statement delivered by silence, and silence is remembered longer than any greeting that did go out.

The cause is rarely intent. It is that the calendar in the system is the head office calendar, and a greeting gets sent when the day appears on the sender's own screen. Nobody chose to leave anything out. Nobody chose anything.

Culture inside a company is not the paragraph about inclusion. It is the list of days that got the email, and the smaller office is the one keeping that list.