It’s common to hear that Germans are great at switching off once their working hours are done, but according to a new survey, this may not be entirely true.
The survey commissioned by Novotel surveyed around 5,000 adults across Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Poland to investigate their habits and working schedules. Surprisingly enough, it found that the Germans have the worst work-life balance of all four countries, with 58 percent work and only 42 percent leisure time.
A good salary in Germany is the one that will allow you to afford the lifestyle that you want. Anything above 47.700 euros a year (gross) will place you in Germany’s above-average range of income.
A key issue for many workers is flexible working time in order to have a work-life balance. Negotiating a work/life balance can help enable parents (both men and women) to reconcile their work with their family lives and women in particular to participate in the labour market.
Finding the right work-life balance can allow workers to take leave from work so that they can participate in education or training or take up an interest, hobby or leisure pursuit. This may mean that employees can reorganise their working lives and hours around shorter days, weeks, months or years.
German families tend to be small with only one or two children. The men are still quite often considered to be the head of the household, even though both the wife and husband work.
Career success – that’s what many people think of when it comes to hard work and top performance. But some people make a career out of being lazy. But how can it be that laziness favors ascent?
How can it be that industrious people stagnate while the lazy climb up? Why is laziness a career accelerator and not the opposite?
In this video career consultant Martin Wehrle shows an important background: how career really works. Because those who make a career focus on a certain aspect. In this video you will find out what that is and how you can use it for your own advancement, promotion or salary increase.
This episode of Ten Minute History (like a documentary, only shorter) covers the outbreak of the Bohemian Revolt which was what would eventually spiral out of control into the Thirty Years’ War.
The revolt was crushed fairly quickly but sparked intervention by Denmark, who didn’t do too well, and later Sweden who did very well. Both of these were aided by France who decided to get directly involved in 1635.
By 1648 the Holy Roman Empire lay in ruins, with Austria and Spain struggling to pay for the war and rebuild the Habsburg Empire. This war saw the rise of Sweden and France but most importantly saw the foundations of modern diplomacy built.
This unwillingness to discuss private time with colleagues reveals both the German distaste for small talk, but also the German desire for privacy.
Germans have a clear and robust sense of what should be in the public domain and what should not, and although there are exceptions for good friends, finding out what your colleagues get up to outside of work requires military grade interrogation techniques.
With waterboarding out of the question, I am left with little recourse other than to linguistically trap colleagues into giving away small details of their lives. The excruciating process of trial and error can last for years, until one day a colleague feels comfortable enough to actually tell you directly what they get up to when not at work.
German is a difficult language to learn as it is, but there are more than 12 German dialects spoken within the country. Some don‘t sound like German at all. If you‘re studying German, think twice!
YouTube comments:
“Fun fact: Plattdeutsch is so far from Hochdeutsch that it is considered as a language of its own. Also, there are many variants of Plattdeutsch itself – some of which I cannot understand, although I grew up with Plattdeutsch. Often, it takes less than 50 kilometers to find a place where you hardly understand the dialect.”
“As an American who learned hochdeutsch fluently. It took me forever to understand what people were saying in Bayern.”
“As someone who can speak the dying Lorraine dialect, I appreciate the inclusion of Letzeburgisch. It is not exactly the same, but closer then any other dialect.”
“Fun fact. In Baden we alone have dozens of dialects, sometimes significantly varying from village to village.”
German authorities have too much access to people’s internet and mobile phone data and laws must be rewritten as they are unconstitutional, a court says.
The federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has ruled that the privacy of Germans should be better protected.
Police investigating crimes or trying to prevent terror attacks are currently allowed to access names, addresses, birth dates and IP addresses. They are not entitled to access data involving connections to other people.
However, campaigners challenged the existing laws, and the judges agreed police should only be allowed such access if there was a specific danger or suspicion of a crime. Current laws violated the right of citizens to phone and internet privacy, they ruled.
Privacy is a significant concern for Germans for historical reasons, dating back to the all-pervasive Stasi intelligence service of the old East Germany and the vicious Gestapo of the Nazi era.
The Constitutional Court said that the current laws did not do enough to protect personal privacy in the digital realm.
July 2020. BERLIN — The German police and intelligence agencies have excessive access to citizens’ mobile and internet communications, the country’s Constitutional Court said on Friday, ordering the existing laws to be tightened.
It was the latest decision by the court to support personal privacy over public security concerns in the digital sphere, which, taken together, have made the country a world leader in protecting personal privacy.
Critics charge that the string of court decisions could hinder the ability of security services to prevent crimes and terrorist attacks.
Wikipedia – Information management uses the legal terms Holschuld (obligation to collect) and Bringschuld (obligation to deliver) for the information behavior of persons or personnel who have to collect information, messages or knowledge from the owner of the information in a timely and complete manner and in a suitable form or to forward it to another person.
According to the sender-receiver model, work instructions, service instructions or a manager must clarify in advance which information is required to be retrieved (pull) and for which information is required to be delivered (push) and who is responsible for the transmission of information. There is an obligation to deliver if the sender is the initiator of the information forwarding. In the case of an obligation to collect, the recipient is the initiator and must make an effort to obtain information from a source.
As a rule, information and messages are the responsibility of the person who received this information. He must decide to which addressees it is to be passed on. In hierarchical organizations, the reporting obligation (obligation to provide) is imposed on the respective lower level, which has to report to the higher level. Management must then inform the board accordingly. Since the supervisory board should obtain all relevant information in a better and more detailed manner, it has to actively demand the executive board’s obligation to provide it and to meet its obligation to collect it to a greater extent.