Is it just poor workflow or is it willful information hoarding! A good friend emailed me recently about the concept of information hoarding at work. I write and speak extensively about individuals who sabotage coworker performance and productivity at work.
The act of withholding information is a common tactic used by difficult and uncooperative employees. This article outlines examples of information and power hoarding, both aimed at maintaining the offending employee’s informal power at work.
Hoarding has become a pretty popular term lately, and more people are familiar with this psychological syndrome. It’s become popular on lifestyle magazines, self-help psychology websites, a few TV shows (remember the hoarding woman who didn’t even notice the dead body in the chaos of her house on CSI?), and there are even whole reality shows (think Hoarders) following the habits of people with the condition and their struggle with cleaning up that mess their house turned into.
According to German law (§ 269 BGB) the obligation to deliver is one of the three types of obligation that determine the place of performance. In this case, the debtor must render the service at the creditor’s place of residence. This is where performance success also occurs.
Ms. X would like to redecorate her apartment and buys a couch from a furniture store. Due to the nature of the purchase contract, the company owes Mrs. X the delivery of the piece of furniture. The debt is only settled in Ms. X’s apartment, until then the furniture company is liable for the loss of or damage to the goods.
The fact that daily e-mail traffic becomes a time-waster for many office workers is often due to the careless handling of the cc and bcc fields. Do you know that too? They emailed information to a specific distribution group and cc’ed all of them.
And then you get some replies to your email. Such an approach is a common and annoying mistake in business email traffic. Often enough, it also happens that colleagues randomly fill in the CC or BCC line with addresses – the message could be of interest to more than just the actual recipient.
In this way, mailboxes are clogged up by bystanders, who have more work to do as a result. Show that professional handling of the cc and bcc looks different! When sending your email, always ask yourself: Who really needs to receive the message? Who is the addressee of the message? And who only gets to know them?
This error can result in a hefty fine. A small mistake when sending an e-mail can quickly cost thousands of euros. You can find out here how you can avoid getting into a sticky situation in the first place.
At least since the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), all sorts of legal stumbling blocks have been lurking in the handling of personal data. Such a mistake can also happen quickly when sending e-mails – and without realizing it.
LondonCNN Business —
European governments are racing to develop apps that can track the spread of the coronavirus to prevent a second wave of infections when the economy reopens.
Germany is further along than most, and hopes to have an app ready to download within a few weeks. But details are scarce, and if the app is to succeed, Germans will have to overcome a widespread reluctance to share data with authorities that is rooted deep in the country’s history during the Nazi period and under Communist rule in East Germany.
“The skepticism of Germans in terms of data protection is remarkable when it comes to sharing data [with the government],” said University of Mannheim Professor Sebastian Siegloch, who has studied German attitudes toward surveillance and privacy.
US legislation means Washington could seek access to sensitive police data that Germany plans to store with Amazon Web Services.
April, 2019. BERLIN — Amazon’s cloud hosting services are not suitable for storing German police data due to a risk of U.S. snooping, Germany’s top data protection officer told POLITICO.
Ulrich Kelber, Germany’s federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said that U.S. authorities could invoke the CLOUD Act to demand access to data held by Amazon Web Services — creating a risk for German government bodies that store data with them.
The CLOUD Act, passed last year by Donald Trump’s administration, allows American authorities to compel U.S.-based tech companies to provide requested data, regardless of whether that data is stored in the U.S. or abroad.
On 5 July 2017, almost a year before the General Data Protection Regulation (EU/2016/679, the “GDPR”) will be applied, the new German Federal Data Protection Act (‘Bundesdatenschutzgesetz’) passed the final stage of the legislative process, the so-called German Data Protection Amendment Act (the “GDPAA”). It has been countersigned by the German Federal President and published in the Federal Law Gazette.
The GDPAA will, with one exception outlined below, enter into force on 25 May 2018, and will substantially change the current German Federal Data Protection Act in order to align it to the GDPR, to make use of its derogations, and to implement the Law Enforcement Directive (EU/2016/680).
Although the GDPR directly applies across the EU and its provisions prevail over national law, Member States retain the ability to introduce their own national legislation based on certain derogations provided for by the GDPR. These derogations include national security, prevention and detection of crime, and also apply in certain other important situations – the so-called ‘opening clauses’.
High time to start the argument for changes – the topic must not remain taboo.
Criticism of the US would be more credible if we, at least in Europe, had the same understanding of privacy and data protection. But that is by no means the case, as not only surveys show.
If all EU members had converted the 1995 data protection directive into national law in the same way and if all national supervisory authorities had interpreted the regulations in the same way, then most American “data octopuses” would hardly have settled in Ireland. 28 member states of the European Union, that also meant: 28 different views of data protection! So there was no question of Europe speaking with one voice to the US.
Knowledge hoarding — when employees purposely keep critical knowledge to themselves — is a fairly common phenomenon found in companies of all sizes. It’s an uphill battle to create a culture of knowledge sharing if you don’t address knowledge hoarding head-on.
As our team grows from our initial product and engineering teams to content, marketing, customer support, and beyond, we’ve looked for ways to prevent knowledge hoarding from finding its way into our own company culture. To do this, we first had to identify why employees hoard knowledge.