get vs. give – Page 2 – understand-culture

Germany’s Cryptic Debate on Data and Privacy

Activists are helping lead the battle for Germans to control their data privacy.

BERLIN — In a quiet neighborhood of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, C-base, a hackers den designed to resemble a space station – complete with LED kitsch – is a hive of activity. On a Wednesday evening, several dozen Berliners gather to socialize and hear presentations on net-related topics while sipping pilsners. This is the monthly “Internet politics” evening of Berlin’s Digitale Gesellschaft – Digital Society, in English – an organization that campaigns for civil rights and consumer protection in Internet policy.

Germans would pay more for their privacy than Americans

A study investigating how people in various countries value their private information has found that Facebook users from Germany would charge the social media platform the most for sharing their personal data.

The study, by US-based think-tank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI), is the first to attempt to quantify the value of online privacy and data. And for the study, it assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the US, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina.

It addresses the growing concern about how companies, from platforms such as Facebook to retailers, have been collecting and monetising personal data. Due to this, US regulators have imposed hefty fines on Facebook Inc and Alphabet-owned Google’s YouTube unit for privacy violations.

Five Strategies To Improve Communication With Team Members

Even though almost 75% of employers rate collaboration and teamwork as “very important,” according to data from Queens University of Charlotte, 39% of employees think that people in their organization don’t collaborate enough.

Improved communication between team members in the workplace often brings fantastic results, including:

• Smoother team building

• Greater agility

• Enhanced focus

• Efficient performance

• Reduced workload

In light of those benefits, it’s easy to agree that workplace collaboration is critical. But achieving these results can be difficult. Here are five tips to streamline communications in the digital age:

15 Ways To Fight Communication Breakdowns

Communication is key in all relationships, from personal to professional. However, sometimes even the strongest teams can suffer from poor communication.

This breakdown can be especially problematic when employees are scrambling to complete a major project or meet a tight deadline. To help you combat this issue, we asked 15 members of Forbes Coaches Council how leaders can improve team morale and get the lines of communication back on track.

Germany is the first EU Member State to enact new Data Protection Act to align with the GDPR

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’.

Information Hoarding syndrome

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.

5 Signs

Information hoarding, whether intentional or not, can be a costly problem. In fact, International Data Corp estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge across teams and individuals. When employees don’t share their knowledge, teams miss opportunities to collaborate, individuals waste time trying to track down information, and organizations fail to preserve expertise and tacit knowledge when people leave the company.

Information in the project – Holschuld or Bringschuld?

Holschuld from holen, to get and Schuld, obligation. You are obligated to get or ask for the information. Bringschuld from bringen, to bring, provide, give and Schuld, obligation. You are obligated to bring, provide, give the information.

“I didn’t know that!” – “But that’s on the intranet. You should have known that! After all, information is a debt to be collected!”

This or something similar is a dialogue that is heard again and again between project employees and project managers. Whereby instead of “Intranet” there can also be “Project drive”, “SharePoint” or another medium.

Is that really true? Is information in the project really the responsibility of the project staff?

I think the project manager (or the project office) makes things too easy here. I can’t throw all the information out at the employees’ door and then expect them to pick out the ones that are relevant to them. So that we understand each other correctly: the project manager can expect his employees to read meeting minutes or other periodicals regularly if they know where to find the latest issue.

But they won’t, and shouldn’t, bother to sift out “out of line” information that affects them from the jumble of information. That’s not their job. You should work on the project, any other approach would slow down the project.

Defeating the Secret Scary Syndrome of Information Hoarding

At the end of your day, do you close out dozens of browser tabs that you intended to look at but never got to?

Do you have piles of downloaded movies, TV shows, and music that you’ve never watched?

Have you ever discovered unread PDFs, e-books, and blog articles collecting virtual dust in secret corners of your computer?

Congratulations, you might be an Information Hoarder!

That means you collect information but don’t use it. Like the cat ladies on an episode of “Hoarders,” Information Hoarders have way more stuff than they know what to do with.

This very modern problem stems from the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, our desire to consume it all, and our inability to do it.

What’s behind employee knowledge hoarding

I’ve observed a growing problem in today’s workplace where employees hide, hoard or simply don’t provide information to others in their organization. It’s disruptive and contributes substantially to the lack of productivity. Although employers have tried multiple solutions to the problem — meetings, team building, knowledge management systems — the issue remains largely unresolved.

Human beings are a complicated bunch, and, as it turns out, there are multiple reasons that can cause this breakdown in the flow of information from person to person, level to level or team to team. The fix depends largely on determining which specific issues are driving the behavior in each particular instance.