Diskrimination bei der Post

Ich musste ja zunächst einmal eine Nacht darüber schlafen, trotzdem aber will ich nicht vorenthalten, was gestern Morgen in der Postfiliale in Filderstadt-Bernhausen passiert ist.

Wir wollten eine Legitimation über das Postident-Verfahren durchführen. Die gute Frau hinter dem Treten erklärte uns nun, dass eine Unterschrift mit anderen Schriftzeichen als dem lateinischen Alphabet nicht statthaft ist und sie somit die Originalunterschrift in dem japanischen Pass meiner Frau nicht für die Legitimation gültig ist. Damit erkennt sie die Identität meiner Frau nicht an, weil sie, wie so viele hier, Japanisch nicht lesen kann. Was sollen wir also tun?

Sie hat uns daraufhin vorgeschlagen eine Unterschrift in lateinischen Buchstaben in den Pass zu schreiben. Den Pass also als Notizzettel zu verwenden. Ist das nicht dicht dran an einer Aufforderung zur Urkundenfälschung? Dies haben wir abgelehnt, schließlich ist der ausgestellte Pass die Legitimation, dafür gibt es diesen ja.

Die Dame konnte uns keinerlei Möglichkeit nennen und verweigert uns die Durchführung des Postident-Verfahrens und damit den Abschluss eines privaten Vertrages. Damit aber verweigert sie vielen Ausländern ihre Legitimation, nur weil sie die Zeichen nicht lesen kann, das aber sei ihr egal.

Ich nenne das Diskrimination und werfe ihr Rassismus vor!

Wir sind noch zu einer anderen Postfiliale gefahren und konnten dort ohne Probleme die Legitimation durchführen, dies zur Ehrenrettung der Post. Das andere wird noch ein Nachspiel haben. Ich werde hier berichten.

21.04.2013

Das Thema lebt noch, allerdings habe ich bisher keine abschließende Antwort von diesem Verein erhalten. Eine Woche nach diesem Vorfall habe ich ein Schreiben von der Post erhalten, 06.04.13, so weit so gut. Darin wurde angekündigt, dass hierzu möglichst schnell noch eine Antwort kommt. Dies ist jetzt 2 Wochen her, schnell ist allerdings etwas anderes. Das aber ist typisch Deutsche Post. Kunden sind nicht wichtig, Kunden kann man hängen und warten lassen, Service Nein Danke. Die große Trägheit gepaart mit Hochmut. Das Wort Schneckenpost ist kein Witz.

Wird fortgesetzt.

Email still reigns

This is the last article about Oscar Berg’s blog posts so far. Today I want to write about his arising question “How do we end the reign of internal emails?”. So far I wrote about the “opt-in culture”, statistics about the email usage and interesting approaches about to stop pure email communication and, very important, introductions of alternatives.

Out of Oscar’s experience each of his customer suffers from problems with internal emails. All the statements he mentioned before in his former articles occurred there, it is ‘badly executed communication’. Also Michael Arrington wrote that ‘the problems with email are getting worse’. Employees do not have the time to read carefully and respond in an adequate time anymore.

A lot of people are aware of the problem, but not so much has been done so far. The big issue is how companies implement social collaboration platforms. A lot of them put the platform in place and leave the people by themselves, in believe everything will come how it should come. For most of the employees it is “just” another tool – the companies fail with a fundamental change of the way people – managers and employees – are communicating with each other. Also in my environment I can see that people discuss about using email today and in future. The opinions are very ambiguous and still quite extreme, abolishment vs. retention.

I cannot go along with Oscar’s opinion that email is a perfect tool for managers. Even managers have to learn to work with social tools, maybe it is more difficult for them.

We are still left behind with an open question “How do we end the reign of internal email?”. That means that we could not take most of the people on the journey behind email, the “critical mass” has not reached yet. However, in my view we are just a view steps away to get the ball rolling.

Ohinamatsuri und Chirashi-sushi 2013

Vorgestern am 03.03. wurde in Japan der Girl’s-Day oder auch Doll’s-Day gefeiert. Traditionell werden an diesem Tag Puppen aufgestellt, die den Herrscher, die Herrscherin und den Hofstaat zeigen. Wir haben zu Hause nicht die ganze Ausstattung sondern nur den Herrscher (Odairi-sama) und die Herrscherin (Ohina-sama) in 2 Ausführungen.

Die 2. Version ist lustig, da es zwei Hasen sind. Da dann bei uns auch bald Ostern ansteht, passt dies ja ganz gut, auch wenn hier keinerlei (!) Zusammenhang besteht.

Natürlich gab es auch das traditionelle Chirashi-sushi zu essen und wie in jedem Jahr gibt es hier ein Photo. Eine Ausnahme allerdings gibt es, im letzten Jahr ist bei uns Ohinamatsuri und Chirashi-sushi essen ausgefallen.

Leave Email behind

In my third article about four blog posts from Oscar Berg we will see some approaches to stop pure email communication and introduce alternatives. In my first article I wrote about Oscar’s introduction of the “opt-in culture”. The second article covered a lot of very interesting statistics about the email usage. Today I want to write about Oscar’s follow up “Moving Beyond Email”.

When organizations recognize to move with their communication ahead they should do four things immediately.

1. Put an end to the information bombardment

With our current email system we have no opportunity “to opt-out for the recipient”. We depend on the sender for good and for evil. “Social technologies like micro-blogging” can lead us “to an opt-in culture and put an end to the information bombardment”.

2 . Avoid accidental information leakages

To avoid information leakages information should “posted on a blog, wiki or social networking platform instead”. Just people with sufficient credentials can get the information. The possibility that the wrong person gets that information is drastically reduced.

3. Clean up the conversation mess

As long there is a one-way conversation like one-to-one or one-to-many recipients email works quite well. As soon as it comes to a many-to-many conversation the effectively of email drops down radically. “Most social tools are designed for many-to-many conversations”. Each message just exists once and conversations are held together in one thread. The “opt-in” or “pull” mechanism allows the reader to get all the required information without being bombarded.

4. Set information free

Billions of business information are stored in inboxes. Unable to get from the person who need it, almost undiscoverable even for the owner. Information in blogs, wiki and social platforms are accessible and even more important searchable. To store all the data more central has the side effect that the costs for information management decreases.

Use emails just for it is suited for and look for alternatives for the rest of your communication. Even a lot of companies are aware of it a lot of them will struggle achieving tangible business results. According to Gartner 80% of social business efforts will not achieve benefits through 2015. Why?

With social tools we alter our communication style. We need time to learn, we need time to experiment, to learn what works and what does not work. It tooks for “virtually all new communication technologies” a lot of time to figure out their business use and their universal acceptance. People have to change their mindset and habits, and they make failures. To introduce new social technologies it comes to a cultural change in working together and trust each other. It works just with an open culture that accepts failures.

To get there we should “not drop a new platform on people from the sky”. “We have to be more like social scientists” not technologist. Our approach should be “step-by-step, learn from failures and adjust our strategies when necessary”.

My last article about Oscar’s blog posts will come soon, stay tuned.

Break the Email Habit

In my first article about stopping the email communication I wrote about what are the problems working with email. Oscar Berg introduced an “opt-in culture” to leave the “occupational spam culture”. Today I want to write about Oscar’s article “Time to Break the Habit of Internal Email”.

In this article Oscar show some interesting statistics how employees uses emails and how much time they spend for email related tasks. Statistics show that “an average corporate employee spends around 25-30 percent of his workday on email related tasks”. We just spend 14 percent on communication and collaboration, though. These two figures are not meaningful for themselves, let us have a closer look what we are doing with emails.

A large portion of time is simply spend on “organizing, archiving and deleting emails”. Time that is not productive at all, it is just used for managing our inbox. More statistics show that about “7 percent of our received emails are spam”, another “11 percent are non-work related”, and 63 percent are used for inter employee communication. That is now the catch we can continue to look on.

The time we spend for managing and working with email itself is also not the big issue “if we did it in one chunk”. Actually I try working with emails just twice a day when I am very busy. In the morning I have a look on these and right after my lunch break. I switched off all disturbances like pop-up windows, sounds and other possibilities to show me an incoming email. I decide when I read the email. It works most of the time. However, most of the people do not work like this. They are stressed and overwhelmed from the email flood and they do not recognized that is due to their working style and how they handle emails. Their curiosity and the amount of interruptions and refocusing on their email work again make people feel stressed. “An average manager typically get interrupted every 8 minutes.”

Oscar asks the question “Why have we arrived at this situation?” now. The answer is simple and well-known: It works as designed. What does it mean? Emails were designed for an one-to-one communication first. Companies in the late 70^th and early 80^th were different to nowadays. “Work was not mostly collaborative, one-to-one and not geographically distributed”. With the advent of the “Reply all” feature the email flood and many-to-many communication could begin.

Emails got convenient and widespread. Over the years “our brains got wired to emails”. The latter makes it so difficult to change our behavior. There are well-trod trails in our brain and email is our first choice. It needs a strong impulse, a radical approach now to establish different trails and different tools, side-by-side to emails. For this reason I think that the demand to vanish emails and the following discussion is necessary. We will see how it continues in future.

I will write about another 2 articles from Oscar about the email issue soon. Stay tuned.

Discussions about the email habit

There is a lot of talking and writing to stop email communication in a company. Atos announced in 2011 to dismiss emails within 2 years. It looks like that they are on a good way to achieve their plan. But there are also a lot of blog post that are not so radical as Atos’ plan.

I do not want to judge it and say it is good or bad, my perception of this topic is that the discussions are about a cultural change and how to combine all the available tools and use them for their best purpose, it is a moderate change. It is a topic about the people, change management and about technology and its usage.

When e-mail was invented (1971) and spread into the world it was the time for it. But time has not stopped and now there is a migration to another form of working together and using different tools different to e-mails. The challenge is to combine the new and the old. The push-technology e-mail with the pull-technology social media. To find the connections and gates between. It is a challenge but I am confident we will gradually achieve it.

Recently I have found some very interesting articles from Oscar Berg. Oscar wrote in his blog “The Content Economy” and also in cmswire. His first article I want to mention is “Email is the biggest productivity drain for knowledge workers”.

In his article he shows the difference between a push system and pull system or as he calls it “occupational spam culture” and “opt-in culture”. What are the problems when dealing with e-mails. Here is a short list:

• Information are hidden in the participants’ inboxes
• Information cannot be accessed from outside communicators
• Information are duplicates from themselves, consuming disk space
• Information need coordinating activities from all the people who are involved in the communication, really time-consuming

The last point is the biggest burden for pure e-mail communication. The receiver is responsible for the structure to find the information at a later point in time. And when the receiver is not interested in the kind of conversation in his inbox there is no way to opt-out the conversation. This situation Oscar calls “occupational spam culture”.

The solution out of the “spam” is an opt-in culture. People decide themselves where they want to participate, where they want to contribute content and as a sender how to organize the information. The advantages are highly visibly, the receiver does not need to care about the structure, “a huge amount of waste can be eliminated and people can use the time and energy for value-adding activities”.

One example of this mode of operation is a team blog. Simple, isn’t it? All team members share their input in that blog, team members add their comments to the articles, all members (at least) can read it and can participate when they want.

There is also a solution for people who cannot get away from their e-mail habit. They can stay with it! What? Yes, they can stay with it, get e-mail notifications out of the blog, can see the new information from all. But where is the catch? Well, the catch is that someone has to copy the information out from the e-mails into the blog to contribute this content to everyone. Maybe that is also a way to get the more skeptical people more confident in the new medias. To see that nothing harm them when they change their working style.

Oscar has written another 3 articles I will mention here soon, stay tuned.

Reiseinfos Kansei

Heute möchte ich noch ein paar Dinge aufschreiben, die die letzten 3 Wochen keinen Platz gefunden hatten.

Kitkat

Hier ist zunächst meine Kitkat-Suche. Dies war in diesem Urlaub echt schwierig. Vor 3 Jahren war es bedeutend einfacher gewesen und mit diesem Ansatz bin ich auch dieses Mal auf die Suche gegangen. Zunächst hatte ich nur die normalen Kitkat gefunden, so wie es sie auch in Deutschland gibt, dann zwei Versionen, die ich schon hatte. Hier dachte ich, da stimmt etwas nicht. In den 3 Wochen konnte ich dann doch noch einige finden, allerdings konnte ich nicht herausfinden, warum es zu Beginn so schwierig war.

Hier nun die Liste meiner Funde:

• Kitkat aus Shikoku mit Sudachi und Orangen
• Hebi-doshi Kitkat für das Jahr 2013 von vorn und hinten
• Big-Little-Kitkat dark und white
• Kitkat zur Unterstützung der Studenten
• Kitkat Ichigo (mit Erdbeeren)
• Kyōto-spezial Kitkat Hōjicha
• Kyōto-spezial Kitkat Uji-matcha
• Kitkat Uji-matcha – latte
• Kitkat Sakura- matcha

Links

Da ich jedesmal auf der Suche nach Links für Touristeninformationen oder auch Bahninfos in Japan bin, möchte ich hier für euch und auch für mich eine kleine Liste hier zusammenstellen.

• Touristeninfo (JR-Seite)
  (Kyōto, Ōsaka, Nara, Kobe, Himeji, Okayama, Fukuyama, Onomichi, Hiroshima, Miyajima, Yamaguchi, Kitakyushu, Hakata)
• Ōsaka Tourist Map
• Ōsaka Railway Map oder auch Ōsaka Railway Map 2
• Hankyu – Hankyu Rail Map – Guide to Using Hankyu Railways
• JR West – Route & Station Maps – Timetable & Fare finder
• Fahrplanrecherche (Hyperdia; für Hankyu und JR)

Raucher

Zum Schluss noch das Thema Rauchen. In Japan darf man, sofern gekennzeichnet, in Restaurants rauchen, aber Achtung, vor der Tür, also draußen, jedoch nicht. Dies ist zunächst einmal umgekehrt, wie man es von Deutschland her kennt. Leider ist es aber nicht ganz so pauschal, wie oben geschrieben, daher spendiere ich noch ein paar Worte zu diesem Thema. In Japan wurden von den Städten Bereiche der Stadt festgelegt, in denen Rauchverbot herrscht und nur an bestimmten Plätzen oder aber außerhalb des Bereiches das Rauchen wiederum erlaubt ist. Diesen Hinweis habe ich auf einer Karte entdeckt, die ich in einem Touristenbüro bekommen habe. Also bitte vorher informieren und nicht irgendwelchen Ärger riskieren.

Schluss

Hier nun endet mein Bericht und auch meine zusätzlichen Informationen. Ich möchte mich bei allen Lesern, die bis hierhin durchgehalten haben, für ihre Geduld bedanken. Wann es einen weiteren Bericht gibt, weiß ich noch nicht, da noch keine neue Reise geplant ist. Ich denke aber, sie wird kommen.