Working with Jan

Creation Date: March 2020
Status: living document, updated when needed

A collection of things that might be useful when working with me.

My personal philosophy:

Every day, I stand for equality and to shift the world towards being a better place for everyone.

Things to know:

• I go by the pronouns he, him and his or they and them. I will often use they,them and theirs when I don't yet have clarity on your pronouns.

• I’m a remote worker. In non-pandemic situations I try to physically meet colleagues once or twice a week. When I do so, I want to connect, chat, make new friends and learn about others.

• I'm based in Munich, Germany, and work the CET time zone. Due to personal reasons with medical conditions in my family I try to not travel too often. While you can always meet me in Munich, the chances to meet me somewhere else are rather limited. I will still enjoy meeting with y'all for special occasions.

• I generally work ~8:00am–~6.00pm CET, minus family hours in the afternoon (usually around 3pm), occasional evening hours (after 9pm). I avoid meetings in the evening. I reserve quite some time for the family, also during the time that our time zones may overlap.

  • Don’t feel obliged to give in to my schedule. If we can’t find face time this week, let's try asynchronous syncing.

  • Answers to late-night messaging isn’t expected or desired. I’m working when it fits my schedule. Feel free to answer when it fits your schedule.

  • The people I reserve time for: partner: Claudia, daughter: Mia (born in 2007), son: Anton (born in 2013).

  • If you receive a message from me at night then the right interpretation is “because Jan is doing work on their schedule” rather than “Jan wants an answer right now.”

  • Same goes with Slack/Discord/Teams and other chats.

• I'm a person with Type 1 Diabetes. Type 1 Diabetes or T1D is a chronic condition and also considered a severe disability. I might experience a low glucose event during a meeting, an on-site event or a phone call at any time. Imagine having stage fright/severe nervousity, or when you were in a squat position for a while and then stand up quickly, or a weird combination of both. That's a condition that I experience from time to time and if so for around 5 to 20 minutes. I will need to treat this condition through eating soemthing sweet (i.e. containing sugar). Please don't take this as an offense (it is never). I will also regularly check my blood glucose through my phone, my watch or my laptop to avoid such situations. This also is never intended to be an offense. Please don't make me feel bad for taking care of my condition. I appreciate it.

• I'll set up meetings 5 minutes after the hour / half the hour. This happens intentionally, to make room for short breaks. I learned this as a self-caring/family-caring practice during the covid-19 pandemic, but it makes sense for me to continue to facilitate meetings in that way. Expect me to also drop out of calls 5 minutes earlier in respect of up-following meetings, that were not scheduled with this delay.

• I don’t care if your message processing schedule aligns with mine or not (especially given the distributed nature of global teams.)

• If you want my urgent attention on something with tremendous importance, please try these things: DM me on LinkedIn, or give me a call and leave me a message on my mailbox (work: +491743306622 or private: +4915170155530).

• My mobile is usually muted, i.e. fully silenced to not distract me from the thing I’m currently doing. Calling me without an appointment usually doesn’t work.

• I’m disciplined in balancing work and life. There’s no clear borders between the two anymore, but still we need to assign these segments to our days, for ourselves and our beloved ones.

• I’m an advocate for inclusive behavior and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging in general. I might get back to you to talk with you on a behavior I saw that you showed or you were exposed to. Don’t be afraid of talking about that, I’m striving to make things better, not embarrass anyone.

• I will ask for meeting agendas unless it’s a 1:1 (possibly there’s a private reason you don’t want me to know about in a written form.) I recommend always having an agenda for meetings and, if possible, pre-reads, for longer meetings. This helps not only with attendance, but also makes the meeting time more productive.

• I encourage you to find a mentor and sponsor (internal or external, maybe both) and for you to meet with other members of the team for your own learning and career growth. Feel free to meet with people I work with and ask me for a recommendation.

• Information should be open. That applies to documents, sheets, slides, and often calendars (although I respect that you might not want your calendar items to be visible to everyone). Decisions to disclose on information might vary though:

  • good reason: protecting the confidence of a partner/customer/colleague

  • good reason: the document includes personnel information

  • poor reason: forgot to change the sharing settings

  • poor reason: can’t imagine anybody else would be interested in this doc

  • poor reason: the doc’s not finished yet

• Unless you aren’t feeling well or are traveling I encourage you to use video chat often. There’s so much body language involved in working together and this establishes a more “in person” connection with your vis-a-vis.

• Amongst other things I value honesty, kindness, straightforwardness, openness, agility and dependability. Please call me out if I miss the mark on these!

• Ask me anything!

• I’m a kind supporter of awesomeness. You are 100% awesome. You will still need empowerment to always make use of it.

A lot of this is shamelessly ripped off from the document "Working With Kelly" by my wonderful ex-manager Kelly (X).