General

Surprisingly, on Thursday, 26th March 2020, things changed completely. Somehow my wife and I were in a really good flow.

Our daily plan (share in the previous post) more or less worked very well. I realized somehow that even as a family, we are group and could end up in the same group dynamic phase Tuckman first defined.

I enjoyed the time with the kids, we played and laughed a lot. As the weather wasn't that nice as whole family we went for a short walk, bought 2-3 things from nearby turkish supermarket and went home.

I still feel the need for at least one short walk per day. All in all, it was the first really good remote (wfh) day over almost 2 weeks.

Work

No Meetings. And it was GREAT! I finished a small task of getting rid of a pinterest integration and it's waiting to be live soon. So far the data is also showing that on a day2day basis there is not much traffic expect 3-5 spontaneous peaks of some stylists. I guess these are newly hired ones which are some marketing.

We have an Employee Ressource Group (ERG) program and together with 3 co-workers, I co-created the Muslim Community Network ERG to organize and empower especially Muslim co-workers. Beginning of 2020 was already successful for our small group and luckily we organized a Kick-Off event one day before the whole company moved to remote. More about Zalando's Initiatives

Due to Corona, we can't meet in person or plan any event, yet we started doing weekly check-ins so we have some chat about corona, our muslim community and their conspiracy and why germans buy so much toilet paper 😂

TIL

This time it's a non-technical learning about Tuckman's group theory.

My hypothesis is that also as a family, we have similiar stages:

• Forming: As a family, you will regularly have this stage. When you marry, when you finish studies, when you both start a career or become parents. These days, it's surviving Corona pandemic and still be able to take care of kids, family and job. The stretch.

• Storming: The state we are more or less in. This stage often starts when they voice their opinions and, as a result of this, a conflict may arise between team members as power and status are assigned. (Wikipedia) So yes, we had conflicts as everyone is raising voices. I think we are still in this stage for some time because over the weeks, the whole family dynamics will change.

Other stages are Norming and Performing. I hope that at the end of this whole experiment we will end up in a Norming or Performing state as a family.

Take care, #stayHome and #washYourHands with Lyrics