Zurich - Reflection on Work

Picnic eggs for making my lunch - special edition from Swiss National Day!

When I used to speak to my parents every week on the phone, my Dad would ask me why I never talked about work. I replied that it was never anything new – it was what was expected of me and so there wasn’t really anything to report. Also, I didn’t say this, I didn’t really think they’d have much of a clue about what I was talking about anyway. That’s no offence to them – I wouldn’t really expect anyone to be that interested.

Anyway, I guess it’s the same with this blog and I wondered if maybe I should say something about my working life.

I’m more than halfway through my contract now. Generally, I’ve been pretty happy. The work environment has been good, I’ve made new friends and the work itself has been fairly straightforward. It’s taken a while, as always, to build up trust and relationships with the people I’ve been working with.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about working. Not long ago, I was thinking that 6 months had really been enough, at least for full-time work. Other days I feel that it’s fine as it is. Some days, I long to return to having no work to do and just going back to doing my own writing, having more time to learn Arabic, going swimming every afternoon.

On all counts, I would much prefer to choose when to wake up each day rather than have it dictated by work. It’s not about getting up earlier or later; it’s about having the choice. However, I’m lucky that the work hours are pretty flexible; I could probably do as I wished if I like, but I’m a bit old-school and prefer just to do the set time rather than come in later and stay later. So maybe it all comes back to me not really wanting to work full-time any more.

One interesting aspect of my current position is that I have a lot of dealings with my Japanese colleagues, since my role is basically to hand over what I'm doing so that they can take charge when I leave. It's been a bit of a struggle since we're operating under two different systems and it's hard to get decisions sometimes. The Japanese prefer to discuss behind the scenes and have an iterative decision making process going through each stakeholder one by one.

I attended some Japanese cultural training and, interestingly, their language requires you to know the correct hierarchical order before you can address someone properly (and I thought the Du/Sie and Vous/Tu distinctions in German and French were difficult enough!). So, the Japanese like (need) to know what your position is in the organisation before they can even speak to you and this is thought to be a good thing as you know where you stand. They also like to copy everyone in on emails to ensure equality of information, whereas in our culture the trend is to try to avoid copying in too many people on correspondence. I haven't yet had a trip to Japan with this position, but I'm hoping maybe next year (I apparently have an allowance for only one travel during my employment, so I'm hoping it's for Japan).

I do feel quite sad about handing "my" products over (one is transferring to Japan and one to the USA) as at this stage I feel I've managed to put everything into order, I've grown fond of the people I'm working with and would like to see the plans I've worked on come to fruition. From that point of view, I will be sad to leave it behind!