STA, 8 June 2020 - In a unique decision, Germany will send a married couple of ambassadors to Slovenia in August. Termed a family-friendly job sharing experiment by the German Tagesschau news programme, it will allow Natalie Kauther and Adrian Pollmann to take turns as ambassador every eight months for the next four years.
In an article posted on Sunday, Tagesschau says that this is the first such decision by the German Foreign Ministry in an effort to give its employees more flexibility.
The pair, in their mid-40s, said the main reason why they lobbied for this arrangement was because they realised they needed to spend more time with their children, aged seven, eight and ten.
The pair have experience with job sharing, as they had previously both held, at the same time, the title of deputy-ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
They decided not to split the mandate in two, but to switch every eight months, with Pollmann starting the rotation in August.
