3. Focus on staff well-being

COVID-19 also had an enormous impact on our staff. The appeal to work from home as much as possible hindered contact with students and colleagues. We did not see the impact of COVID-19 reflected in the sickness absenteeism rate, but staff well-being was certainly under pressure. We conducted a staff survey several times a year to monitor this. Extra measures were then taken based on the results.

Whenever possible, research went ahead as planned. However, many researchers suffered delays due to library and archive closures and the cancellation of experiments with test subjects.

A focus on staff health and well-being has been a feature of Vitality Week for years, with events focusing on lifestyle, vitality, well-being and job satisfaction – this year, in the form of webinars. Some successful webinars from that week in October were offered again later in the autumn. They were: ‘In Control of Work Pressure’, ‘How Does Frequently Working from Home Affect You?’ and ‘Sleeping Better’.

Two campus psychologists were also appointed to support staff members in 2021, a new offering aimed at personal problems that can lead to work-related health complaints. This pair complement the existing services, particularly the coaching at the Expert Centre for Development and the company social work. This year, the expert centre paid extra attention to personal leadership courses, aimed at giving staff better control over their work and careers. Starting this year, the course (Self management: take control of your work) will also be offered in English.

When there was a risk of delay, discussions were held with managers or supervisors about, for example, the research design and sequence of activities. In addition, thanks in part to using NPO resources (research), temporary contracts were extended (if there were delays due to COVID-19). This was already done in 2020, and it will be continued in 2022 and 2023 if necessary.

In addition, the Executive Board has made additional structural resources available to hire extra staff and bring the education-to-research ratio more in balance. This will help reduce workloads in the short term, and the university is ahead of the development in the reference estimates. With this, Radboud University anticipates the expected resources in 2026, and until then will draw on its own reserves to reduce staff workloads in the short term and to increase the well-being of staff (and students). This will have a positive effect on the student-staff ratio, allowing for more personal attention for students and for a better balance between teaching and research activities. The first additional people under this scheme were appointed in the second half of 2021.

For example, Nijmegen School of Management used the funds to bring its staffing more in line with the growing number of students. The faculty had 243 FTEs in 2018, a number that had risen to 340 by 2021. The workload was also lightened by removing administrative tasks from teaching and academic staff. Dean Tom Elfring: “Those tasks have been transferred to the support departments, which have also grown. This tackled one of the most important stress factors. We really needed some extra hands, and that has been accomplished.”

Thanks to the NPO resources, several faculties have been able to find extra teaching support, especially to relieve lecturers of burdens related to teaching online. For example, the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts have provided lecturers and researchers with a pool of educational support staff and student assistants. They can provide technical support for online education or take over administrative tasks. Michiel Kompier, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences: “The lecturers can ask for their support directly without involving us as a go-between. This has been such a success that we will continue it after the pandemic. It also offers students a good part-time job.” Kompier would have liked to do more this year, but as he explains: “The workload is so high that there has been no time to tackle it.”

Dean Margot van Mulken (Faculty of Arts) is also pleased with the educational support staff and student assistants who have relieved the lecturers during the pandemic. “We too will continue to work with this form of support after the lockdown. ‘Education officer’ is now a permanent position in our faculty.”

“We have also systematically increased employees’ research time, in the hope that more time for research will lead to greater job satisfaction. In any case, it will lead to more colleagues, because we have the space to employ more staff. Has that solved the workload problem entirely? No, I dare not say so. But it certainly has eased the pressure.”

The Faculty of Law has employed an extra pool of staff to relieve PhD candidates and junior researchers who have thus been given six months to focus on (overdue) writing. Dean Piet Hein van Kempen emphasises that this year’s success is due to everyone making an extra effort. “When you look at what we’ve achieved in terms of quality of education and research in 2021, you can see that a good programme has been carried out despite the pandemic.”

At the Radboud Teachers Academy, the extra staff were used to create extra work groups and provide better internship supervision at the schools. The Faculty of Medical Sciences was already heavily burdened by the pandemic because staff had to focus on extra patient care besides keeping up with their teaching and research. The faculty has now developed ‘career paths’ for all scientists that include discussions about career expectations. Policy Advisor Bob de Jonge: “Certainly we cannot do everything to eliminate workloads in this pandemic time, but with these paths we can provide our staff with more clarity and certainty.” The faculty has also invested in training programmes to help professors better supervise PhD defences and to make them more manageable for PhD candidates.

The workload is now receiving the attention it deserves at the central level, notably by the university conducting four surveys this year to measure workloads. And the Executive Board already sent out a clear message this year: take your holidays and days off on time, get some rest, and set your priorities. Rector Magnificus Han van Krieken: “80- or 90-hour work weeks are unnecessary, even if you’re working towards a Nobel Prize. You get the best results when you keep an eye on work-life balance.”

The report commissioned by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and completed this year – Recognition and Rewards, coordinated by Radboud Professor Paula Fikkert – dovetails perfectly with the focus on workload. It recommends putting an end to the ‘culture of judgement’ with performance measurements based on numbers of top publications and grants received.

Recognition and rewards took shape in 2021 with a series of roundtable discussions dedicated to gathering testimonials and proposals for improvement. The roundtables were organised by job profile. In addition, there were roundtables based on the four themes from the Recognition and Rewards in Nijmegen memorandum: team science, career diversity in science, quality above quantity, and an eye for the human dimension.

“The proposed reduction of tasks cannot be achieved by ticking off an action list; it requires a change of culture”, says Rector Magnificus Han van Krieken. “We must move towards the realisation that good is good enough, with an emphasis on the first ‘good’. In the past, we focused too much on the peaks in the landscape, whereas now we are paying more attention to the plateaus.”

At the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, the pressure is off. Employees have been told not to worry too much about things like the number of publications during an appraisal or promotion. “We haven’t really had to deal with this in 2021”, Dean Heleen Murre-van den Berg said. “It’s something to take into account in the coming years.”

Rector Magnificus Han van Krieken underscored that idea: “Let new plans go for a while. Stick to our core tasks: helping our students graduate and our PhD candidates receive their PhD. This is the year when we should all try to let life take its course. And possibly also allow it to do so because we also have to learn that sometimes good is simply good enough, with an emphasis on ‘good’. Excellence is not required in everything you do.” Tom Elfring, Dean of Nijmegen School of Management, emphasised the importance of ‘just’ keeping everything on track. “We don’t need to boast about our extra pandemic-related support, but we can boast about the enormous achievement that we, as the largest faculty, made in offering and completing all programmes and assessments according to plan and despite all limitations.”