What concrete steps are you taking to improve the health, wellbeing and workplace quality of your people?
As I mentioned earlier, we place great emphasis on remote working. I personally believe we should be encouraging management by objectives, which in my opinion can contribute to a better work-life balance. I also attach great importance to equal treatment. The Rector’s Office has just received Equal Salary certification, which I’m delighted about. We’ve also set up numerous internal and external channels to help our employees with any concerns they may have. In addition, we recently installed a whistleblowing system.
You mentioned equal pay, what about equal opportunities in your institution?
Within the Rector’s Office, management positions can be filled at 80% or 100%. I make sure that a person who is employed on an 80% basis receives additional support to enable him or her to carry out their work, while at the same time taking care of a family, for example. This offer is naturally available to both men and women.
During COVID-19, we noticed a decrease in the number of women applying for research grants. This indicates that women’s activity was slowed down during the period when children were not attending school. We made a call for entries to enable women researchers to relaunch projects that fell by the wayside during COVID. There is also the issue of academic careers, which is very important to me. How can we retain women between 30 and 40 in research and then allow them to move on to professorships? A successful strategy that we have been implementing for the past few years is the tenure track for assistant professorships.
Equal opportunities are not just for women but for many others. We have put in place the “HES-SO without barriers” policy which aims to better integrate people with disabilities, but also the LGBTQIA+ community in our institution.
Do you have any last thoughts that you would like to share with us?
In essence, our job as higher education institutions is to educate young people, to ensure that they have a place in society and that they’re happy. The universities of applied sciences, the universities of teacher education, the universities and the swiss federal institutes of technology all share the same mission and a common objective, which is the wellbeing of future generations. In this regard, it’s a pleasure for me to collaborate with these different institutions and to represent them as President of swissuniversities.
Acknowledgements
We thank Guillaume Perret for taking the photo.