Reducing work pressure
Work pressure is still high across the entire organisation. Leiden University is not unique in this respect, as all Dutch universities are facing high levels of work pressure. In an effort to reduce work pressure, we have launched a toolkit including practical measures at central, faculty, and individual level. This will hopefully make work pressure easier to address and manage.
Seven focus areas
Leiden University aims to create realistic task assignments, norms for task load, and a good balance between teaching and research tasks. This is also a theme that is important to Academia in Motion. There are seven focus areas:
- Focus on improving resource deployment in the primary process
- Reduce regulatory pressure (‘keep it simple’)
- Attention for staff resilience and vitality
- Organise smarter support for academic staff
- Create regulatory space for staff members
- Better harness ideas coming from the organisation
- To measure is to know: use the staff monitor
Work Balance Community of Practice
The Well-being Programme group is a forum consisting of Faculty and central HR advisers, aimed at exchanging best practices for reducing work pressure. Policy development has been translated into practical measures in the ‘work pressure toolkit’.
Some of these measures are implemented at University level, such as the ‘Leidse kwartier’ (the practice of starting lectures 15 minutes late) at the start of a meeting, or managers acting as role models. We expect faculties, institutes, and units to use the toolkit to address local bottlenecks.
Work pressure toolkit
The toolkit lists measures that make work pressure more manageable. Faculties, institutes, and units can use the toolkit to formulate their action plans and faculty and other policy. The toolkit is in Dutch.
DownloadIf you have an idea for reducing work pressure, and you would like to share it with the Community of Practice, please contact your HR adviser.
Approach and initiatives
E-mail free weeks, working hours to be used at the employee’s discretion, and protecting private time: these are some examples of measures taken to reduce work pressure. Other initiatives include:
-
Leiden Research Support
Academic staff is receiving better support, for example via the Leiden Research Support initiative. This programme strengthens research support in applying for, managing, and offering accountability for externally financed research projects. -
GROW interviews
Work pressure has been added as an item for discussion in GROW interviews. -
Career Platform
The Career Platform has many useful tips and tools for exploring your talents, weaker points and energisers. It also has online tests, so you can get to know yourself better and discover how to make the best choices for your development and workplace satisfaction. -
Healthy University
The Healthy University programme offers activitites as well as tips and tricks for staying healthy at work. -
Confidential counsellors and university doctors
If staff members and managers cannot reach an agreement, they can get help from confidential counsellors or university doctors.
To measure is to know
We use a number of methods to investigate the impact of our policy and initiatives:
- Staff monitor
- GROW interviews
- Risk inventory and evaluation
- Signals from HR departments and confidential counsellors
This allows us to measure whether the gap between the current and the desired work pressure level is decreasing, overtime hours are being reduced, and the general task load is manageable. We also check whether specific job groups or units are suffering from work pressure, so that we can adjust our policy aims accordingly.
Many people at the Faculty of Humanities engage in their work with great passion and enthusiasm. It is important that employees enjoy their work and create a healthy work balance. Work Balance in Action is intended to keep the theme of ‘work balance’ on the agenda. By engaging in dialogue around this topic, we break through existing taboos, so that we can work together to take steps to improve work balance and job satisfaction.