To maximise the discovery and use of everyone’s talent, our university must put individual development first. We give everyone opportunities, encourage initiative and entrepreneurship, question rules that restrict and pay attention to work pressure and work-life balance. In this way, we ensure a warm and healthy working and learning environment.
KU Leuven is more than just a teaching or research institution. It is a dynamic community of more than 65,000 students and almost 2,000 professors (Independent Academic Personnel or ZAP/OP3), more than 7,000 doctoral students, postdocs and researchers in various positions (ABAP-OP1/2) and some 4,000 administrative and technical staff (ATP) who together ensure the fundamental support of teaching, research, management and proper functioning of the university. It is this dynamic community that creates the opportunities within and thanks to which individuals flourish. This community animates twelve campuses in Flanders and Brussels. This makes our university a lively and diverse place of encounter, where knowledge and talent find each other and flourish.
Recent university satisfaction survey figures show that our staff members consider their job to be important. However, 80% experience a very high workload, with a dark-red score that has further increased since 2021. The AAP/BAP is experiencing several problems around tasking. At the same time, the ATP still too often experiences low promotion and development opportunities.
We strongly believe in a working and learning environment in which scientific progress and opportunities for personal development for all are central, with an emphasis on people’s well-being in the broadest sense. There is therefore a need for a central, structural and sustainable approach to prevent the pressures people experience (prevention), reduce existing pressures and provide our people with the necessary clarity and opportunities for development.
- We want to facilitate a working environment where trust is encouraged within an agreed framework. More trust and less control. After all, trust and autonomy increase job satisfaction and engagement and reduce the risk of burn-out. We want an environment that is workable and where people are unburdened by not bothering them with unnecessary administration. By applying the principle of subsidiarity and allowing more autonomy, everyone can concentrate on the core of their job.
- We provide opportunities in research, education and entrepreneurship. To this end, we establish a sustainable system of mentoring programmes, where individuals with experience help colleagues achieve their personal and professional goals. We support these mentors internally (e.g. via workshops, manuals and feedback sessions) but also publicly, by giving them visibility within KU Leuven and beyond. The aim is to create more cohesion within teams in this way.
- We reduce the current administrative burden as much as possible. Internal procedures around privacy, ethics and other regulatory requirements for clinical or social science studies, for example, could be simplified. We are committed to simplifying administratively time-consuming procedures such as faculty evaluations, with the aim of maximising participation by streamlining input. We simplify recruitment procedures, with the aim of reducing processing times, relieving the departments and individuals involved and allowing more time for smooth, quality exchanges with candidates.
In addition, support services that deal with complex processes (such as preparing timetables and exam regulations) several times a year need to be given the necessary framing and support tools, without losing sight of students’ needs. Maintaining the right balance is essential here.
- We introduce an efficiency test with every new proposed procedure. For each new proposal, we ask ourselves whether it is realistic and useful to implement. Staff who will be affected by or come into contact with a new measure must be involved in discussions from the outset, before implementation is started. The impact of a new procedure on the workload and the progress of research or teaching will also be assessed, and whether additional support is needed. Together, we need to regain the balance between administrative standards and practicality and refocus on the core tasks of research, innovation and knowledge transfer.
- We are exploring how new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), can ease repetitive and time-consuming work. We are strengthening efforts to offer high-quality education to students, where technological innovations and central support should help make knowledge transfer and disciplinary education as efficient as possible for all. Furthermore, we are convinced that IT-supported examination can remove workloads for faculty and staff. Here, it remains important to proactively involve faculty departments in both strategic decision-making and policy implementation, so that faculty needs can be met according to their own emphases.
- The top priority is to create a healthy working and learning environment. Ensuring healthy working conditions also means providing a clean, tidy, green and pleasant working space. For example, students and staff on the campuses and in some of our buildings (especially in Leuven centre) too often feel surrounded by concrete instead of greenery. We want to take even more initiatives to create a natural environment in addition to the so-called ‘green lungs’ being created around campuses.
- Noise or odour pollution on the various campuses should be addressed as much as possible. Furthermore, we should strive to ensure that students and staff have easy access to healthy food at affordable prices on the various campuses. We will therefore, among other things, ban the supply of soft drink vending machines and unhealthy snacks on our campuses, install more water fountains, offer healthy alternatives to red meat, focus on local food products (short chain), work with reusable materials as much as possible, safeguard the green areas on our campuses as much as possible and in these ways ensure that sustainability is structurally embedded at KU Leuven. Where possible, desirable and opportune, students and staff should also be facilitated to use the university’s existing or further to be developed sports infrastructure
- Access to affordable psychological help should be maximised for students and staff both in Leuven and on the other campuses. The mental well-being of our students and staff is essential to their well-being and that of our university. In recent years, the Student Services Department (Stuvo) carried out a reorganisation with the aim of deploying psychologists and psychiatrists closer to the faculties. The main focus is on prevention and first-line care to eliminate study-impeding factors – both social and study-related. For example, students have access to free first-line psychologists (maximum five individual consultations) and waiting times are kept as short as possible. Unique to KU Leuven is the access to second-line psychologists and/or psychiatrists, an initiative that is not (yet) replicated at other universities. Students can choose whether to enter in the first or second line. Second-line fees are also manageable at 11-22 euros per session (group sessions free). However, subsidies are not possible for a growing group of PhD students and international students. A project was therefore recently launched for this target group. We want to investigate how we can further expand this initiative and, provided there is a positive evaluation, embed it permanently. In any case, the value of buddy programmes such as Mindgate for Belgian students and Pangaea for international students will continue to be recognised. Also, peer-assisted learning (PAL) coaches remain very important for first-year students as low-threshold help with study questions.
- We are committed to developing a modern administrative culture at KU Leuven. Professors are not recruited to take up management positions, but rather to conduct excellent research and provide high-quality teaching. Yet, sooner or later in their careers, most of our professors will take up a managerial position that goes beyond managing their own research group. We need to better prepare them for this through targeted training that not only focuses on knowledge and skills but also on the formation of a healthy management culture. We aim for participatory governance, where decision-makers give sufficient freedom to those they manage. Indeed, micromanagement, which is unfortunately still too widespread within our institution, is a major cause of work pressure and dissatisfaction, which results in people not being able to use their full potential.