The various ambitions of the Recognition & Rewards programme are widely supported by academics. This is shown by the outcomes of the first Recognition & Rewards culture barometer, administered at the start of 2024 among academics at the institutions collaborating in the national Recognition & Rewards programme.
For example, academics firmly endorse the diversification of career paths and the focus on quality instead of quantity. In addition, over half of the respondents expect to be better able to make fundamental decisions in line with their preferences, talents and life stage, besides expecting that their work will be valued more broadly. At the same time, there is also certainly much to be gained and we need to continue the course we have set and make the change more visible.
Today’s societal challenges require multidisciplinary collaboration among academics with a range of qualities. Dutch universities, university medical centres, research institutes and research funders have worked together in the Recognition & Rewards programme since 2020 to rebalance the recognition and rewarding of academic work. We want to give room to, recognise and reward the talents of academics, each of which has their own focus on academic teaching, research, impact, patient care or leadership (see also the position paper 'Room for everyone's talent'.
Results at national level
The Recognition & Rewards culture barometer makes it possible to gain an insight in the programme’s progress. Besides highlighting the above-mentioned broad support for the programme, the culture barometer also reveals some areas of concern. For example, most respondents note that they have not yet seen any, or much, change as a result of the programme. Most of the changes experienced are policy changes, while systemic and culture changes are experienced less. In addition, there is a large group of respondents that worry that Recognition & Rewards will not succeed in putting the programme’s ambitions into practice.
It is also notable that nearly a third of respondents fear that choosing a particular profile will limit mobility, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Although the institutions associated with Recognition & Rewards aim to ensure that career paths should not stop at individual institutions, there is certainly still work to be done to make this visible and prove it. The insights from the culture barometer help the institutions enhance the dialogue on what else is needed to make this happen and to translate the outcomes into actions.
Results at institutional level
Analysis and reporting were also done at the level of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR; excluding Erasmus MC). The outcomes at the EUR level are largely in line with those at the national level. Although as EUR we are happy to see that academics within our institution also support the wider Recognition & Rewards programme, that the majority of academics are already largely or fully familiar with the programme and that many academics expect that realising the ambitions of the Recognition & Rewards programme will create a greater opportunity to make choices that fit their preferences, talents and life stage, there is definitely a need to make the culture change around Recognition & Rewards more visible.
For instance, it is striking that relatively few academics at the start of their academic career (PhD, postdoc, and starting UD) have completed the culture barometer. As a result, it is not clear how they view the changes while they, in part, form our future university. We also see that more than half of the academics indicate that they never or rarely talk to colleagues about Recognition & Rewards and that there is hardly any communication by the institution about it. Many academics also indicate that they would like to see more attention in assessment and evaluation interviews to other, innovative and creative, forms of output, the activities in relation to teaching, team spirit, leadership and open science, and that there should be more attention to development.
Of course, these outcomes are valuable and give us insight into how the culture change around Recognise & Rewards is (not yet) perceived. More important, however, is to clarify what will be done with these outcomes. Below is an initial overview of concrete follow-up steps:
- The Recognition & Rewards theme will be continued within the organisation. Increasing attention will be paid to embedding and making the ideas of Recognition & Rewards visible in the ongoing concern of schools and services (such as HR).
- The results of the culture barometer at national and EUR level will be shared and discussed with the Rector and the deans. The conversation with them will focus in particular on 'what goes well', 'what can we learn from' and 'what should we actively work on' (what are the action points).
- We will actively reach out to the academics that are at the start of their academic career via the Graduate Schools and other existing initiatives. In doing so, we would like to engage with them to see what they think are opportunities and challenges and how we should overcome these.
- We will (continue to) actively engage in:
- Creating more awareness for Recognition & Rewards discussable through internal communication and meetings at central level and within the schools. In doing so, we will generate explicit attention to the importance of team cooperation and use good examples.
- Creating visibility for the changes that have already been set in motion, such as the further development and implementation of differentiated career paths at assistant-, associate- and full professor level and the use of narratives in promotion procedures and the annual development-cycle.
Room for talent
'We see that most academics, fortunately, feel they are recognised and rewarded. Even so, we believe there are too many academics in whose experience this is not the case. These employees, too, deserve to be rewarded for their talent. This motivates us to continue to work towards a culture change and to cooperate to ensure that various contributions to academic teaching, research and public engagement are recognised and rewarded.'
Kim Huijpen
National Recognition & Rewards programme manager
Continue the conversation
A special edition of the Recognition & Rewards e-magazine elaborates on the results of the culture barometer, including an interpretation of the results, interviews with academics and the link to the full report.
In addition, dialogues will take place both nationally and at participating institutions to discuss the results of the culture barometer and look ahead at how these results will help in further shaping the programme. The national programme team is organising a dialogue session to this end at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam on Thursday, 29 August 2024. You can sign up here.
- More information
Als je vragen hebt, neem dan contact op met het EUR Erkennen & Waarderen programmateam via recognitionandrewards@eur.nl of met het nationale programmateam.
