Well-being for employees

Having a healthy (home) workplace is of great importance in order to be able to work as sustainably as possible. It therefore is important that your home workplace meets a number of conditions. On the home workplace page you will find more information about the possibilities for ordering home workplace supplies and ICT workplace support.

 
But working from home is more than just setting up the right facilities and having the right working-position. Make sure you stay productive and motivated by taking regular breaks, drawing up a fixed timetable and checking off your to-do-list. Finding it hard to take a short break in-between? See if a meeting can be held in 50 minutes instead of an hour. Or go on a lunch walk to activate your brain. 

The UT Sports Centre offers a diverse range of services that UT employees can use to improve their physical and mental well-being. Go to Sports for Employees for more information on activating your (free) CampusCard and what sports and activities you can do. 

On the campus of University of Twente you will find a wide range of healthcare institutions to offer in addition to the mentioned contacts below. As a UT employee, you can very easily book an appointment. The specialists are very experienced in complaints common for students, international knowledge workers, and highly skilled professionals. The facilities include a General practitioner, Dentist, Travel doctor, Psychotherapy, Physiotherapist, Dietician, Company doctor and health & safety service.

Twice a year, you can participate in the UT Well-being Weeks, a dedicated multiple-week period focusing on the well-being of both our employees and students. Throughout this time, you can participate in a variety of activities and initiatives. Visit the Well-being Weeks website for more information. 

Do you want to stay updated and receive the latest news on the Well-being Weeks. Subscribe to the Well-being Weeks newsletter. 

Do you want to have a look at your lifestyle? Set your own goals and work on specific aspects of your lifestyle that matter to you! A lifestyle check is free of charge for UT employees (people who are employed by UT) .

During the lifestyle check, potential health risks can be identified early on. You will do this together with a lifestyle coach. The check (60 minutes) takes place in the Sports Centre and includes a physical examination with various measurements, including blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol. Additionally, you will fill out 2 questionnaires before your appointment, which combined with the results of the physical examination, form the basis for conversation with the lifestyle coach. If necessary, follow-up interventions can be planned, and it is possible to be guided by a lifestyle coach throughout the year. 

As a UT employee, you can make use of the sleeping pod in the Vrijhof to revitalise your workday. Do you need a 20-minute break from your busy day? Go to the Vrijhof - UT library and revitalise your workday! You can find the sleeping pod in the downstairs study area of the Vrijhof library. The sleeping pod is available during library opening hours. 

Are you providing long-term and unpaid care for a chronically ill, disabled, or needy person within your environment? This can be a family member, but it does not have to be. Becoming a informal caregiver is usually not a choice and can happen to anyone, at any age. Sometimes the caring responsibilities are difficult to combine with a job. Then overload or failure is lurking.

UT wants to prevent this by paying attention to employees with informal care tasks, being flexible and offering tailor-made solutions, so that the work/life balance is not disturbed or disturbed as little as possible. 

Do you have a question about informal caregiving and working at UT? You can always reach out to: wellbeing-hr@utwente.nl 

There is an external Helpdesk available for you that you can call anonymously with financial questions or concerns. For this, UT has a partnership with DiFfit. DiFfit helps with a listening ear, advice and useful tips.

In embracing physical diversity, we also recognize neurodiversity as the variations in cognitive and emotional processes among individuals. This encompasses people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other neurodiverse traits.

Neurodiversity brings forth a valuable array of perspectives and talents. It serves as a source of creativity, innovation, and unique processes of thought within teams and the broader organisation. However, neurodiversity can, for instance, lead to tensions or feelings of misunderstanding, potentially causing challenges for employees or teams.

If you have questions about neurodiversity and work or if you are seeking support for yourself, your team, or other colleagues, please reach out to your HR advisor. 

Research reports like these help UT to gain better insight and understanding of important issues such as work pressure and undesirable behaviour in the workplace. Providing a safe and healthy environment for work and study is a high priority. It helps that everyone can take note of these insights, which is why we are happy to share the reports publicly

The process included a policy review, a university-wide survey, and group interviews (30 interviews with more than 150 employees, including EB). We are now moving forward with central and decentralised action plans, where concrete actions are described. We would like to sincerely thank everyone for their cooperation so far. Thanks to all the efforts, we achieved a response rate of 48% on the questionnaire and have gathered important insights from the group interviews. 

More insight with this tool

A study into employee well-being shows that 50% of employees structurally work overtime. This study also shows that many UT employees are not satisfied with the current discussion* on the topic of workload. It is time to make a change. Employee well-being is important to UT, so we are committed to making workload something that can be discussed and managed.

This is why HR, along with researchers, lecturers, and support staff, is developing a tool that will make tasks  and time distribution transparent – and therefore something that can be discussed easily. The tool contains information that has already been filled in, in order to make things as easy as possible for you. You will see instantly in which quarter your workload is high and which activities cause this. The information that has been filled in automatically can be adjusted manually, thus producing a realistic picture of your workload, both for your current situation and for the next four quarters.

Of course, the tool does not automatically lead to a reduction of your workload. The insights that you gain with it can offer the starting point to initiate a conversation about the topic with your manager. The insights, facts and prediction of future workload facilitate looking at the situation objectively and  finding a solution together.

In case you are looking for a training course or team development related to well-being, you can find it under Development Offers on this page. To support your team members (and yourself) you can make use of the sports and cultural offer, the relevant information about setting up the (home) workplace, and make sure you know where to find the suitable contact persons (including the integrity support structure). It is important to know what trends and signals there are in your unit from the well-being research. Below you will find a checklist to recognise symptoms and more. 

Under 'related links' at the bottom of this page you will find other health & safety topics.
Tools and information exclusively aimed at team leaders and managerial functions, including topics outside well-being, can be found on the 'for managers' portal page. An example of a page that can be found here is manager-specific information related to absence and absence prevention.