Well-being for employees (Welzijn medewerkers) | Service Portal

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an overview of various initiatives to promote your physical and mental well-being.

Besides this information, keep an eye on the Service portal news page for up-to-date offers focused on well-being.

Are you a student?

On utwente.nl/student-wellbeing we give you some practical tips and advice and offer help when you are feeling down and stressed.

Development offer

Sign up for the 2023 Well-being Leadership Development Expeditions
For those in Leadership positions. Learn to act and reflect on three crucial levels of leadership; lead self, lead others, and lead system. A 6 day development programme over the course of 6 months.

Sports Centre offer

The UT Sports Centre offers diverse range of services catering to the well-being of staff. See what all the possibilities are on this overview page and stay up to date via the news page!

Below are some highlights:

Free use of fitness, swimming and group lessons (including morning meditations)
10 week courses (for example Tennis, Golf, Yoga, Meditation and Tai Chi)
Employees with an age above 50 years, can make use of our Fit50+ program.
In addition, the Sports Centre also offers medical services such as a dietician, medical fitness, chair massage and physiotherapy. This is an existing and ongoing offer!
Increase your resilience! Get moving with Running Therapy towards more mental and physical relaxation during your workday. During the running sessions you will be supported with noticing, adjusting and/or accepting mental and physical discomfort.
Free lifestyle- checks and lifestyle coaching

Healthy (home) workplace

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. Think for example about taking breaks regularly, drawing up a fixed timetable or see if a meeting can also be held in 50 minutes, so that you can take a short break in between.

Financial helpdesk

Anonymous Financial Help Desk
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.

Informal Caregiving

Informal caregivers are people who provide long-term and unpaid care for a chronically ill, disabled, or needy person form their 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.

Talk about it
Are you an informal caregiver and do you notice that your work/life balance is disturbed? Don’t keep struggling, but start a conversation with your manager and try to come to a solution together. Often there are more possibilities that you might think at first.
What arrangements are there?
Within UT there are various arrangements that you can make use of:
- Emergency leave in acute situations (ranging from a few hours to a few days) at full pay.
- Short-term care leave: a maximum of 2 times the working hours per week per 12 months at 70% of the salary.
- Long-term care leave: maximum of 6 times the working hours per week per 12 months. In principle without pay, unless otherwise agreed.
Tailor-made Solutions
Sometimes the above-mentioned arrangements, that are already in place, are not enough and a tailor-made solution can be helpful. For example:
- Flexible working (other days/times, from home, etc.)
- Other long-term leave. Takes effect after a written agreement on duration, remuneration, payment of pension contributions (in case of decreased salary) and taking compensation and leave hours.
- Temporary other work.
- Temporary reduction in working hours.
- Etc.
Useful Websites
- How can I get support with care as informal caregiver? | Rijksoverheid.nl.
- Help through the municipality: support in the form of replacement care or respite care, domestic help, housing adjustments and transport, guidance fo a day care and short-term stay, protected housing, treatment or guidance of children with a disorder (Ondersteuning van je gemeente - MantelzorgNL)
- Advice and a listening ear: contact an organisation for informal care support. Find a nearby organisaiton via: Organisatie in de buurt - MantelzorgNL.
- Answers to questions related to informal care: Mantelzorg helpt jou helpen - MantelzorgNL.

Capacity management

Do you work more hours than is required on a regular basis? Do you spend too much time attending meetings and doing administrative work? Does this mean that you have too little time for research, personal contacts, and development, but do you find it difficult to enter into a conversation with your manager about this issue? To address such situations, a tool is being developed that will help you to gain insight in your tasks and the time that you have.

More insight with this tool
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.
*Tip: a training to help initiate the conversation and speak out!
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.
Discussing your workload
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.
Passionate UT employee continues to struggle with workload
Employee time planning dashboard

Contacts

Health care facilities on campus

The campus has a wide range of healthcare institutions to offer in addition to the abovementioned contacts. Although situated on campus, most of these institutions are not directly linked to the university. They 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.

Tools for team-leaders

All information on this page is relevant, regardless of your function.But as managers you also have a signaling and helping role towards your team. That is why there is tooling that is specifically aimed at managers.

Are you looking for a training, course or team-development related to well-being? Then look under Development Offer on this page. In addition, look for your team members (and for yourself) at the sports and cultural offer, the relevant information about setting up the (home) workplace, know what trends and signals there are in your unit from the well-being research, and be aware of the contact persons (including the integrity support structure). All this can be found on this page.

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.

UT employee well-being study

As the current circumstances are unique and we cannot yet predict how things will be in three months, three different measurement periods (Spring, Summer and late Autumn) were deliberately chosen in the research design. This means that employees are divided into three representative groups and that you as an employee are only invited to participate once per year. As a result, we as a university can receive input at three different times throughout the year without putting the employees under additional pressure. Everyone will receive a personal invitation to participate in one of the partial measurements. The most recent report is the first report for 2022, which provides an overview of the findings of the first measurement (wave 1 of 2) throughout the year.

The most recent reports are available below.

Well-being Action Plan

Contact

Please contact HR Services for any further questions. Tel 053 489 8011.

For ideas, comments or changes to this page, please email webteam-hr@utwente.nl

Last edit: 30 June 2023

Well-being for employees