Working at home: rules for TU Delft staff still underway

Things got heated this month at a meeting between TU Delft’s Works Council (OR) and Executive Board. The reason? A document on organising hybrid work at TU Delft. That ‘we’ will hybrid work is clear. But the Works Council and the Executive Board do not agree about how it should be done.

Rector Magnificus Tim van der Hagen has often said that TU Delft is a campus university. Partly for this reason the Executive Board wants to make it obligatory for staff to be in the office for 60% of the time and to work from home for 40%. “The OR does not agree,” says OR Chair Menno Blaauw. “The staff members who are more productive at home than on campus are not given enough space. Furthermore, we are looking into whether this even can be required in terms of the CAO (collective labour agreement, Eds.)

‘We would rather not have a ruling with heavy bureaucracy’

The proportion between working at home and on campus proposed by the Executive Board does not match what staff want. A questionnaire among nearly 2,000 staff members last year June showed that 95% still want to return to campus for half their working time.

According to the proposed rule, every staff member needs to get permission from their supervisor for every percentage that they want to work from home. Once an agreement is reached with the supervisor, the agreement is recorded in the staff member’s personnel file. The OR questions this too. “We would rather not have a ruling with heavy bureaucracy in which the agreements with thousands of staff members are recorded in the personnel files.”

Insulted
The Executive Board was unhappy about the way in which the OR presented its position: in a detailed PowerPoint presentation in which every single detail of the document was gone through. “What can you say?” asked Tim van der Hagen during the meeting. “The way that you insult the services and your own staff who put so much effort into this is inappropriate. By responding as you have, you have belittled a dossier that was started with so much energy and good intentions.” Blaauw responded by saying that it was not his intention to insult staff members.

The run-up to the document had been eventful. The OR also did not approve a previous proposed ruling compiled by the Human Resources Department (HR). A working group consisting of OR members and HR staff members then worked from November to January on a new document. During the meeting, the OR asserted that this document was not sufficiently incorporated in the document compiled by the Executive Board. “In our view, it has really become a different document,” said OR member Maaike Swart. “We even asked if the wrong document had ended up in the items for the meeting.”

New energy
HR Services Manager Robert Paul Gagliardi answered that the document compiled by the working group really was used in writing the proposed ruling. “I want to refute the allegation that we ignored the document. What we did was to look at the areas of agreement. And we indicated that a few factors did not fit in.” He did not state which factors these were at the meeting.

After a heated discussion, the OR, Executive Board and the staff members that worked on the ruling agreed to once again set up a working group. A second working group with the same mission of compiling guidelines for hybrid work which both staff members and HR could agree on. “We will do this on campus with a cup of coffee and we will then get going with new energy,” said Julia Kreuwel (Strategic Development), one of the staff members who worked on the document. With this, she brought the subject to a close.