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.
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 change, or much change, in the wake of the programme. Most of the changes experienced are policy changes, while systemic and culture changes are experienced less. In fact, a large group of respondents 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. The institutions associated with Recognition & Rewards wish to avoid that career paths end at individual institutions. The insights from the culture barometer help enhance the dialogue on what else is needed to make this happen.
‘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, Recognition & Rewards programme manager.
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.
Results Radboud University
Radboud University’s report shows results that follow these national outcomes (10,7% response rate). These results indicate that respondents support the main objectives of the Recognition & Rewards programme, they share positive expectations towards the possibilities and/or opportunities that the programme brings. We can learn from the results that respondents experience only a little change, yet. This reveals the necessity for more Recognition & Rewards action at Radboud University.
In response, the university’s project team emphasises the importance of drawing more attention to all Recognition and Rewards projects, initiatives, collaborations, and developments on the policy level that have already been brought into action at Radboud University. To further translate and accomplish Radboud University’s vision of Recognition & Rewards, the university’s project team carries out the following subprojects: (1) development of diverse academic career paths; (2) reforming annual interviews; (3) reforming academic research assessment, according to the CoARA agreement; and (4) starting Recognition & Rewards for professional services. The project team’s ambition is to share developments more frequently and to invite and encourage employees to participate in working groups of these subprojects or give feedback on draft policy documents. We foreground these collaborations for successfully implementing the Recognition and Rewards vision at Radboud University.
Dialogue session
In the coming period, 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.