Archive internal news

Anyone wishing to procure an IT product such as software or a cloud service at ETH Zurich has to meet a number of requirements. A new course programme provides support.

Many people at ETH Zurich are faced with the challenge of combining their professional activities with caring for family members. A new, comprehensive website and events are designed to support ETH members in this endeavour.

How are our scientific staff doing? To be able to answer this question better, ETH Zurich has conducted surveys among its doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and established researchers in the last three years. The results of the 2023 surveys are now available and are pleasing.

Four projects in the “Barrier-Free at ETH Zurich” program were successfully completed at the end of 2023. The quarterly reporting provides a comprehensive overview of all ongoing activities and results achieved in the 14 sub-projects. All projects have the common goal of making ETH Zurich's infrastructure accessible in accordance with the "Design for all" principle.

At present, specialist knowledge within IT Services is spread across many specialist areas. With the first newly introduced Product Centers, we have therefore defined how we want to work together more efficiently in the future. The biggest change? Our collaboration model in the Product Centers is organized directly around customers and products. This allows us to work together efficiently, independently and in a self-organized manner to optimally implement our heterogeneous customer needs.

Since the beginning of March, members of ETH Zurich have been able to take advantage of the Respect programme to deepen their skills in respectful collaboration. The first live event is dedicated to the topic of emotion regulation. Nadia Dörflinger-Khashman, Head of Diversity and Cooperation, explains how we all benefit from the input lecture.

“Respect – Reflect – Respond”: Starting today, you’ll come across this slogan at various places at ETH Zurich. It’s part of the new Respect programme aimed at all members of the university community. These three words summarise how we should treat each other at ETH: on equal terms, willing to reflect on our own thoughts and actions, and responding appropriately in a variety of contexts.

As part of the Disability Rights Action Days, ETH Zurich is presenting the "Design for all" campaign and organizing various events: learn sign language in the "Café des Signes", change your perspective in the newly designed awareness workshop or explore the ETH buildings with the new accessible navigation app "PolyMaps".

Decide which internal ETH topics you would like to be regularly informed about in the future: Thanks to the new, personalisable Internal news newsletter, you can select specific topics that you want to be kept up to date on.

Develop skills that will take you further. The 2024 course offering is now available to all ETH employees in the new Lifelong Learning Hub L3H. Educate yourself in the new year. Popular learning offerings include courses on mindfulness, lateral leadership, and time and self-management.

ETH Zurich and its members have come through the pandemic well. In the meantime, studies, research, teaching and work at ETH Zurich are back in full swing. However, quite a few ETH members are unsure what to do if they notice symptoms such as a cough, sore throat or cold.  

The Annual Academic Achievements process (AAA) has been open in ETHIS since the start of November. AAA is the academic reporting from professorships, departments and study programmes at ETH Zurich. Reports may be submitted until the end of January 2024.

Research thrives on the open exchange of knowledge – and of data that make knowledge possible in the first place. In order to support this exchange of data, the ETH Domain’s Open Research Data Program to open up research data has been in place since the beginning of 2022. Researchers can now once again apply for funding.

There is a connection between our health and the sense of belonging to a community. In our recent digital lunch time session, “Health,” now accessible via recording, discover the impact of team belonging on your individual well-being and its role in reducing burnout.

We aim for our printer landscape to be sustainable and cost-efficient. Currently, around 1800 trees are used up by printing at ETH every year and 80 tons of greenhouse gas emissions are emitted. It is interesting to note that a personal printer has a three times greater impact on the environment than an infrastructure printer. Therefore, it is time to act!

Save the date: Find out how social connections can help reduce burnouts and improve your well-being at the next "Health" lunchtime event on October­ 5.­­­­

Lifelong Learning Hub (L3H) is the name of the new learning environment that looks to the future by allowing ETH employees to shape their own personal and professional development. It is a platform for an active and collaborative learning culture where knowledge is shared and learning content is shaped collectively. L3H will be rolled out gradually. By the end of the year all employees will be invited to join the L3H learning community.

Margrit Leuthold has been ombudswoman at ETH since 2018 and is stepping down next year. She talks to us about why listening is so important, some beautiful moments she has had in this confidential role, and what qualities an ombudsperson needs.

The Real Estate Management department is now offering workplace consulting for ETH Zurich. Three specialists in the field of New Work are available to advise on the future-oriented design of workplaces at ETH – including desk sharing.

In November 2021, the President of ETH Zurich, Joel Mesot, and the Vice President for Personnel Development and Leadership, Julia Dannath, appointed seven professors to investigate the current situation of women faculty at ETH Zurich. The aim is to gain an insight into how things stand today.

Can you imagine receiving your letters by e-mail so that you can read them wherever you are - at home or on the road, for example?

Anyone wishing to register a guest at ETH Zurich will in future be able to do this in one of 14 guest categories by means of a new process. This will create more transparency and increase security.

The ETH website needs to be accessible. According to the Disability Discrimination Act, this applies both to content and published documents. New, improved InDesign templates are available for ETH members.

How flexible is your way of working? And how would you like to handle this in the future? These were just some of the questions addressed in last year’s survey on the future of work, which gave all ETH employees the opportunity to share their experiences and preferences regarding the new, flexible work arrangements at ETH Zurich. The results are now in.

As well as objective stress and excessive demands, there are also internal stressors that can create or intensify stress. Learn in the recording of the most recent “Health” lunch event how to overcome or at least mitigate such stressors.

How are our scientific staff doing? In order to be able to answer this question better, ETH Zurich has conducted surveys among its doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and senior assistants in the last three years. The collected results are now available.

Save the date: at the next “Health” lunchtime event on 16 May you can learn how to recognise, mitigate or even overcome your personal internal stressors.

ETH members are now able to learn more about unconscious bias. A new e-learning tutorial, launched as part of the university’s Respect campaign, explains how unconscious bias arises, the possible consequences it can have, and how we can consciously avoid it in future.

Electrical devices are ubiquitous in our daily work. To ensure they pose no danger, they must be checked occasionally. We can all play a role.

Although the openness and international orientation of Swiss universities and research institutes are positive attributes, they unfortunately leave them vulnerable to the threat of spying by foreign intelligence agencies. ETH Zurich has a specialist body tasked with preventing the illegal transfer of intellectual property, know-how and technologies.

Sexual Harassment Awareness Day will take place on 23 March. Universities and research institutions throughout Switzerland will for the first time campaign jointly for an environment without sexism and sexual harassment. ETH Zurich is also taking a stand to show that such transgressive behaviour will not be tolerated.

The facilities at the GESS Library are now also available to use from 5.00 p.m. to 8.30 p.m., Monday to Friday.

Switzerland has adopted the EU’s drone regulation as of 1 January 2023. This has implications for drone flights over ETH premises or those operated by ETH employees.  

Last August saw the launch of ETH Zurich’s newly designed commercial training lab with seven apprentices on the Hönggerberg campus. Both the apprentices and the vocational trainers stand to benefit from the ensuing gains in basic professional skills and the lab’s focus on the working world of tomorrow. This will also strengthen the basic commercial training programme as a whole.  

Flexwork models like working from home and mobile working – are they only possible for administrative jobs? No, these are also viable ways of working for researchers, as a team from D-BIOL shows us below.  

At least once a year, ETH Diversity publishes its Equality Monitoring report on gender equality and diversity at ETH Zurich. The figures for 2021 are now available.

Do you want to look up the basic rules for handling business expenses or get tips regarding safety, security, health and the environment? The newly designed compliance website provides the answers to these and other questions relating to compliance at ETH Zurich.

As of today, all ETH members have access to a new preventive service to avoid sexual harassment: the e-learning course provides knowledge about forms of sexual harassment and offers tools for responding to it, either as an affected individual or a witness. The Executive Board asks all ETH members to complete the e-learning course.  

In the coming weeks, ETH Zurich will start to roll out multi-factor authentication (MFA) to the first users. Applications such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Adobe Creative Cloud, Zoom or the Web Center will now require a second login confirmation. Read on to find out what you need to do.

The switch to working from home and online teaching have caused a huge drop in the demand for food at ETH. ETH CFO Robert Perich and Marcel Zurbuchen, who is responsible for partner catering providers, explain the situation with catering facilities and tell us what we can expect at the start of the semester.

National Future Day is taking place on 9 November 2023, when fifth to seventh grade children will have the opportunity at ETH Zurich to delve into the diverse professional world of science, technology and administration.

For around half a year now, most ETH employees have once again been working on site – albeit a bit differently than before the pandemic. A new video featuring the ETH transfer team shows how they are getting to grips with flexible working, working from home and virtual meetings.

In this day and age, protection against cyberattacks is absolutely essential. This is a challenge for all of us. The current version of the IT Guidelines and IT Baseline Protection Rules outlines which security measures we need to implement at all costs.

On 1 August, Paolo Ermanni handed over the office of Vice Rector for Continuing Education to Stefano Brusoni. In this interview, the two of them discuss how to measure success in continuing education and how research can benefit from it.

48 young professionals from ETH Zurich have successfully passed this year's final apprenticeship exams. They completed their apprenticeship last Friday, 8 July, as part of the 2022 graduation ceremony.

ETH is going to introduce multi-factor authentication (MFA) this autumn. From then on, applications such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Adobe Creative Cloud and Zoom will require a second factor in addition to the familiar ETH user name and password Read on to find out how this will affect your daily work.

In case you notice something the next time you log in to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: The ADFS login page will be adapted to the current corporate design of ETH Zurich. 

Three polymechanics apprentices at ETH Zurich have manufactured appliances for physics research equipment as part of their final project, gaining them full marks. Their custom-made apparatus help improve the measurement of magnetic fields.

After two years of pandemic-related absence, most ETH employees have now returned to their workplaces at the university. This phase of the transition back to in-person working is called “Return to the office”, and employees are trying out how flexible working can be put into practice. A new video series sheds light on the process.