"Well-being in challenging times": new town hall series kicks off

The last several months have seen the ETH community rising to the unusual challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Especially now that work routines have been massively upended – from working from home and obligatory mask-wearing on campus to social distancing measures – personal well-being has a key role to play.

How are ETH community members dealing with restrictions and uncertainty in this challenging environment? How can they maintain their social fitness when workplace conversation is limited to virtual meetings? Julia Dannath, the Vice President for Personnel Development and Leadership, tackled these questions in her first town hall meeting. This new event series is scheduled to take place every month with a rotating roster of topics concerning general well-being.

Around 1,000 ETH members took part in the live event. Anyone who missed the meeting can watch the recording here.  

Get-togethers in the corona era

After introductory remarks from Dannath, the event proceeded with Ulrich Weidmann, the Vice President for Infrastructure and head of the university’s COVID-19 task force. He focused his attention on what is allowed when it comes to social get-togethers. Weidmann stated that although the measures were drastic, adherence had been very good. He thanked everyone who had shown responsible behaviour both on and off campus and stated that the current corona rules would probably remain in place until the beginning of the 2021 Spring Semester.

Using an interactive "mentimeter", participants were able to rate their overall fitness on four dimensions. Martin Ghisletti, Head of Personnel Development, broke down these four aspects for the audience: along with social fitness, the concept also includes physical, emotional and mental fitness – all of which are essential to emerge from the crisis with your health and well-being intact.

Rosa Visscher from AVETH introduced the university's various social fitness initiatives, which include personal counselling, workshops, a virtual pub quiz and sports offerings such as community yoga.

Nadine Bienefeld, an occupational psychologist working in D-MTEC, presented the results of the COVID-19 employee survey conducted between March and May 2020. The findings showed that ETH employees seemed to be generally dealing well with the crisis. However, the survey revealed that doctoral students and postdocs with teaching duties felt the highest levels of stress. Now that the circumstances of the pandemic have changed, a second survey round is scheduled to start on 14 December 2020. 

New social fitness initiative

Julia Dannath and AVETH then presented a series of measures intended to improve collaboration and exchange at ETH during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond. One of these measures is the recently launched LunchLottery, which lets members of the ETH community connect across teams. LunchLottery is an external event platform that randomly groups three ETH members together and invites them to enjoy a group lunch or coffee break. These lotto lunches take place twice per month and are, unfortunately, virtual-only for the time being. The idea is to create networking opportunities and to strengthen the social fitness of ETH community members. The pilot project will run for three months, and afterwards participants will receive a survey on their experiences.

Dannath answered questions from participants towards the end of the one-hour event, with support from Ghisletti. "What are the Executive Board's possible long-term plans for improving well-being?" and "What can I do if I feel socially isolated?" were among the questions posed by participants.

All generally relevant questions and answers from the event will be added to the FAQs on the coronavirus info site.

The next town hall meeting in this series will take place in January 2021, with a focus on physical fitness.