Welcome to a new blog!

Welcome to this new blog on Rewards and Recognition at YUFE! YUFE refers to the European university alliance ‘Young Universities for the Future of Europe’. It currently has ten academic members, of which the University of Eastern Finland is one. The other academic members are Maastricht University (the Netherlands), University of Bremen (Germany), Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland), Universidad Carlos III De Madrid (Spain), University of Antwerp (Belgium), University of Cyprus (Cyprus), University of Essex (the United Kingdom), University of Rijeka (Croatia), and Sorbonne Nouvelle University (France) as a new member. The non-academic members are ETS Global and the Adecco Group.

In the new YUFE phase (2023 onwards), UEF is leading a sub-task on Rewards and Recognition (R&R). With R&Rs we mean different ways universities use to recognize the contributions of their staff and the ways the staff are rewarded for these contributions.

How to recognize and reward staff?

There are different ways to support the recognition and rewarding of staff. These include recruitment and promotion (including vertical and horizontal career progression), favorable work conditions that enable to maintain a work-life balance, job continuity, autonomy of work, job enrichment, flexible working hours, training and other development opportunities, and monetary rewards. In addition, in the context of European collaboration, travel grants, mobility schemes and support for establishing new networks are areas to be strengthened.

In the competition for talented professionals, coupled with needs to strengthen the attractiveness of universities as employer organizations, these topics are timely and important.

The way forward

With this blog we aim to communicate the work done in the project YUFERING (YUFE Transforming R&I through Europe-wide knowledge transfer) and the work that is in the focus of the new YUFE phase. We will communicate mostly in English, but there might be some blog entries in Finnish as well.

Jouni, Maria and Katri