Covering letter from Mette Thunø and Per Dahl:

In early May dean Mette Thunø and joint union representative Per Dahl entered into a new working hours agreement, following lengthy negotiations in a negotiating committee consisting of dean Mette Thunø, department head Bjarke Paarup, deputy department head Claus Holm, campus director Per Lindblad Johansen, associate professor Per Dahl, associate professor Charlotte Paludan, associate professor Ida Juul and associate professor Marianne Schleicher. The faculty management team and the faculty liaison committee have been informed of the content of the agreement on a regular basis.

The purpose of the negotiations was to reach a joint agreement about working hours for all members of staff at the Faculty of Arts, thereby harmonising a range of existing agreements as well as establishing new ones where none were available before. The overall goal is to ensure a balance in the number of working hours that staff allocate to teaching and research tasks respectively. The agreement also seeks to provide both the management and staff with a general overview of the number of working hours invested in individual degree programmes at each department.

The working group has worked hard to ensure that the agreement is simple, flexible and functional, and that it can be supported by the digital registration of the time spent by each member of staff on teaching tasks. A special IT program is currently being developed for this purpose. After the summer holiday a series of introductions to the new registration system will be arranged.

One of the other general perspectives involves ensuring the reliability of the agreement by redressing previous imbalances (both registered and non-registered) in the time spent on research and teaching tasks respectively.

We hope that everyone will welcome the new agreement and use it as intended. This will enable the management and all the staff to discuss and agree on an allocation of working hours that takes into consideration not only the faculty’s research, but also its research-based degree programmes.

There will be three information meetings before the summer holiday (two at Aarhus Campus and one at Emdrup Campus). The dean and the union representative will both be present to explain the content of the agreement and answer any questions. The times and places of these meetings will be announced in newsletters.

Best wishes
Dean Mette Thunø and joint union representative Per Dahl

Distribution with newsletters

The agreement will be distributed (in Danish and English) with newsletters at the faculty’s departments and centres.