Newsmail #84, 2024-02-23

Dear all,

This week has seen a lot of development dialogues, supervision meetings, work-place meetings, work environment meetings and coordination meetings. I have also had recruitment meetings, met potential new colleagues and follow-up meetings with former colleagues. This is the part I like most with my job, it often feels that everything we do, we do together. I have never had a meeting where I did not feel that I learnt something from the other people, and got new input on how to move forward.

We are taking step by step on making MMK a safer place, we do safety evaluations, we investigate unmarked chemicals. We report unsafe environments (I reported that the toilet doors were difficult to lock from the inside, that has now been fixed thanks to me 😊). One tool we use is the quarterly employee pulse. The results from last measurement showed something I haven’t seen before, it showed a big lack of inclusion in some groups as well as experience of unwelcome behaviour. As organization we are currently not doing a good job of promoting an inclusive work environment (according to the survey). Most people do feel included, but a large group for example do not agree that the culture at the workplace is positive. The local JML-group has looked at the details of the survey results to try to analyze the situation and to suggest actions to improve the situation. We also use the development dialogues to discuss these results individually.

One could reflect upon if these results would differ if we had a higher level of presence in our buildings, if things were different before the pandemic. I myself believe so, I personally still miss a lot of interactions I used to have when we had more informal meetings and the lunch area was crowded both during fika and lunch. That’s one of the reasons I decided to ask the unit managers now in the individual meetings to really emphasize our requirement that MMK staff should spend the majority of their MMK work time in the MMK building, it’s necessary to be able to increase the quality of our joint work environment.

Talking about crowded, several colleagues plan for vacation next week. Most schools in Stockholm are closed next week (“sportlov”) and several of us uses this as an opportunity to get a mid-semester vacation. Myself included.

Hasta luego,

Martin