Speaker
Description
Due to the pandemic, we have experienced two very different modes of working in the past 2 years: A primacy of offline interactions before it and nearly-exclusive online communication during it. This leads to a question about how professional cooperation will be organized in the future. I will argue that we should strive for a diversity of answers, where the proportion of online vs. offline work varies significantly both within and between research teams. This does not only offer a great opportunity to reduce the amount of daily travel, but it can also make a university career more attractive for social groups that have often been dissuaded by employment conditions, such as parents, dual career relationships and scientists with disabilities. Since in my opinion academia is uniquely suited for flexible work forms, it can in this way serve as a role model for other professional sectors. Finally, I shall discuss concrete approaches to achieve efficient communication and team building even if a majority of interactions takes places online.
