Many employees at JGU have to balance work and private care responsibilities, whether for children and/or (elderly) relatives who depend on support and care. In some cases, parents and caregivers face obstacles in their daily work that are difficult for them to overcome.
An example of this can be committee meetings that conflict with daycare closing times, making it difficult for parents to participate in committee work. As a result, this group of people cannot contribute as much to academic self-administration as other colleagues. The consequences affect everyone:

• For employees with family responsibilities, this may lead to professional disadvantages because corresponding engagement is missing from their CV.
• Colleagues who (still) do not have family responsibilities are also affected, as they are supposedly more flexible and resilient and therefore have to take on additional tasks more frequently.
• For committees, it is more difficult to recruit members if committee work cannot be reconciled with family care work, and it can be challenging for meeting chairs if the committee is not quorate because individual members have to leave the meeting early or cannot attend at all.
• Last but not least, for supervisors or the work area, it means that valuable qualifications, capacities, and perspectives remain untapped.

Considering the life realities of employees with family responsibilities when structuring the work routine and recognizing their challenges is therefore not only beneficial for employees with family responsibilities but also relieves and supports their colleagues and supervisors. Family-friendliness means promoting a balance between professional requirements and private concerns. We would like to contribute to this with our project.

After a status assessment, our goal is to develop an idea box with components to improve the structural framework conditions of committee meetings, as well as a process roadmap that enables departments to establish these measures independently and also for other meeting formats such as team meetings.

In developing our measures, it is important to us to work closely with those JGU employees whose needs the results of our project are aimed at. These include both employees with family responsibilities and their colleagues and supervisors. Here, we will initially proceed exploratively and use a status assessment in the faculties, colleges, and institutes to gain an overview of the current framework conditions of committee meetings at our university, focusing on faculty council, rectorate, and executive committee meetings.
In a second step, based on the results of the survey, we will develop various measures that are suitable for facilitating the participation of employees with family responsibilities in committee meetings. It is important to us to identify the advantages and disadvantages as well as opportunities and risks of the individual measures, and to identify teams, meeting types, and groups of people for whom these measures may be particularly suitable.
Finally, the individual measures will be prepared in an idea box, in which we point out the advantages and disadvantages of the individual components, name the necessary resources, and give a recommendation for whom the measure is particularly suitable. In this way, all areas of JGU can select the components that suit them and design their process towards family-friendly meeting organization individually and tailored to their own needs.