ShareA year of COVID-19 at AQU Catalunya
How the pandemic has affected us in the last year, how we have adapted to the new way of working, and how we have ensured 0 contagions in the premises of AQU Catalunya.
A year ago we had no idea what was coming. We knew of the confinement of the Wuhan population due to a very infectious virus, but not what it would mean for us. We thought it would be a matter of a few weeks, then the weeks became months, and the months have turned into a year.
In this year the Agency has had to adapt to another way of operating. Here we take stock.
Technologically prepared. On the eve of the declaration of the state of alarm, 100% of the staff of AQU Catalunya took their portable equipment and have since been working from home without notable incident. This has been possible thanks to the progressive implementation of the ISO 27001 information security management standard, with which AQU was certified in 2015. One of the requirements of the Standard is risk analysis to ensure access to information. In order to be prepared, laptop computers and software that enabled us to work remotely were gradually introduced, the hosting of the information was outsourced and backups were made to ensure the restoration of the information in a maximum of two weeks. In December 2019 we took the final step by introducing Office 365 as a working tool.
E-administration. The Agency completed the project to implement e-administration in all the assessment processes we manage. The institutional and programme assessment processes were already working virtually and the teacher assessment processes had been changed over by 2019. In January 2020, ORDER EMC/6/2020, of 17 January, approving the compulsory electronic processing of the assessment, certification and accreditation procedures of the Research Assessment Committee of the Agència per a la Qualitat del Sistema Universitari de Catalunya premonitorily established the use of electronic means in the assessment, certification and accreditation by the Research Assessment Committee for those requesting assessment from the first calls of 2020.
Adaptation of procedures and activities. The effects of the pandemic and the state of alarm that most impacted on the Agency's activity were: on the one hand, the suspension of the administrative deadlines affecting the calls for assessment of teaching staff, the deadlines for accreditation of degree programmes, the deadlines for submission of modifications and verification reports, the submission of appeals and the procurement of goods and services; and, on the other, the switch from face-to-face to online activities such as the meetings, conferences and workshops, and, above all, virtual visits for certification and accreditation. Within a few weeks of the declaration of the state of alarm, and with a clear vocation for public service, the Agency was able to adapt the face-to-face assessment processes, undertaking them virtually and becoming one of the first European agencies to do so successfully. This model has been presented in different European forums and has become a benchmark.
Staff adjustment to teleworking. In 2020 we asked staff about their experience of working online during lockdown. The survey was answered by 42 people (86%). In general, almost 90% of the staff surveyed were satisfied or very satisfied with teleworking and almost all the staff asked to continue in a less intensive way, about 2 days a week, in the future. The vast majority of staff had no incidents at work (74%) and only a few occasional problems with access to applications were reported. Staff with dependants had more difficulty disconnecting digitally and felt more stressed than people who had no dependants, and while most felt fine, people indicated that they needed to re-establish personal contact.
0 risks, 0 contagions. In this past year we have pushed for a policy to reduce the risks to a minimum. For this reason we have been teleworking almost all the time and the face-to-face work has been done only occasionally and only for justified reasons such as moving offices, equipment delivery, staff selection tests or welcoming new members. All face-to-face meetings have been carried out in strict compliance with the established safety measures (safe distance, ventilation, mask-wearing, handwashing and non-sharing of workspaces)
In short, AQU Catalunya had a good starting point to deal with the pandemic and did so because continuous improvement is part of its DNA. In addition, the reaction capacity of the AQU Catalunya team was impressive and immediate, not a single day's work was lost, and we quickly introduced new ways of working that will surely be maintained, when we can work on-site again.