Fourth edition of the Strategic Meeting explored INESC TEC’s New Normal

Telework. Virtuality. Crisis. Flexibility. Quality of life. Distance. Mobility. Learning. These were some of the concepts explored during this year’s Strategic Meeting, “Making it work, from anywhere”. The event took place September 11.

The INESC TEC 2020 Strategic Meeting took place online, due to the pandemic, with approximately 200 participants. This year, the speakers participated in the debates at the Auditorium of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, without any audience, and far from a varied group of collaborators who followed the event online from different places/locations and with diverse conditions.

This was the fourth edition of this internal and structural initiative, aimed at reflecting on and debating crucial questions for the future of INESC TEC. The two panels focused their activity on the Organisation, emphasising the relation with companies, the management of laboratories and spaces, as well as on a People-oriented approach, thus highlighting the management in an academic environment, new leadership, organisational culture and the balance between personal life and work. All of these questions were discussed in view of the current times of lockdown and telework, in an attempt to analyse the impact of this new reality on the future of the institution.

The event also featured a keynote speech by Annika Gehrmann, head of Fraunhofer International Human Resources group. The presentation focused on the institution’s outlook on the current difficulties, as well as on the way they addressed them, together with their employees.

Moreover, this was the first time that an internal event such as this took place in a hybrid format. According to those in charge of organising the event, “the relevance of the Meeting’s theme lies in the deep changes we observe in the way people work, and how the relationships between entities materialise, with a long-term impact. The prospective coldness of an online event was offset by the depth of the speakers’ interventions and the warmth of the debates that followed”.