Working from home during the corona pandemic

Unfortunately, the coronavirus is currently still affecting us on a worldwide level. While we thought the second wave in the Netherlands had slightly overcome its peak, the government introduced the ‘hard’ lockdown. This means that the researchers from our department are still working from home as much as possible. We would like to give you some positive insights into several aspects of the scientific work in our department during these challenging times.

To start off, we asked our scientific colleagues to share their home-offices with us. As you can see, most of us have tried to add some fun to their office, from cats to Christmas trees. How are your home offices and how do you keep them fun and exciting?

It can be a challenge to stay productive in your home office. We have gathered some tips from our colleagues;

• Set up a work space, which you can leave when you take a break or end your working day
• Change your environment from time to time; take a walk during your break
• Stay active, perform exercise regularly during your work week
• Try to stay in contact with your colleagues
• Plan online social events after your work day

We are happy to see that many of our colleagues are trying to manage the situation as good as possible, which has led to a high continuance of our scientific output despite the pandemic. PhD candidates have defended their thesis, researchers have joined and presented at online international conferences, papers have been published and we have been able to restart with limited lab work and continue clinical trials in coherence to the corona regulations.

How have you experienced working from home? What are the aspects that you have learned? Let us know on our social media post!