2018 FAMOS Family Friendly Award
The FAMOS Family Friendly Award is to recognize academic leaders and teams that best exemplify the University's commitment to work-life balance arrangements.
RWTH, a certified family-friendly university, places strong emphasis on improving work-life balance for its members, whether they are staff or students with families. An important part of this is the implementation of family-friendly work policies and practices. Over the past months, all RWTH employees had the opportunity to nominate their managers for the eleventh call of the award “FAMOS für Familie.”
The award honors individuals who have made particular efforts in family-friendly management, sustainable leadership, healthy work-life balance, and creativity in the workplace. As RWTH chancellor Manfred Nettekoven said during the celebratory event to honor this year’s award winners: “You all contribute to making the University an attractive employer for excellent staff.”
The jury selected the following awardees from all nominations received: Professors Sigrid Brell-Cokcan, Chair for Individualized Production in Architecture; Lars M. Blank, Institute of Applied Microbiology; Christoph Broeckmann, Institute for Materials Applications in Mechanical Engineering; and Alexander Mitsos, Chair of Process Systems Engineering. Also awarded were Werner Möller, head of RWTH’s Human Resources Department, and Timo Schönenberg, head of the training workshop at the Chair of Manufacturing Technology.
Chancellor Nettekoven and Jadranka Bozanovic from RWTH’s Family Services Center presented the awards at the ceremony. “Without the unflagging dedication of the Rector’s Office, we would not be the family-friendly University that we are today,” said Ulrike Brands-Proharam Gonzalez, RWTH’s equal opportunities officer.
Sustainably Family-Friendly Management
Over the past ten years, 30 academic managers have received the awards. This year, for the first time, the FAMOS Sustainably Family Friendly prize was presented, whose purpose is to recognize past award winners that have adopted and implemented family-friendly policies for their employees in the long term. The first recipient of the prize is Professor Henner Hollert from the RWTH Department of Ecosystem Analysis.