It’s not easy to silence a group of CEC staff members. But the interim director of the Communication Expertise Center managed it. During a “team talk” earlier this month, Pim van Zanen presented his proposal to dissolve the service and continue as a “network organization.” 

In this proposal, employees would be placed in four different domains. Depending on the target groups or domains they work for, these would be General Affairs, Education and Student Affairs (ESA), Research Support & Valorization, and Human Resources.

For a moment, there was silence. Not only did the news need time to sink in, but especially the slide showing how communication professionals would still find each other in a decentralized setup. The image showed a tangle of arrows and cross-connections, suggesting that without a central service and management, many additional internal meetings would need to be scheduled.

I’m responsible for education marketing, education and internal communications at the Department of Industrial Design. This probably means I’ll become part of ESA. That makes sense in itself, since I already spend most of my time at the department for my work—getting my information there and speaking with the people I need to do my job.

But I also need the knowledge and expertise of my colleagues at the CEC. I work closely with my colleagues in education marketing on various student recruitment activities. But we can’t do without insights on strategy and how TU/e appears in the news. During the Open Day, for instance, you’re also dealing with reputation.

We need to know which events are coming up and which research findings are being published so that we can share them with prospective students, current students, and staff. I also want to know who to turn to for specific communication or marketing expertise. How will we find each other under this new plan? It will probably mean a lot of extra internal meetings. That won’t make our work more efficient.

Annemarie van Malsen is a communications officer at TU/e’s Department of Industrial Design. The views expressed in this column are her own.

This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.