It was a plot twist he was not expecting at all when in January of this year, ready for a new challenge, he applied to work at TU/e. Spiele, who has a background in business administration (having long ago started his career with the Netherlands Marine Corps before becoming a manager in various companies such as Facilicom, TNO and the German TÜV NORD and working on a range of tasks related to security & safety, including cyber security), was alerted to the vacancy for TU/e's Campus Manager Safety & Security via LinkedIn, he explains.

The broad range of duties and responsibilities appealed at once. “Safety and security, parking management, mobility and crisis management, and all that within the public-private environment of a university.” At the same time, an opportunity arose with an American organization, he says “which would have meant having to spend 70 percent of my time flying all over the world. Not that this was the deciding factor, but I've been away from home such a lot all through my working life. Discussing it with my family, I reached the conclusion that TU/e simply offered the best opportunities.”

This is bearing in mind that his family has been settled for more than twenty years in the Brainport region, more specifically the municipality of Son, neighboring Eindhoven. Spiele was born fifty-eight years ago in Enschede, and has also lived in Groningen, Amsterdam and Utrecht, but “Brabant is our base.”

After careful consideration of the changed circumstances and risks, the security organization maintained its regular numbers. “Colleagues compared it initially with the Christmas recess, when for two weeks the campus is all but closed. So this situation, in which they are practically the only people on the campus, is not new to our security team.” Nonetheless, according to Spiele, a switch did have to be flipped. “We are on campus as usual, doing what we've always done, working with multiple colleagues in the incident room, driving together in the surveillance car. In your daily work as a security officer, physical contact with your colleagues and others is sometimes unavoidable. What risks are we running in terms of infection and how are we dealing with them? These are issues on which we sought external advice, including from RIVM, and discussed among ourselves and reached agreement.”

For the rest, on the empty campus in recent months the duties and daily routines of the security crew have been much the same as usual, says Spiele. “Our people are doing their surveillances, making inspection rounds in the buildings, responding to reports of break-ins, fire reports and other incidents.” Initially, however, the incident room had the added task of dealing with all the incoming telephone traffic to the university. “It was manageable but the calls soon increased - both in number and complexity. In response, it was decided to scale up the reception services.”

High adrenalin

Whereas his team's duties were largely in the 'business as usual' category, Spiele's initial months at the university were “70, 75 percent directly or indirectly corona-related,” he says. “Crisis, scaling up, scaling down, changes, being flexible, collaborating while adrenalin is running high, working long hours; that's simply who I am and it's what I like. It is one of the dimensions of my work I like best. But what made it extraordinary was that I was not yet familiar with this organization, with its language.”

This vision will appear in the long-range plan for the period 2020-2024, which should be ready this fall. An important theme in this plan, Spiele explains, is the planned transition to “a more information-driven and data-driven approach to both security and the program related to integrated safety”. Health & safety and environment, safety, security, cybersecurity and privacy: at present TU/e has a dedicated department for each of these areas, says Spiele, but the plan is to integrate these themes, and to apply a more preventive and proactive approach to them. “This requires a very different way of thinking and working. What does this mean for our processes, systems and our competences? That's what we now plan to explore.”

For the short term, Spiele's main message for his people was “that we still do not know how COVID-19 is going to affect us. How is it going to affect the campus? Will we soon have twelve to thirteen thousand people milling about, and if so, what are the implications of that? We have no absolutely no way of knowing. So it makes sense to consider various scenarios.”

When asked what he personally expects, Spiele says, “Whatever happens, in the first quartile I expect we will still be running a combination of face-to-face and online education, for example with digital lectures and a number of taught activities and exams on the campus. I certainly don't see the campus being fully back up and running in the fall, however much I would like that. With the current requirement to maintain the appropriate distance, that's simply beyond our infrastructure; we just can't accommodate so many people.”

And that raises all kinds of issues. Certainly if you think ahead to the start of the new academic year in early September. And indeed even for today, given the increased scope being created for, among other things, events. “What can we do and when? How can we ensure we remain diligent?”