Update organisational development
The Organisational Development team, led by rector Erwin Muller, has organized numerous meetings with colleagues from a variety of university departments over the last few months. Together, they’ve looked at organisational challenges, bottlenecks and opportunities. From these meetings, a strong demand arose for clear boundaries, priorities, standardisation and connection, just like in the results of the employee experience survey. Conditions required for solid support and cooperation as well as innovation.
The following documents were discussed during these meetings:
- The draft for the organisational governance vision, which was afterwards converted into the ‘Governmental Compass’.
- The analyses of the central support services, which was afterwards converted into the visionary document for support services.
- The results from the research project on the organisation of our teaching logistics, performed by Bureau Turner. The input of the Turner Report has provided the foundation for the current exploration for improvement of our teaching logistics.
An impression of the reactions given during the meetings:
- ‘Give plenty of attention to aspects related to cooperation and culture. Find your common ground with the leadership programme.’
- ‘Show our co-workers and other stakeholders what concrete improvements would look like.’
- ‘It would be helpful, particularly for the central support services, to have a clearer governance model. For the policy-demand-supply chain, for instance.’
- ‘We cannot improve central support services without addressing the cooperation issues with faculties and institutes.’
In addition to these internal meetings, the team has spoken to other universities in order to learn from their experiences. The conclusions and input from all of these consultations provide the foundation for our organisational development over the next few years.
Over the next few months, Erwin Muller and his team will focus on:
- Finetuning the Governmental Compass, which will promote further integration of academic teaching and research within our university structures. With clear agreements about expectations from the leadership at faculty, institute and university levels.
- Further refining of the assignment for the structure of one central organisation, comprising of a number of clusters. Our board has agreed on the draft for this at the end of September and – together with the teaching logistics project - it’s one of the important agenda topics for further discussions with leadership groups at board and faculty levels as well as expertise centres and the councils in October, November and December.
- Formation of an expertise group, with internal experts on the different topics in this diverse trajectory.
- An online (Sharepoint) page, where you can find background information as well as details about the planning and progress of this program.
Who is involved in the organisational development programme?
- Vice-Rector organisational development: Erwin Muller
- Programme manager organisation development: Maaike Swart
- Désirée Leeuw-Le Large and Sjoerd Louwaars
- Communications advisor: Silvia Stegeman
- Programme secretary: Mark Kuipers (as of 1 November)
- Governmental Compass: Annemiek Hogendorp
- Governmental advice: Jan Adriaanse and Rolf Oosterloo
- Exploration of Teaching Logistics: Joop van Pijkeren
Do you have any further questions about this subject or would you like to share your insights and thoughts on the matter? We are happy to hear from you!