What will you do and what not?
We focus on things that bother employees during their daily work for VU Amsterdam. This could be when they are working on the VU campus or when they are working at home. These are issues where a report within the VU organisation (sometimes through one of the service desks) does not bring a solution or does not clarify why a solution has not been found.
What is the biggest challenge in getting that done?
The biggest challenge lies with those things that cannot be solved by one service or faculty but require involvement of multiple units. Then the questions come into play: who owns it, who should pick it up and who is in charge?
Linked to that is a big challenge in terms of communication, how do we inform each other. We have VU-zine and vu.nl to reach all employees but not really anything for specific groups of employees. For example, how do we reach everyone who works with management information or the procurement process? A lot of information is available via vu.nl, but this information is sometimes hard to find, there are multiple versions or it concerns outdated information. Also, different organisational units sometimes work on solutions separately and without knowing it from each other. This is not convenient and actually causes ambiguity and new annoyances and discussions.
What do you fancy most?
What I like most is solving things in a really practical way, without getting bogged down in investigations and discussions about "who is in charge of...". Making things simpler. I happened to come across a poster by Loesje: "Who joins a game of making difficult things easier." I think that says it all.
What has been the biggest surprise so far?
An unexpected insight is that a number of annoyances had by now been picked up in the regular organisation and were also partly solved. There is, however, another learning point: we solve it but hardly ever communicate about it. Employees who were bothered by it often don't even know that improvements have been made.
One of the learning points from the MARS evaluation was that employees should be more involved, in addition to managers. How will you involve more VU employees (than just the administrative top)?
We involve different groups within VU Amsterdam: OBPs, researchers, employees involved in teaching, the service desks, secretariats and the VUture panel.VU employees can also join us on an issue we are currently working on on 25 April during the walk-in work session.
Through the webpage, we show what bottlenecks employees experience within VU Amsterdam, even if the overview is sometimes still ripe and green.
By showing what annoyances have been collected, we want to achieve that people bring up new things. After all, what we don't know we can't try to solve.
What's the funniest daily annoyance you've heard so far?
Not really a funny annoyance, but the annoyance that we are bothered by, for example, procurement rules that apply by law did stand out. Unfortunately, we can't change that: we don't draft that legislation ourselves.
