For IT services companies, delivering high quality IT services is of eminent importance. IT service quality drives customer satisfaction, which in its turn drives firm performance. It is this link that is addressed in this paper: How can the performance of customer service delivery teams be improved, when looked upon from the perspective of firm performance? Based on the literature on excellent performing organizations, we apply the concepts that, according to Collins (2001), drove the development of 'good' companies to 'great' companies to a case study of an under performing service delivery team that developed into an excellent performing service delivery team. The lessons from this study were that most of the drivers behind the performance improvement of this team were in fact 'soft' factors that concerned the human side of the team more than the organizational, procedural or structural measures.
Proefschrift van drs. Jeroen Gradener naar de legitimiteit van community development (opbouwwerk). Niet vanzelf krijgen opbouwwerkers een mandaat van bewoners om hen te ondersteunen in het verbeteren van hun eigen leven en hun leefomgeving. Hoe deze opbouwwerkers erin slagen om ondanks weerstanden hun legitimiteit als professional te ontwikkelen is onderwerp van het internationaal vergelijkend promotieonderzoek.
Introduction: Nowadays the Western mental health system is in transformation to recovery-oriented and trauma informed care in which experiential knowledge becomes incorporated. An important development in this context is that traditional mental health professionals came to the fore with their lived experiences. From 2017 to 2021, a research project was conducted in the Netherlands in three mental health organizations, focussing on how service users perceive the professional use of experiential knowledge. Aims: This paper aims to explore service users’ perspectives regarding their healthcare professionals’ use of experiential knowledge and the users’ perceptions of how this contributes to their personal recovery. Methods: As part of the qualitative research, 22 service users were interviewed. A thematic analysis was employed to derive themes and patterns from the interview transcripts. Results: The use of experiential knowledge manifests in the quality of a compassionate user-professional relationship in which personal disclosures of the professional’s distress and resilience are embedded. This often stimulates users’ recovery process. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the use of experiential knowledge by mental health professionals like social workers, nurses and humanistic counselors, demonstrates an overall positive value as an additional (re)source.
Teachers have a crucial role in bringing about the extensive social changes that are needed in the building of a sustainable future. In the EduSTA project, we focus on sustainability competences of teachers. We strengthen the European dimension of teacher education via Digital Open Badges as means of performing, acknowledging, documenting, and transferring the competencies as micro-credentials. EduSTA starts by mapping the contextual possibilities and restrictions for transformative learning on sustainability and by operationalising skills. The development of competence-based learning modules and open digital badge-driven pathways will proceed hand in hand and will be realised as learning modules in the partnering Higher Education Institutes and badge applications open for all teachers in Europe.Societal Issue: Teachers’ capabilities to act as active facilitators of change in the ecological transition and to educate citizens and workforce to meet the future challenges is key to a profound transformation in the green transition.Teachers’ sustainability competences have been researched widely, but a gap remains between research and the teachers’ practise. There is a need to operationalise sustainability competences: to describe direct links with everyday tasks, such as curriculum development, pedagogical design, and assessment. This need calls for an urgent operationalisation of educators’ sustainability competences – to support the goals with sustainability actions and to transfer this understanding to their students.Benefit to society: EduSTA builds a community, “Academy of Educators for Sustainable Future”, and creates open digital badge-driven learning pathways for teachers’ sustainability competences supported by multimodal learning modules. The aim is to achieve close cooperation with training schools to actively engage in-service teachers.Our consortium is a catalyst for leading and empowering profound change in the present and for the future to educate teachers ready to meet the challenges and act as active change agents for sustainable future. Emphasizing teachers’ essential role as a part of the green transition also adds to the attractiveness of teachers’ work.
Als invulling voor de City Deal Kennis Maken willen de gemeente Leeuwarden en de onderwijsinstellingen (MBO, HBO en WO) in nauwe samenwerking met bedrijfsleven en maatschappelijke instellingen hun krachten bundelen voor het oplossen van relevante vraagstukken. De stad heeft gezien de rurale context in Noord-Nederland een brede definitie, onder het motto “De Stad als campus, de regio als proeftuin”. De uitgangspunten zijn: - Er wordt in eerste instantie gewerkt aan thema’s en uitgangspunten vanuit de Kennisagenda Fryslân die vanuit het Hoger Onderwijs Akkoord Fryslân, naar een innovatieve en lerende regio is opgesteld, - De uitdagingen worden aangepakt vanuit een multi-disciplinaire en multi-level (MBO, HBO en WO) aanpak. - De activiteiten vinden zoveel mogelijk plaats in zogenaamde living labs . - Het Innovatie Pact Fryslân, een samenwerkingsverband tussen het Friese hoger onderwijs, het beroepsonderwijs, het bedrijfsleven, de provincie Fryslân en de F4 gemeenten en Hoger Onderwijs Akkoord Fryslân overleg (zie figuur 2) als strategisch platform inzetten. In algemene zin de activiteiten die in dit kader uitgevoerd gaan worden zijn: 1. Het aanstellen van een kwartiermaker/ kennismakelaar die maatschappelijke vraagstukken in kaart brengt en kan koppelen aan de partners. 2. Als pilot, het inrichten van een aantal living labs op basis van een multi-disciplinaire- en multi-level aanpak. Studenten van meerdere kennisinstellingen en verschillende opleidingen zullen hieraan deelnemen om meerdere invalshoeken te krijgen om de maatschappelijke uitdagingen aan te pakken. Als hoogtepunt zal er een groot inspiratie-event georganiseerd worden (“Fryslân breekt uit”). 3. Het opstellen van een gezamenlijke living lab agenda, waarin gewerkt wordt aan de afstemming en uitvoering van de living labs. NHL Stenden Hogeschool zal als penvoerder optreden en met de gemeente Leeuwarden als consortiumpartners aan te merken. Daarnaast zullen de O3 partners (onderwijs/onderzoek/ondernemers) verenigd binnen het IPF een belangrijke rol krijgen voor afstemming, maar ook in de uitvoer.
Dutch society faces major future challenges putting populations’ health and wellbeing at risk. An ageing population, increase of chronic diseases, multimorbidity and loneliness lead to more complex healthcare demands and needs and costs are increasing rapidly. Urban areas like Amsterdam have to meet specific challenges of a growing and super divers population often with a migration background. The bachelor programs and the relating research groups of social work and occupational therapy at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences innovate their curricula and practice-oriented research by multidisciplinary and cross-domain approaches. Their Centres of Expertise foster interprofessional research and educational innovation on the topics of healthy ageing, participation, daily occupations, positive health, proximity, community connectedness and urban innovation in a social context. By focusing on senior citizens’ lives and by organizing care in peoples own living environment. Together with their networks, this project aims to develop an innovative health promotion program and contribute to the government missions to promote a healthy and inclusive society. Collaboration with stakeholders in practice based on their urgent needs has priority in the context of increasing responsibilities of local governments and communities. Moreover, the government has recently defined social base as being the combination of citizen initiatives, volunteer organizations , caregivers support, professional organizations and support of vulnerable groups. Kraktie Foundations is a community based ethno-cultural organization in south east Amsterdam that seeks to research and expand their informal services to connect with and build with professional care organizations. Their aim coincides with this project proposal: promoting health and wellbeing of senior citizens by combining intervention, participatory research and educational perspectives from social work, occupational therapy and hidden voluntary social work. With a boundary crossing innovation of participatory health research, education and Kraktie’s work in the community we co-create, change and innovate towards sustainable interventions with impact.
