"Climate protection" of a different kind

A good organizational climate is important to everyone. For this reason, the University of Kassel conducted a survey on the organizational climate among its approximately 3,500 employees for the second time. In the meantime, implementation of the measures derived has begun. In addition to individual support - which departments, central services and administrative departments can take advantage of in order to derive and implement measures for their organizational units and thus improve cooperation and the organizational climate - four major university-wide projects have been set up. The headings of the central projects are Onboarding, Leadership, Organizational Culture and Career Development. Currently, employees of the Strategic Human Resources Development and Organizational Culture unit are drawing up roadmaps together with the President's Office, among others, in order to plan the next steps.

Onboarding

The goal of the onboarding project is to focus on the topic of familiarization with new and different tasks. To this end, event formats, tools and methods are to be developed to support the onboarding of employees from all professional groups. These range from welcome events to exchange and networking formats to media offerings such as podcasts and films. "In the end, we hope to have a toolbox with guidelines and checklists that we can make available to all employees," says Maike Mach.

Leadership

Leadership and leadership skills are also among the focal points that were rated as important in the organizational climate survey. "The Leadership project encompasses all the activities that serve to professionalize and support our managers," says Dr. Manuela Kaiser-Belz, head of the Strategic Personnel Development and Organizational Culture unit. "To further strengthen leadership skills at the university, we are currently developing a number of measures - including the establishment of leadership networks, expansion of coaching and mentoring offerings, and seminar offerings on professional leadership topics."

Organizational culture

The way employees work together at the University of Kassel and job satisfaction are important indicators of organizational culture. It is the goal of the project to focus on these issues and to initiate various activities. For example, improving cooperation between administration and departments, more communication on the work of the presidium, or making it easier for employees in self-administration to find information and participate in decision-making. "Directly implementable, for example, are so-called delegation visits from administrative departments and central services to get to know colleagues in other areas and their work even better," says Kaiser-Belz.

Career development

The goal of the Career Advancement project is to further develop and expand professional development opportunities at the University of Kassel. Individual offers for specific target groups already exist, for example scholarships for young academics, further training opportunities such as administrative specialist or master craftsman/technician in the administrative-technical field. However, the results of the organizational climate survey show that there is significant potential for improvement in the area of transparency and diversity of career development opportunities. "Our goal is to expand career paths at the university as a whole and make them as transparent as possible so that we can support the professional development of our employees as much as possible," Kaiser-Belz describes.

Text Manuela Kaiser-Belz