Organisation
Employees

Staff are positive about their work but critical of the boss

The 2014 Employees’ Monitor reveals that staff at Wageningen UR are satisfied with their working but less happy with their line manager.
Albert Sikkema

A little more than half of the employees took part in the biannual survey. Effectory, the company that compiled the monitor, concludes that Wageningen UR staff are very enthusiastic and committed. Wageningen UR gets a score of 6.9 out of 10. Its employees like their work. They give their work a score of 7.6: they think they do meaningful work, are proud of their job and continually try to improve their performance.

They are less satisfied with the commitment from senior management (both the directors and the Executive Board), who get a measly 5.6 for their performance as managers and are said to be out of touch with the organization (5.0). But despite employees’ complaints about their bosses, they still plan to stay at Wageningen UR (8.1): only one in ten employees is looking for a job elsewhere. If you look at the monitor in more detail, you see that university staff consistently give higher scores than the DLO people. International employees are more positive about Wageningen UR than their Dutch colleagues. Most international employees work at the university.

The differences between the science groups are also striking. The scores given by staff at AFSG (the nutrition and biobased groups) are in line with the aver- age for Wageningen as a whole. But the ASG (animals), Imares (fish), ESG (nature) and SSG (LEI) groups score less than the Wageningen average. On the other hand, the PSG (plants) science group, Rikilt, Facilities & Services and Corporate Staff are more positive than the average.

The workstress at Wageningen UR remains an area for concern: 42 percent of the employees fi the workload too heavy. And 10 percent of staff say they can’t discuss this high workload with their line manager. Staff at LEI in particular experience this problem. An Employees’ Monitor survey was carried out two years’ ago as well but the design was different then, which makes it difficult to compare the results. The results for Wageningen UR were compared with those for other knowledge institutions for the first time, but this did not reveal any major difference.

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