People couldn’t care less about the streamlining of the VU Amsterdam organisation, aka VUture, the Staff Council thinks. ‘It’s a kind of horoscope that you can interpret any way you like.’
The VUture project, intended to streamline VU Amsterdam’s organisation, is not warming many hearts on the work floor. At least, that’s the distinct impression many members of the Staff Council have. They verbally tore up the project during yesterday’s meeting.
“It’s vague and I can’t wrap my head around it”, says one of the council members. He noted that where he works, no one is thinking about VUture. “I find it impersonal and not at all like VU Amsterdam”, someone else adds. “I don’t know anyone who pays this any mind”, a third chimes in. “People are like: Whatever.”
9 challenges, 4 scopes, 20 solutions
All of this is in spite of the Executive Board’s significant efforts to get VU Amsterdam employees on board, with on- and offline sessions where everyone got the opportunity to say what they thought should change or remain the same at VU Amsterdam.
After months of talking, this resulted in a plan in which nine challenges are classified into four ‘scopes’, linked to twenty solutions that are divided up into four categories.
Incoherent and confusing
No one is happy with the inaccessible, organisational consultancy style of writing of the plan. “Impossible to make sense of”, opined a Staff Council member. “It almost seems like this plan was written by ChatGPT”, sneered someone else. “It’s a kind of horoscope that you can interpret any way you like”, was the general consensus.
Someone pointed out that the way the challenges and solutions are broken down into categories and frameworks and schedules gives the plan a semblance of orderliness, while the opposite is true: according to him, the whole thing is incoherent and confusing.
More important things
It’s also not clear to employees what the VUture plan means for them exactly. “No one is opposed to improving the organisation, but what that actually entails is not explained in concrete terms”, someone noted. “People read that the business operations should be aligned better and think: okay.”
What’s more, apart from VUture there are a number of other things going on that people attach more importance to. “Everything’s been compartmentalised”, said someone, “but there are also budget cuts coming, a possible merger of three faculties (Religion & Theology, Humanities and Social Sciences, Ed.) is being looked into, and the problems with the ICT project MARS still haven’t been solved either.”
Imposed top-down
Those cuts (25 million euros) are much more of a hot topic on the work floor, report several Staff Council members. “They are being viewed with suspicious eyes, by colleagues on temporary contracts, who are afraid they’ll be out of a job in a while. But also by the rest, because the workload will increase if there is less personnel.”
“The Executive Board has to make VUture more concrete”, was Staff Council chair Marius Rietdijk’s conclusion based on all this. “And give employees something that they can look forward to, such as workload reduction.”
The only ones the Staff Council thinks are positive on VUture, are the directors and managers. “They invite us to lunches and gatherings to talk about VUture.” This creates a feeling, someone said, “that VUture is yet another project imposed on the work floor top-down.”
“I’m afraid this will be as big of a disaster as MARS”, one of those present concluded sombrely.