Op basis waarvan worden in je organisatie HR-beslissingen genomen? Op basis van eigen cijfers of van best practices bij andere organisaties? Op basis van gefundeerde argumenten, of eenvoudigweg door hoger management, waarbij je je eigen organisatie-expertise aan de kant zet? Beslisculturen in organisaties kunnen heel fact free of meer evidence-based zijn. In een fact-freecultuur heeft HR Analytics als zevende zintuig geen schijn van kans. Cijfers kunnen als moeilijkdoenerij worden gezien of zelfs een bedreiging vormen voor stakeholders die cijfers enkel beschouwen als een middel om af te rekenen met het bestaande beleid. Of cijfers zijn een ritueel geworden: niemand vraagt zich meer af wat ze eigenlijk betekenen. In een evidence-basedcultuur worden belangrijke beslismomenten serieus genomen. Op die momenten is er de kans om de kwaliteit van de beslissing te verrijken met analytische inzichten – naast informatie die andere zintuigen kunnen aanleveren. HR Analytics kan hier haar meerwaarde doen gelden. Maar de HR Analyticspraktijk is weerbarstig. Zelfs als het belang en de uitvoering van HR Analytics goed ingebed zijn, betekent dat niet automatisch dat analytische inzichten de HR-beleidsvoering altijd bereiken en invloed uitoefenen.
With changing retirement ages and an aging workforce, interest is growing on the potential contribution of relevant bundles of HR practices in eliciting well-being and performance among aging workers. Drawing on theories on lifespan development and self-regulation, we distinguished two bundles of HR practices: development HR practices that help individual workers reach higher levels of functioning (e.g. training), and maintenance HR practices that help individual workers maintain their current levels of functioning in the face of new challenges (e.g. performance appraisal). Further, based on lifespan theories, we expected and found that the association between development HR practices and well-being (i.e. job satisfaction, organisational commitment and organisational fairness) weakens, and that the associations between maintenance HR practices and well-being, and between development HR practices and employee performance, strengthen with age. In addition, a third bundle of ‘job enrichment’ HR practices emerged that elicited higher job performance among aging workers.
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Purpose – Driven by the rapidly accelerating pace of technology-enabled developments within human resource management (HRM), human resource (HR) analytics is infiltrating the research and business agenda. As one of the first in its field, the purpose of this paper is to explore what the future of HR analytics might look like. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of 20 practitioners of HR analytics, based in 11 large Dutch organizations, the authors investigated what the application, value, structure, and system support of HR analytics might look like in 2025. Findings – The findings suggest that, by 2025, HR analytics will have become an established discipline, will have a proven impact on business outcomes, and will have a strong influence in operational and strategic decision making. Furthermore, the development of HR analytics will be characterized by integration, with data and IT infrastructure integrated across disciplines and even across organizational boundaries. Moreover, the HR analytics function may very well be subsumed in a central analytics function – transcending individual disciplines such as marketing, finance, and HRM. Practical implications – The results of the research imply that HR analytics, as a separate function, department, or team, may very well cease to exist, even before it reaches maturity. Originality/value – Empirical research on HR analytics is scarce, and studies on scenarios, values, and structures of expected developments in HR analytics are non-existent. This research intends to contribute to a better understanding of the development of HR analytics, to facilitate business and HR leaders in taking informed decisions on investing in the further development of the HR analytics discipline. Such investments may lead to an enhanced HR analytics capability within organizations, and cultivate the fact-based and data-driven culture that many organizations and leaders try to pursue.
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Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
Denim Democracy from the Alliance for Responsible Denim (ARD) is an interactive exhibition that celebrates the journey and learning of ARD members, educates visitors about sustainable denim and highlights how companies collaborate together to achieve results. Through sight, sound and tactile sensations, the visitor experiences and fully engages sustainable denim production. The exhibition launches in October 2018 in Amsterdam and travels to key venues and locations in the Netherlands until April 2019. As consumers, we love denim but the denim industry, like other sub-sectors in the textile, apparel and footwear industries, faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project brought leading denim brands, suppliers and stakeholders together to collectively address these issues and take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production. Sustainability challenges are considered very complex and economically undesirable for individual companies to address alone. In denim, small and medium sized denim firms face specific challenges, such as lower economies of scale and lower buying power to affect change in practices. There is great benefit in combining denim companies' resources and knowledge so that collective experimentation and learning can lift the sustainability standards of the industry and lead to the development of common standards and benchmarks on a scale that matters. If meaningful, transformative industrial change is to be made, then it calls for collaboration between denim industry stakeholders that goes beyond supplier-buyer relations and includes horizontal value chain collaboration of competing large and small denim brands. However collaboration between organizations, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to failure. The research behind the Alliance for Responsible Denim project asked a central research question: how do competitors effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we used a mixed-method, action research approach. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project mobilized and facilitated denim brands to collectively identify ways to reduce the use of water and chemicals in denim production and then aided them to implement these practices individually in their respective firms.
Aanleiding Nieuwsuitgeverijen bevinden zich in zwaar weer. Economische malaise en toegenomen concurrentie in het pluriforme medialandschap dwingen uitgeverijen om enerzijds kosten te besparen en tegelijkertijd te investeren in innovatie. De verdere automatisering van de nieuwsredactie vormt hierbij een uitdaging. Buiten de branche ontstaan technieken die uitgeverijen hierbij zouden kunnen gebruiken. Deze zijn nog niet 'vertaald' naar gebruiksvriendelijke systemen voor redactieprocessen. De deelnemers aan het project formuleren voor dit braakliggend terrein een praktijkgericht onderzoek. Doelstelling Dit onderzoek wil antwoord geven op de vraag: Hoe kunnen bewezen en nieuw te ontwikkelen technieken uit het domein van 'natural language processing' een bijdrage leveren aan de automatisering van een nieuwsredactie en het journalistieke product? 'Natural language processing' - het automatisch genereren van taal - is het onderwerp van het onderzoek. In het werkveld staat deze ontwikkeling bekend als 'automated journalism' of 'robotjournalistiek'. Het onderzoek richt zich enerzijds op ontwikkeling van algoritmes ('robots') en anderzijds op de impact van deze technologische ontwikkelingen op het nieuwsveld. De impact wordt onderzocht uit zowel het perspectief van de journalist als de nieuwsconsument. De projectdeelnemers ontwikkelen binnen dit onderzoek twee prototypes die samen het automated-journalismsysteem vormen. Dit systeem gaat tijdens en na het project gebruikt worden door onderzoekers, journalisten, docenten en studenten. Beoogde resultaten Het concrete resultaat van het project is een prototype van een geautomatiseerd redactiesysteem. Verder levert het project inzicht op in de verankering van dit soort systemen binnen een nieuwsredactie. Het onderzoek biedt een nieuw perspectief op de manier waarop de nieuwsconsument de ontwikkeling van 'automated journalism' in Nederland waardeert. Het projectteam deelt de onderzoekresultaten door middel van presentaties voor de uitgeverijbranche, presentaties op wetenschappelijke conferenties, publicaties in (vak)tijdschriften, reflectiebijeenkomsten met collega-opleidingen en een samenvattende white paper.
