Organisational Excellence and Resilience

All organisations regardless of size or type must tackle rapidly changing conditions in their economic, technological, political, social, natural, or legal environment and go through deep transformations. The profound transformations of developing digitalised, ecologically sustainable, and globalised organisations call for progressive direction and leadership processes as they touch complex structures of interest that need to be rearranged or newly negotiated. Organisations need to build and enhance their capacity of managing sustainable organisation development. This chapter introduces an integrated learning and practice approach of leadership, organisation development and learning, providing sustainable responses to the complex requirements in the quality of management. We point out that in the perception of the people affected by and participating in such processes, it is never the simple functioning of individual proceedings and performances that is at stake. Instead, at all times, it is the quality of the whole organisation and its overall inward and outward performance that is challenging those who bear responsibility. We are not talking about the management of quality but about the quality of management. In this chapter and in the book as a whole, we present a comprehensive management approach coalescing the fundamentals of Excellence—as they are incorporated by the Excellence model of EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) or by CAF (Common Assessment Framework), its congenial model for public administrations, and interpreting it as a learning organisation. In a framework of continual learning and (self) improvement of the whole organisation, the Excellence model asks for regular self-assessment. It aims for the organisation to understand and reshape itself as a co-operation body capable of effective learning. Individuals and groups of individuals in the organisation are allowed and encouraged to learn to enable the entire organisation to overcome known and unknown challenges in a constantly and rapidly changing social, technological, and economic environment.

Section 2 aims at teaching basic occupational psychology principles in the context of stress and resilience at the workplace, as well as the ability to integrate stress management into the Excellence Model in an innovative and value-adding manner. At first, industrial and organisational psychology principles are integrated into the global topics of sustainability and the promotion of decent work for all. It will be shown that an excellence management approach based on the blueprint Agenda 2030 and on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations is synergetic with the objective of sustainable, comprehensive quality and occupational health. Subsequently, common and emerging psycho-social risk factors at work will be highlighted as well as the transformative role of modern organisations in developing resource-rich working conditions to promote resilience and health among employees, teams and supervisors. Practical categorisations of stress factors and resources that shape personnel’s experiences will be outlined to summarise the state-of-the-art-knowledge of work-, organisational, and personnel psychology. For integration purposes, a scientific systemic model for the assessment of organisational behaviour and intangibles at work and for the intervention for the quality of human resources called the Human System Audit (HSA), will be introduced to align the topics of stress management and excellence. Core aspects of the HSA are based on the interaction of the organisational environment and structure with intangible psychological and psycho-social processes of individuals, groups, and of the organisational system that are taking place in an organisation and are impacting the quality of the human resources. Finally, conceptual innovative alignments between the psychological human resource perspective of the HSA and the direction and execution deployment factors of the new EFQM model will be exemplified. Part 2 thereby bridges the gap between conventional total management approaches based on excellence and organisational psychology perspectives for occupational stress and health.

Business Excellence and Human Systems Audit are two management approaches that look complex, difficult and time consuming to implement at a first glance. A means of addressing this perception is to use a software solution that “translates” the underlying methodology into easy to understand, self-reflecting questions and that then combines the individual data into organisation-wide consolidated anonymised results. This chapter explains the background and methodological approach for two tools—one that is based on the concepts of Business Excellence and the other reflecting a Stress Factor Assessment based on the Human Systems Audit. The chapter gives a concise overview of how to use these tools, what types of reports can be generated and how the two tools could be used synergistically for increased efficiency to develop a strategic growth path for any given organisation.

Part of the IMPRESS Solution is a set of self-learning and training materials, clustered in modules. The modules comprise background knowledge on stress and stressors as well as on resilience and resources. They also give an introduction to Excellence and self-assessment as a basis for identifying and reducing organisational stress factors. The modules addressing basic topics and individual approaches to stress management are set up as e-learning modules that are available over the Internet. The more detailed contents and corporate solutions are available as additional materials. This chapter gives a short overview of the modules, and provides recommendations on how to use the additional materials to develop customised solutions.

To validate the developed Stress Factor Assessment tool, the IMPRESS project piloted the tool and supporting materials with 18 external pilot users and collected their feedback to inform a final fine-tuning of the software, the underlying methods and training materials. Additionally, the project collected anonymised potential stressors and their real-life impact from around 1500 people to act as a population level reference database against which an individual could compare their own personal stressor profile. The collection of anonymised data from the assessment tools is an ongoing process feeding into a joint data repository used by two projects that are complimentary to IMPRESS, namely the SSTeMM project (Student Stress Training e-Mobile Management) and WLF (An Excellence based self-assessment for a positive work-life flow in times of remote working and social distancing). The continual growth of the data repository allows the individual user to apply some socio-demographic filters (like age group, gender, country, employment status, etc.) against which to benchmark their personal data without losing anonymity or statistical validity. This chapter provides an overview of the main results arising from the analysis of the 1500 anonymised data sets collected at the end of the IMPRESS project’s run-time. It then presents a number of case studies drawn from the 18 external pilots done as part of IMPRESS in several European countries. These case studies are divided into two main groups—“commercial organisations” and “educational institutions.”