Tine Silfvander, Shop Steward for the technical and administrative staff at CBS, explains that career opportunities are becoming a part of CBS’ strategy.

“Including career opportunities in the strategy is plain sailing under the topic recruitment. Whereas we have talked about career opportunities for VIP personnel before, talking about careers for TAP staff is new. So, it’s will be very exciting to see how that will be dealt with at CBS,” she says.

Tine Silfvander explains that the implementation group currently working on the strategy must now consider how they want to implement this focus area.

Already at the meeting, it was proposed that career opportunities could become a mandatory part of the appraisal interviews, but it is too early to say whether that will be written in the strategy, she says.

“Careers are the management’s responsibility, so it’s obvious we have a problem. Because careers not only concern getting more responsibility and managing others, and we certainly don’t need more managers. Instead, we need to ask individual TAP employees what careers are to them. Careers mean different things to different individuals,” she says.

Ole Helmersen, the Shop Steward for VIP personnel, explains that two main topics in the job satisfaction survey were discussed by the General Consultation Committee: Career opportunities and work-life balance.

“After the meeting, we agreed to continue the discussion in March, as we are now awaiting input from the departments and administrative units based on their individual surveys. From there, a process can begin concerning how to solve the issues,” he says and continues:

“We will do our part to keep the Senior Management’s nose to the grindstone to solve these problems, and we will also suggest possible solutions. So, we haven’t finished discussing the results of the job satisfaction survey by a long shot.”

CBS WIRE has asked President of CBS Nikolaj Malchow-Møller for a comment on the results of the job satisfaction survey. However, it has not been possible to obtain a reply.

Minimize sick leave

In the job satisfaction survey, sick leave had increased from six to nine percent, and 46 people replied that their sick leave was due to high demands and workloads. Therefore, Tine Silfvander would like to find ways of minimizing sick leave related to working conditions.

“We can’t eliminate sick leave entirely, but we can make sure that sick leave due to working conditions is at an absolute minimum or nonexistent. I know that the Senior Management takes these surveys very seriously, so I expect they will study the issues reported in detail,” she says.

VIP personnel are set to get a new job structure in 2020, which is closely connected to recruitment and career options, explains Ole Helmersen, who wants to take this topic further with HSU.

“The revised job structure is very new, and will cause some problems that we must examine and find solutions to both with HSU and the Academic Council,” he says.

TAP employees need more attention

In general, both Tine Silfvander and Ole Helmersen are satisfied with the results from this year’s job satisfaction survey. But more can be done.

“I’m satisfied. It could have been much worse, and there’s a slight improvement compared to the survey from 2016. But there is still room for improvement. I generally think that TAP needs to be encouraged a bit by their leaders and the management,” she says and continues:

“The Senior Management knows my opinion on this, and I would be pleased if more was done for the technical and administrative staff. A special greeting from the Senior Management or an employee day where some awesome persons are invited to inspire the employees. That could be a start.”