3 HEI enhances quality and well-being

The evaluation area III assesses the functioning and development of the quality system and how the system is used in strategic management. The procedures used to support the competence development and well-being of the staff are also assessed.

Based on the audit team’s evaluation, the evaluation area III is at the level good.

The audit team identified the following as the main strengths and recommendations:

Strengths

  • Hanken has a considerable, collegiate and well-developed quality culture, which is deeply embedded in the different actors’ and stakeholders’ mindsets and frequently alluded to as the “Hanken spirit”.
  • The creation of the Hanken Teaching Lab offering a broad range of pedagogical and digital support services for Hanken teachers has been a success. The Lab shows responsiveness to teachers’ needs and a willingness to experiment. It has made impressive achievements in just a short period of time.

Recommendations

  • Hanken should develop instruments and systematic processes for scanning and monitoring the institution’s operational environment and strategic horizons and for linking these to the PDCA cycle.
  • Hanken should work on a stronger alignment of its quality and management systems, in the way the systems are presented as well as in practice. Quality management instruments could better feed into annual planning and strategy development.
  • Hanken should devise a mechanism for determining the quality system’s effectiveness beyond the regular check-ups via externally driven quality assessments.
  • Hanken needs to find a way of identifying and supporting individual needs with regard to well-being support and staff development, and then to find a way of addressing them without succumbing to particularism and intensifying inequalities.