Employees Crafting Favorable Working Conditions – Triple Loop Learning in the Higher Education Sector

The aim of this presentation is to offer new insights into how organizations may learn through the course of continuous and systematic interventions for mental health and wellbeing in the higher education sector. By ensuring that lessons, or experience, regarding organizational interventions, are harvested within the organization to support future change efforts the organization is building a learning capability (triple-loop-learning) (Von Thiele Schwarz et al., 2020). In this study, we address this triple loop learning through 1) exploring how the organizations have worked to improve both their intervention targets and their intervention work, and, 2) by looking deeper into the mechanisms behind transferring experiences from one intervention process to another, thus, continuously improving both the work environment and their intervention work.
The uniqueness of this study is twofold. 1) Researchers normally leave the organization after the evaluation of the change process is completed. The longitudinal process studied offers the opportunity to investigate a circular process of change as it plays out for the fourth and even 5th time. 2) The importance of learning and learning transfer are amplified in a sector where central stakeholders are employed on fixed term contracts experiencing extraordinary challenges with making sure valuable lessons are not lost while continuously operating to improve their work environment.