Stakeholder involvement, benchmarking for excellence key to institution`s performance

Graduates celebrating their achievements. Photo: Courtesy.

Achieving excellence is a result of high performance throughout the entire organization or country’s economic sectors.

Quality management and leadership especially in institutions of higher learning form the basis of an organization’s level of excellence with crucial support from all stakeholder groups.

One of the ways through which organisations can embrace excellence and achieve their mandate is by engaging stakeholders, doing a competitor analysis and benchmarking, an important process for self-evaluation and self-improvement.

Benchmarking for excellence

Studies have revealed that a number of universities around the world have embraced the concept of benchmarking with the sole aim of achieving academic excellence.

 The USA was the first country to introduce benchmarking processes in the early 1990s and, also, established the National Association of Colleges.

Since then, organisations that seek to learn from super performers in the same sector have to embrace collaborative comparison of practice and performance.

The article titled; “Practical considerations when using benchmarking for accountability in higher education,” published in the journal Innovative Higher Education brings out the issue of benchmarking.

 First, the institution in need should identify the problem area. Then identify another institution with impeccable performance in the same area.

Lastly, a team of experts has to be identified to learn from the exemplary institution, with a focus on how their success formula leads to outstanding results.

This opportunity enables an organization to learn best practices, identify, establish and achieve exceptional standards.

The main idea behind ranking – a very popular process worldwide – is benchmarking and accepting to be compared with your peers.

Any organization that seeks greatness and more customers should be conscious about rankings, and the starting point is establishing benchmarking processes.

Stakeholder involvement

The Baldrige Excellence Framework 2017-2018 recognizes that valuing people is core and goes beyond the workforce to include anyone who has a stake in the organization such as customers, community members and groups affected by the organization’s actions.

Organizations keen on achieving excellence should therefore continuously explore stakeholder needs and perspectives.

Stakeholders of higher learning institutions range from students to their future employers.

Graduates, on one hand, should, at the end of a skills acquisition period, be fit for a purpose and be ready to offer high levels of capability at the workplace.

Employers should also offer deep levels of job satisfaction, respect, remuneration and recognition. What then should be the contribution of institutions of higher learning?

Technical and Vocational Education and Training Authority (TVETA) encourages institutions to develop a demand-driven curriculum informed by the country`s needs.

One way to achieve this is through research to find out how courses offered position graduates in the job market.

The Kenya Institute of Management (KIM) set out on such a study through the 2019 Alumni Tracer Survey with a total of 587 alumni of KIM spanning 20 years from 1998 to 2018.

The findings were that 67 per cent of our former students acquired skills that helped them get a suitable job. Another 87 per cent attested that they learnt skills that effectively helped them execute work-related activities.

The place of institutions in setting up individuals for a lifetime of job satisfaction and fulfilment and forming the foundation of progressive organisations is therefore pivotal.

And as the former US First lady Abigail Adams put it “Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardour and attended to with diligence.”

Therefore, there’s the need for learning institutions to step up their standards and quality of education through stakeholder involvement in order to match existing market needs.