A typology of the requisite skills for financial services employees to enhance self-service technology usage : the case of the South African banking industry

Financial services institutions invest in self–service technologies for various reasons. These include the demands to rationalise costs and to meet the channel preferences of a „technology- savvy‟ client base. Some advantages of self–service technologies (“SSTs”) include the optimisation of staff activities and faster and improved customer services. Retail banks experience various migration-related costs when migrating customers to an SST environment; in terms of both branch infrastructure and the development of employee skills. Some customers continue to favour face-to-face service interactions, which necessitates an identification and evaluation of the necessary skills required by employees to facilitate this migration process. This study aims to both identify and classify the requisite skills needed by financial services professionals to enable them to migrate customers from physical to electronic service channels; including ATMs. With the appropriate training and competencies, employees can guide customers more effectively through the migration process in a non-judgemental way. This would, in turn, address the lack of self-service technology understanding among customers in the longer term. The lack of support from skilled service employees has, in many instances, led to customers paying higher transactional fees and experiencing inconvenience at physical channels, thereby resulting in overall lower self-service usage.Business ManagementDB

EngageMe: The Design and Implementation of a Reflective Tool for Evaluating Student Engagement

Recently, there has been a growing push to explore the potential of non-cognitive factors in helping students reach their fullest potential. Engagement, one predictor of student achievement, is such a factor. Because the conditions under which engagement is elicited may vary, EngageMe, a visualization tool, has been developed to assist instructors’ efforts to understand student engagement in the learning process. The application attempts to enhance traditional observation methods by utilizing electrodermal activity, a measure of physiological arousal, as a proximal indicator of engagement. An iterative, participatory design process was used to create prototypes of the EngageMe interface. The results of this design process, a study focused on the barriers to adoption of this kind of technology, as well as an exploratory case study are discussed. Finally, implications for future development are presented

Towards evidence based psychosocial interventions to support workers in reducing the health and wellbeing impacts of working shifts

Shift work is becoming more prevalent as a working pattern, with current literature suggesting that working shifts may negatively impact on many aspects of health and wellbeing. Following requests from organisations for public health support in this area, a systematic review was completed to identify psychosocial interventions that may support shift workers. The systematic review highlighted the paucity of psychosocial interventions that have been developed for shift workers, which led to the development of this research study. This qualitative research investigated the challenges of shift work and health and wellbeing issues for staff and their managers working within an aeronautical organisation. Thematic analysis identified three themes and five sub-themes. The themes explored issues around isolation, gendered health norms and who is taking responsibility for the health of the shift workers. Potential psychosocial interventions that may support the shift workers are explored from a health psychology prospectiv

The Role of Trust Perceptions and Propensity to Trust in Applicants' Experience of Recruitment and Selection

The role of organisational trustworthiness, propensity to trust and distrust was examined in the context of recruitment and selection. Specifically this research aimed to explore applicant experiences of selection as a context for trust. Because there has previously been little work looking systematically at the factorial and construct validity of propensity to trust this study also analysed responses to nine previously published propensity-to-trust scales using a combination of factor analytic, regression and content analyses. Findings supported the idea that propensity to trust scales are multidimensional and reflect aspects of both personality and experience of different trust contexts. The implication of this is that while use of propensity to trust is theoretically justified, checks on dimensionality should be carried out to account for different facets of this construct. The second study used the NEO propensity to trust scale (Costa & McCrae, 1985) as part of a survey looking into research degree applicant's experience of the recruitment and selection process during the post application and post interview stage. In addition to propensity to trust and propensity to distrust playing different role during attraction, influencing the decision of applicants to pursue a vacancy, propensity to distrust also appeared to regulate the relationship between selection justice, organisational trustworthiness and outcome intentions. Evidence from template analysis suggested ways in which justice and trust are manifested during the selection process, but based on a triangulated view, questions about what or whom applicants trust may need further examination and consideration in future research

DIVERSE LEARNERS IN INCLUSION CLASSROOMS AND THEIR STANDARDIZED ACHIEVEMENT TEST

Special Education services has opened many opportunities for students with disabilities and special needs. Disabled students were previously educated in a separate facility barring them from educational and social interactions with their non-disabled peers. Disable students are now entering their community school and receiving services through an I.E.P. (Individual Education Plan). The primary purpose of this study is to understand the impact of Standard Achievement Tests of disabled students that learn in a co-taught general education classroom with a regular teacher and a special education teacher. This study will be valuable in revealing the academic achievement of students that have an I.E. P