Building people and organisational excellence: the Start service excellence program

One of the largest companies for temporary labour in The Netherlands, Start, is implementing a service‐culture‐change program. This so‐called service excellence program has been initiated to help the organisation to become one of the leading companies in Europe with respect to service behaviour and service culture. After a short introduction of the company and the current situation in the Dutch labour market, this paper describes the reasons for adopting this program and how it is being implemented.