Dear Colleagues:
Signs of autumn—shorter days, cooler temperatures—are gradually more visible, and our faculty and students have successfully pushed through mid-term assignments and exams. In my fourth month on the job, I continue meeting with individuals to learn about their areas of focus, and I remain impressed by all that has been accomplished in the campus' short history. And yet, as you know, there’s still much more to be done to move UC Merced from a start-up entity to a mature research university.
In the months ahead, my attention will increasingly focus on strategies to secure UC Merced's niche in the competitive research university environment and to provide the fiscal, physical and human resources such strategies will require. At the same time, we must continue to focus on operational challenges which, if allowed to linger, can dampen the creativity and drive that enabled UC Merced to grow and prosper against great odds and that will be needed in vast abundance in the years to come.
Update on Process-Improvement Initiative
On the operational level, there is a clear need to address a cluster of challenges that you have identified as important for improving your daily work lives and organizational effectiveness. As you may recall, we solicited your ideas regarding processes you find to be the most burdensome, and changes you believe would provide the most impact for the campus. We received 50 thoughtful responses from faculty, staff and administrators, and these responses will be extremely valuable in creating a process-improvement action plan.
While some concerns focused on specific areas (for instance, purchasing and travel reimbursements), others cut across all university areas, including the need to eliminate cumbersome paper-based processes and the need to improve communication throughout the organization. Over the next few weeks, I will review the findings with my senior team, including possible steps for managing the variety of concerns raised and, based on that review, create a process-improvement action plan to share with the broader campus community.
Organizational Communication Survey
In addition to eliminating paper-based processes, almost all respondents noted the need to improve communication and information sharing across the university. In previous campus messages, I've talked about the importance of strengthening organizational communication as we grow. This letter — a new monthly initiative on my behalf — is partially in response to your understandable desire for consistent and timely communication from administrative leadership. But we need to do much more as we seek to ensure that appropriate information is shared across our university.
To help focus our efforts, I invite you to provide more specific feedback on the effectiveness of internal organizational communication at UC Merced. Please take a few minutes to complete the anonymous survey by Monday, Nov. 7. Your input will help us to shape an internal communication action plan.
Update on Space-Allocation Processes
Our campus has many critical space needs, and the shortage of on-campus space means that difficult decisions must be made regarding the best uses of the space currently available to us. Based on your desire for transparent decision-making criteria for making space-allocation decisions for administrative and support staff, we created preliminary decision-making criteria and sought your feedback.
Based on this feedback, I can now report there is general agreement that priority for on-campus space should be given to faculty and other instructional personnel, and to administrative and support-staff whose jobs require frequent face-to-face, on-campus interactions with faculty and students or who are otherwise frequently required to be on campus for the maintenance of buildings and grounds, public safety and other critical services. Respondents also agreed that the following factors should be considered in determining whether to locate a unit or functions off campus:
- Service delivery will be minimally compromised if delivered from an off-campus location.
- There is suitable off-campus space for the person, unit or function.
- Costs of off-campus relocation are low in comparison to the costs of relocating other persons, units or functions.
- The frequency of need to commute to campus is low in comparison to the frequency of other persons, units or functions.
- The importance of physical proximity to coworkers with respect to efficiency, effectiveness and collegiality will be taken into consideration when possible.
Respondents also offered a number of thoughtful suggestions for improving operational efficiency in a distributed campus environment — for instance, conferencing software, chat rooms, online document storage and retrieval system, and Web-based business transactions. Several respondents asked the university to actively review the possibility of telecommuting as a possible partial solution to space-shortage challenges.
With decision-making criteria now in place for administrative and support-staff space allocation, UC Merced will soon launch a review of the space needs and assignment of its administrative and support functions. This initially will involve a self-assessment and review of the space currently assigned to administrative and support staff and a prioritized list of additional space needs, to be carried out by each division headed by a vice chancellor, each school headed by a dean and managers of other areas such as IT and library. When these are completed in November, space-planning staff will review the results and make recommendations to campus leadership regarding the assignment of space on and off campus consistent with our new decision-making criteria.
Founders Day
One of the more light-hearted, and enjoyable, aspects of building a university from scratch entails the establishment of campus traditions. Some are already near and dear to our hearts, such as the annual bridge crossing of freshmen in the fall and the same crossing but in the opposite direction by graduates at commencement in the spring. The annual Staff Appreciation Week is another time-honored tradition.
Tomorrow, Oct. 25, is UC Merced's Founders Day, which marks nine years since the official campus groundbreaking took place under a large white tent in the middle of a golf course, where the campus is located today. We still have staff who organized and participated in that event with founding Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, and I invite you to visit the UC Merced Facebook page and post your favorite memory of that day in 2002 when California made history by establishing its first research campus in 40 years. For those who were not here in 2002, please enjoy some pictures and Carol's inaugural remarks.
As always, I welcome your feedback on this message and any other communication you receive from me. Thank you for all you do to make UC Merced the success story it will continue to become.
Sincerely,
Dorothy Leland
Chancellor
