Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Board of Governors approves changes to employee benefit plan

The Board of Governors have approved a range of changes to employee benefits designed to improve the competitiveness of the University’s extended health benefit against our comparator institutions.

The changes include medical plan improvements such as the removal of the requirement for doctors' notes for some paramedical services, an increase to the annual plan maximum for psychology and emergency out-of-country coverage, an expansion of practitioners within some paramedical categories, and the addition of coverage for continuous glucose monitors and in-vitro fertilization.

Also included in the changes is the implementation of new prescription drug management programs: mandatory generic substitution requirement; Canada Life’s Health Case Management (HCM) and SMART programs.

The governors accepted these changes based on recommendations from the Pension & Benefits Committee, who recently hosted four public information sessions detailing the changes. If you are a plan member who missed these sessions, a copy of the presentation and a video recording of one of the four presentations is available on the Holistic Benefits Review working group website.

Human Resources is now working with benefit plan provider Canada Life to implement the board-approved changes, and further communications to plan members are planned, including revised benefit booklets and edits to the HR website.

These changes go into effect on May 1, 2021. You can review the frequently asked questions page on the Holistic Benefits Working group website and submit any questions you may have online.    

IST moving support ticket management to Jira Service Management

A message from Information Systems & Technology (IST).

In spring 2020, Information Systems & Technology (IST) began a pilot of the Jira Service Management (JSM) platform (previously called Jira Service Desk) to assess and evaluate its effectiveness as a support ticket management and integrated IT service management (ITSM) solution. From the start of this pilot to present, more than 20,000 support tickets have been processed by IST and campus partners, including Arts Computing Office (ACO), and many academic support units helped to set-up and test the overall system, such as the Secretariat and Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE). Over this time, IST also engaged users of the current ticketing system, Request Tracker (RT), to learn more about their ticket/request tracking needs and use of the existing system.

Based on the success of this pilot, growing interest and demand for the platform, and the significant adoption of Atlassian products across campus, IST purchased Jira Service Management (Cloud) with licenses to support expanded use of the service. Since then, both IST and non-IST areas (by request) have migrated a number of their RT queues to JSM to continue the exploration and testing of included features.

What's next?

This work is going well and IST will begin to move additional IST-owned RT queues to Jira Service Management.  

What does this mean to me?

Increasingly, support tickets submitted to IST will be processed through Jira Service Management (instead of Request Tracker). As a requestor, you may notice:

• Notifications related to support requests being handled through JSM will come from jira@uwaterloo.atlassian.net instead of rt@rt.uwaterloo.ca (applies to IST and non-IST queues that have migrated).
• Links to Jira Service Management forms from the IST Service Catalogue.
• New support request forms created for common service requests:
  • Adding devices to the Wi-Fi allow list
  • Service Catalogue feedback
  • Atlassian requests
  • New mailing list requests
  • Teams Live Event support/request
  • Qualtrics
  • IST Knowledge Base updates/changes 

Accessing the Jira Service Management Portal

You will be able to access these new forms and/or view your submitted tickets via the Jira Service Management Portal.

Ready to try Jira Service Management? 

IST has met with over 30 groups one-on-one to understand their needs, provide a tailored demo, and answer questions. Submit a request to have us come and talk to you about JSM, or to have your RT queues migrated. 

Additional resources

Visit our Jira Service Management website to learn more about this service, and look for more information on a second, expanded pilot IST will be launching during the upcoming spring term. 

To attract young people to a job, tell them why it matters

This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

A group of researchers from the University of Waterloo have determined that providing meaningful work and outlining it in a job posting can help employers develop a competitive advantage because students and young people in general tend to become more interested in the role.

Detailed postings are especially beneficial for organizations that are still developing brand recognition or working with a smaller budget.

“Job postings with student and youth-oriented signals, such as links to meaningful work, enhance job attraction by reframing how young people think about roles,” says Judene Pretti, director of Waterloo’s Work-Learn Institute (WxL). “While this isn’t a call for organizations to change their fundamental values to improve their pool of applicants, it’s definitely a compelling new insight into what organizations might have previously believed would attract the next generation to job opportunities.”

Employers look to recruit talented young people, but many postings don’t necessarily reflect their interests. “Signaling theory” suggests aligning postings with young people’s interests enhance attractiveness of to the job.

Results from the study confirm that “student-oriented job advertisements” were found to be more attractive than traditional job advertisements (which generally feature location, expected tasks, basic description of the organization).

The research looked beyond factors such as pay and location as part of the postings, instead looking at symbolic aspects of the role. These symbolic aspects included the opportunity to learn new things, connection to academic studies and career path and the ability to make a positive impact.

The more detailed the plan about the symbolic aspects, the higher the application quality received from co-op students.

As part of the study, researchers surveyed co-op math and engineering students from a Canadian university in the process of interviewing for a role. The students responded to a hypothetical job posting.

Implications from the research conclude that employers and educators who support students and young people can benefit by understanding what they are looking for in work experiences. When understood, employers can better design and promote meaningful work.

“Signaling ‘student-oriented’ job opportunities enhances job attractiveness in work-integrated learning programs” can be read in Higher Education Research and Development.

Registration opens for 2021 Teaching and Learning Conference

A message from the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE).

Registration is now open for the 12^th annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference taking place on April 28 and April 29, 2021. Because the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 conference, we will be proceeding with the theme of “Learning Through Assessment” that we had planned for that year. This year’s conference will be held entirely online.

We are excited to welcome Dr. Kay Sambell, Independent Consultant and Visiting Professor of Assessment for Learning at the University of Sunderland, and Dr. Sally Brown, Independent Consultant in Learning, Teaching and Assessment and Emerita Professor at Leeds Beckett University, as our returning keynote speakers. Additionally, we are thrilled to announce that Dr. Norm Vaughan, Professor in the Department of Education at Mount Royal University, will be joining us this year as our third keynote speaker. Finally, the Igniting Our Practice plenary session will feature three inspirational University of Waterloo professors – Dr. Robert Hill and Dr. Brenda Lee (Physics), and Dr. Veronica Austen (English) – demonstrating a successful instructional approach to showcase some of the excellent remote teaching happening on our campus.

The registration deadline is Sunday, April 26, 2021.