Thursday, October 31, 2019

Connecting imagination with impact

This is an excerpt of the latest post on President Feridun Hamdullahpur's blog.

Change and disruption is shifting our world and we must be prepared to face the challenges of our society and lead. I know what our University is capable of because of the students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members who have made Waterloo the dynamic institution it is today.

I am pleased to say that our new strategic plan – Connecting Imagination with Impact – has now been approved by both Senate and the Board of Governors. It will help us chart a new path forward through a disruptive and exciting future.

What has changed?

The new strategic plan is a departure from the plan that guided us from 2013 to 2018. You can see it in the vision statement, values, core themes and signature commitments. This isn’t because our last plan was not effective – it absolutely was – but the world is at a new inflection point. The world continues to evolve and we must approach the challenges ahead of us in a different way.

We are taking a unique, community-driven approach to creating a dynamic and flexible university that strives for local and global impact. Our strategic plan embraces Waterloo’s heritage of bold ambition and risk-taking. These elements can be found in our three impact themes:

• Developing talent for a complex future
• Advancing research for global impact
• Strengthening sustainable and diverse communities

Each of these themes are integral to the continued success of our institution. Our work in these three core areas will be distinct from other universities because we know that Waterloo’s unique culture operates best at the crossroads of talent, knowledge and community.

There are seven signature commitments to help guide us over the next five years.

The signature commitments are:

• Build on our global leadership in co-operative education to provide every undergraduate and graduate student with expanded options in experiential learning.
• Empower students to leverage diverse learning experiences by creating more flexible learning pathways.
• Be a global powerhouse for commercializing research, developing new enterprises and supporting business growth.
• Leverage Waterloo’s vast employer network and academic strengths to deliver a dynamic framework of learning-integrated work for professionals seeking to thrive and lead.
• Align our research strengths deliberately with important global challenges.
• Lead globally and nationally at the interface of society, health and technology.
• Create a supportive environment for living, learning, working and discovery that is worthy of our students and University community.

I encourage you to explore our new strategic plan, its themes, commitments, goals and objectives. We needed a plan to guide our university and prepare our students for an ever-changing world filled with challenges. We needed a plan that would see hurdles as opportunities to seize. This plan does just that.

Read the rest of the post on President Hamdullahpur's blog.

Minister of Labour announces funds for work-related injury prevention guide

The Centre of Research Expertise for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders (CRE-MSD) kicked off Global Ergonomics Month with a conference at which the Honourable Monte McNaughton, Minister of Labour, committed additional funds to support Ontario’s new MSD Prevention Guideline, which was created by CRE-MSD to help prevent musculoskeletal disorders.

CRE-MSD is based in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences and is committed to improving the understanding and prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (such as sprain and strain injuries to soft tissues in areas like the back, shoulder and wrist), which are the largest and most common workplace injuries. These disorders are preventable, and the hazards can be mitigated, yet musculoskeletal disorders continue to account for more than one-third of all lost-time workplace injuries in Ontario.

The Ontario Ministry of Labour originally funded the development and implementation of the MSD Prevention Guideline for Ontario in 2016, which resulted in the creation of a freely accessible stand-alone website to make the new Guideline content widely available and current to a range of workplace stakeholders and all sizes of businesses in Ontario.

This October, at a kickoff event for Global Ergonomics Month, more than 250 users from sectors and industry across Ontario came together to learn about new features of the Guideline and to hear a diversity of stakeholder experiences using the Guideline over the past year.

“The goal of this website is to provide useful and easy to access information on implementing MSD prevention activities for firms of different sizes and for people with different roles, such as a small business owner, a worker, a health and safety manager of a larger company,” said CRE-MSD Director and Kinesiology Professor Jack Callaghan. “Early adopters have reported strong results in injury reduction using the prevention program development tools and resources. Feedback on the Guideline has referred to it as the best comprehensive source on the prevention of MSD for information and resources available.”

Campaign month is almost over, but there's still time to give

A message from the University of Waterloo United Way campaign.

As we come to the end of campaign month, the University of Waterloo’s United Way campaign is at 73 percent of our $250,000 goal. We need your help to reach our campus goal and there’s still time to give.

If you attended one of the many campaign events – bake sales, silent auctions, and more – we thank you for your contributions. Supporting the campaign through on-campus events is a wonderful way to participate, but giving through payroll is an easy way to support your neighbours all year long.

A gift of even $10 a month makes an impact on your community and contributes to efforts to support youth, fight poverty, and build communities.

Whether you’ve already made a donation, or are thinking of making a donation, we sincerely thank you.

Save the date: staff consultations for Office 365 email investigation

• Monday, November 11, from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., Davis Centre (DC) 1304;
• Tuesday, November 19, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., DC 1304. 

The purpose of the Office 365 employee email initiative is to investigate the feasibility of moving staff, faculty, graduate and post-doctoral student email to the Office 365 (O365) cloud environment; and if it proves feasible, after consultation and feedback from the University of Waterloo community, to develop a recommendation for approval to proceed and an implementation plan. 

Members of project team will make a brief presentation, which will be followed by an opportunity to ask questions and discuss any component of the project. The objectives of the IST consultation sessions are: 

• to review the rationale for email in the cloud deployment;
• to obtain feedback so we can determine if we will proceed;
• to identify any gaps or areas we would need to address if we proceed. 

To learn more about the project and review the related project resources, please visit https://uwaterloo.ca/office-365-employee-email.