Work Life Workgroup Update President Eli Capilouto

The following message from President Capilouto was sent to all of campus on Friday, June 10, 2022.

Dear Campus Community,

In April, I communicated with campus that a Work Location Workgroup was charged with researching and exploring ideas as well as providing recommendations on how work location can support our institutional mission and efforts to advance the state — our North Star guiding everything we do.

We are a residential campus. We must — and we will — meet the needs of our community while focusing on this critical goal. At the same time, as the workplace changes and the needs of our people continue to shift, we want to support flexibility while consistently and appropriately providing service and support to our campus community.

To that end, a steering committee was established to lead this initiative. Three workstreams — market research, exploration and guidelines and processes — were formed with broad campus representation, ensuring voices were heard among members from the provost’s area, research, Student Government Association, Staff Senate, University Senate, Student Success and more.

While the market research and exploration workstreams have identified and benchmarked UK against dozens of peer institutions, as well as engaged in dialogues with experts across campus, the guidelines and processes team will now begin their work with an eye toward making recommendations for the upcoming fiscal year.

The steering committee and workstreams, now halfway through their timeline, have conceptualized what the future of work could look like at UK and examined what infrastructure needs to be in place to support success in new, innovative ways of working.

These questions and ideas will continually evolve in a post-pandemic world.

And they are the ideas we must pursue if we want to continue our mission as Kentucky’s flagship, land-grant university.

As this process progresses, current transitional guidelines will remain in place. You can find those guidelines and procedures here.

We will, of course, provide updates with the community throughout this process as necessary. It is important to note that UK HealthCare will maintain separate guidelines.

I want to thank the steering committee, as well as the more than 30 employees serving on workstreams, for their continued commitment to and support for innovative and thoughtful thinking in this endeavor.

Eli Capilouto 

President