More Organizational Excellence: Chancellor Katehi formally announces split of the Offices of the Chancellor and Provost  and a savings of $3.4 million in administrative costs.

Dateline staff

UC Davis has embarked on another key component of Organizational Excellence, by asking every employee on the Davis campus to identify inefficiencies and redundancies in central, division, school, college and department level processes.

The information is being gathered via an online survey. Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi announced the survey and provided the link in a May 25 e-mail to all faculty and staff, excluding UC Davis Health System and UC Davis Medical Center employees.

“Our staff work incredibly hard, are smart and committed to doing the right things in the right ways,” the chancellor said in her e-mail announcing the survey. “But often times, we do not take the time to critically examine the way we work. We accept bureaucracy, unnecessary rules and inefficient processes as just being the conditions of our work.”

With significant reductions in resources, this is no longer acceptable, she said. “This is a time to do away with unnecessary bureaucracy, redundancies and inefficiencies so that we can all be more successful in managing our work.”

The anonymous survey should take no longer than five minutes of your time, the chancellor said. The survey is open until next Thursday (June 2).

Three questions ask for a rating of 1 to 5, regarding the efficiencies of administrative processes at various levels. The survey also includes open-ended questions asking employees to identify specific processes that would most benefit from redesign and improvement.

Two questions deal with informed risk taking. One of these questions is open-ended: “We often hear feedback that we are too risk averse as an institution. Please identify specific areas where you believe we should evaluate our level of risk tolerance.”

Finally, the survey asks: What work (e.g., processes, procedures, reports, etc.) is currently being done that you believe is unnecessary and-or does not serve the UC Davis mission?

The Organizational Excellence team plans to post the survey results on the OE website. “The results of this survey will be used to help drive our future success,” Katehi said, “and we will be transparent in our report back to you about what you have said, but also what we plan to do about it.”

Survey link.