Our university is large, multi-disciplinary, geographically dispersed and rapidly changing. Many individuals and teams identify primarily with their most immediate unit or discipline, and only secondarily with their larger unit, their site, and the university as a whole. The more employees identify as part of the wider U of M community, the greater their engagement, pride, productivity and desire to collaborate.

We are committed to increasing the connectedness between faculties, units and departments and will continue to do so by building on the many marketing and communications efforts already underway at this institution. We will continue university-wide alliances, such as the shared leadership model of the Outstanding Workplace Initiative, and the linkage of university-wide OWI actions with unit workplace enhancements.

Many employees may not be aware of the work being done by other units. We will support increased collaboration and cooperation among departments through building additional multi-departmental information sharing mechanisms. U of M is also moving forward with academic restructuring and clustering processes to increase cooperation and collaboration.

We also will more clearly define and communicate our expectations for providing excellent service to each other as collaborators and internal customers, and will continue to provide learning opportunities to support meeting those expectations.