Editor’s Note: The information published in this story is accurate at the time of publication. Always refer to uab.edu/uabunited for UAB’s current guidelines and recommendations relating to COVID-19.
President Ray Watts and senior leaders addressed questions, comments and concerns from faculty and staff and shared updates on planning for a full return to campus during a virtual town hall April 7.
“We’re excited about the opportunity to be able to return this summer and then in full force for the fall,” Watts said. As explained in this Reporter story March 25, many of the faculty and staff who began working remote or hybrid in March 2020 will return to full-time work on campus by the beginning of the summer semester, and the remainder are expected to return to campus by fall. This two-phase reentry plan is a flexible solution that will enable students to return to full-time classroom instruction during the summer and fall terms, as directed by the UA System Board of Trustees.
| This article summarizes comments made and questions answered during the Apr. 7 town hall. An upcoming article will provide answers to questions that could not be addressed live due to time constraints. |
“This return-to-work transition plan is a work in progress,” Watts emphasized. “We are asking supervisors to work with employees and their units, and the leadership continue to get input from everyone — all of our constituents.”
The return is “made possible because we now have over 19,000-plus of our employees vaccinated,” Watts said, along with other promising data and trends tracked by public-health and infectious-diseases experts at UAB. This information was shared throughout the presentation.
Before and during the town hall leaders received “a lot of questions about continuing with remote [work] versus coming back to campus,” in addition to “questions about vaccines and how we are going to handle safety measures,” Watts said. Many of these questions were addressed during the town hall (as described below). Those questions that could not be answered live due to time constraints will be answered next week in the Reporter.
Scroll down to read the complete summary or use the links below to jump to specific topics
Mask requirement continues at UAB
COVID-19 testing for surgical cases
UAB-St. Vincent’s Alliance update
About 80% of UAB employees vaccinated
Know of an employee having trouble scheduling a vaccine appointment? Here’s what to do.
Help fellow employees who may have trouble with technology
COVID-19 testing, case management for employees with symptoms continues
Concerns about returning to work
COVID-19 infection data and trends at UAB and in Alabama
HR gathering concerns around reentry plans
See UAB United for latest updates to safety protocols
Coping with anxiety around reentry
Three feet of social distancing instead of six feet
Domestic and international travel
Incident Command Committee update
Changes to Healthcheck requirement coming
Active Sentinel Testing continues through April 22
Facilities and cleaning protocols
Research labs and social distancing
Mask requirement continues at UAB
The statewide mask mandate issued by Governor Kay Ivey is set to expire April 9, but has been replaced by a recommendation to contine wearing one thorugh May 5. Whether or not this mandate is prolonged, UAB will continue to require that masks be worn at all times, indoors and out, Watts said. “We’re going to continue to have the compliance be at 100%,” he said.
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UAB Medicine update
Reid Jones, CEO of UAB Medicine, said that University Hospital and Highlands Hospital are very full and that faculty and staff “have been very busy.”
The number of patients being treated for COVID-19 “has been decreasing pretty substantially,” Jones said. On April 6, 2021, there were 67 patients in the hospital who were either COVID-positive or recovering from COVID-19. “We’re down quite a bit from almost 300 that we had in the hospital in the early part of January,” Jones said.
“Also good news is that we have far fewer of our employees that are out as a result of COVID,” Jones said. “As of yesterday [April 6], I believe we only had five employees that were actually out of work.”
University Hospital has reinstated block time for surgeries, which has allowed the hospital to do more cases, Jones said.
Return-to-work planning
Return-to-work planning for UAB Medicine employees is ongoing, Jones said. “We’ve had a lot of success with some of our groups that are working remotely, and we’ve asked our managers to develop plans that will ensure that we are hitting the productivity levels that we need, but also making sure that our employees who are working off-campus can still feel connected to the university and be a big part of what we’re doing here,” he said. “We’re very close to having plans finalized for all those people that will be able to continue to work off campus.”
COVID-19 testing and surgical procedures
Questions had been submitted before the town hall asking if UAB Medicine would continue to require COVID-19 testing prior to surgical procedures, Jones said. “The answer is yes for right now, but we’ve developed a multidisciplinary team led by our infectious diseases physicians [and] many other physicians,” he said. “They have actually done a pilot at the Kirklin Clinic endoscopy clinic. We’re taking a look at this and will be making a decision in terms of how to move forward shortly.”
Patient visitors and masking
Other questions asked about patient visitors and mask-wearing by visitors. “We’re following the Alabama Department of Public Health guidelines and allowing two family members, caregivers, per day in the room with the patient under normal circumstances,” Jones said. Some employees “are concerned about some of our visitors who aren’t wearing masks,” he added. “You know, people are people and in spite of our efforts to educate and talk to people we are seeing some people that are not abiding by that. So it’s important that we all remind them that they must pull their masks up, they must wear their masks — it protects them, it protects our patients and it protects our staff. So let’s all try to be diligent about that.”
UAB-St. Vincent’s Alliance update
The initiatives “with the alliance with our St. Vincent’s partners are moving along at a brisk pace, with a lot of groups working together to look for opportunities to do things together that hopefully will provide a better service either administratively or help our patient flow between the organizations,” Jones said. “In the not too-distant future we’ll be able to report back some of the work that has been done by our task forces within the alliance.”
Reopening bridges
Several questions were submitted asking when the bridges between UAB and Children’s of Alabama facilities could be reopened. “We would love to have them open,” Jones said. “Particularly the bridge between the Women and Infants Facility and Children’s Hospital. We’re working with Children’s and have an ongoing dialogue. But until everyone gets comfortable [with policies on screening visitors] we’re going to have to keep that bridge closed. Hopefully in the next few weeks or months we’ll be able to address that.”
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Vaccines
Vaccines strongly encouraged
“We strongly encourage everyone to be vaccinated,” Watts said. “We know that it prevents severe illness and death. This is not a cold or the regular flu. Over 555,000 Americans have died and over 10,000 Alabamians have died.” The great news, Watts added, is that those numbers are reducing rapidly as more and more Americans are vaccinated.
About 80% of UAB employees vaccinated
At UAB, “about 80% of our employees have been vaccinated now,” said Sarah Nafziger, M.D., vice president for Clinical Support Services for UAB Medicine and director of Employee Health. “That’s just a huge relief to me as a leader for Employee Health and for our entire staff,” she said. “We’re so grateful that we had the opportunity to make that happen for you all.”
There are still some employees who are waiting on their vaccines who are within the 90-day window after having had an active case of COVID-19, Nafziger said. “We’re working on getting those individuals scheduled just as quickly as we can.”
In addition, “we know we have some people who were a little hesitant about signing up and may have wanted to wait and see what happens,” Nafziger said. “But by and large, for most employees who sign up for the vaccine, we are able to get you scheduled within a week.”
Know of an employee having trouble scheduling a vaccine appointment? Here’s what to do.
There may be “some pockets out there, and you may know of an employee in your area who is having trouble getting scheduled,” Nafziger said. “If you know about those [instances], please report those to us. We have an email account: employeehealth@uabmc.edu. Just let us know about those so we can work those exceptions and make sure that we get everybody vaccinated who wants to be vaccinated.”
How the vaccines are working
“We are really pleased with the function of the vaccine,” Nafziger said. “Just recently some studies that came out show at the six-month mark that the vaccines are still working.” Many people have wrongly concluded that this means the vaccines are only good for six months, Nafziger said. “That’s not what the studies are saying,” she said. “We know that it’s good for at least six months. It may be much longer, but we’re still studying that to see how long it’s going to last. We just don’t know yet, but we know it’s at least six months, so that’s very good news from those studies that we’ve seen.”
Vaccines for students
“Now that we’ve been cleared by the Alabama Department of Public Health, we’ve been able to open up [vaccination] to individuals down to age 16,” Nafziger said. “That means we are able to open up to our students, and we began vaccinating them this week. Students are signing up to be vaccinated and receiving their vaccine now.”
Many people have asked her about students who live outside the Birmingham area and how they will handle receiving the second dose of the vaccine, Nafziger said. “We don’t want that to delay their vaccine,” she said. “We don’t want them to wait until they go home to get their first dose. They can go ahead and get their first dose with us. We will give them a vaccine card that the CDC prints. And wherever they live, guess what, there are Pfizer vaccine sites all over the country. There’s a website called Vaccinefinder.org. Students can use that website to find their second dose.
“Certainly they’re welcome to come back to us to get that second dose. We are happy to do it, especially for all our students who live locally. But we don’t want this to be a barrier to students who may live somewhere else where it would be inconvenient for them to get back to us for their second dose.”
Help fellow employees who may have trouble with technology
“One of the things I’m going to ask you today is if you are watching this town hall and if you know somebody in your area who may have a little bit of difficulty with technology, ask them, ‘Hey, have you signed up for your vaccine?’” Nafziger said. “If they haven’t signed up, offer to help them…. Managers, especially, please reach out to employees in your area [and] make sure that everybody has had an opportunity to sign up that wants to.”
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Employee Health
COVID-19 testing, case management for employees with symptoms continues
The significant drop in COVID-19 diagnoses is wonderful news, “but we still do have some cases out there,” Nafziger said. “We have people who are testing positive, and we have people reporting exposures. So I just wanted to remind you that we are still offering testing and we are still managing the employees who have COVID. We want to encourage you to report through Healthcheck and to test through us. The beauty of that is that way we can manage you very aggressively from the beginning. Our Employee Health physicians and nurses will be calling you, managing your case and getting you referred into all the wonderful resources that we have available at UAB Medicine to take care of you quickly so that we can avoid you having the terrible illness and long, prolonged course that a lot of people have seen…. That’s a service that UAB has provided for you, and we want to make sure that you access it if you need it.”
Quarantine after exposure
“A lot of people have asked me about quarantining for exposure” to someone with COVID-19, Nafziger said. “This is something that’s a little bit different depending on where you work in the university.” Employees who work in a clinical setting who have a COVID-19 exposure are not required to quarantine “because that’s part of our jobs,” Nafziger said. “If you are a non-clinical person and have an exposure you don’t have to quarantine… if you are fully vaccinated or if you have had a COVID-19 infection within 90 days.” This is a change from previous requirements, Nafizger said. “That’s a nice benefit of being vaccinated.”
Concerns about returning to work
“I know a lot of people are nervous about coming back to campus,” Nafziger said. “I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be safe, and I’m really worried about it.’ And I want to tell you and assure you that the Employee Health team, and me personally, we take your health very seriously and I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you today and endorsing this plan for a full return to campus if I didn’t feel like it was safe.
“We’ve thought through the safety guidelines. We still have a lot of safety measures in place with our masking and with cleaning and social distancing. And we feel confident that we can do this safely. A lot of our employees on the Medicine side… we’ve been coming to work ever since COVID began and we figure out how to do this safely, and we feel that we can do this with the entire campus.”
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COVID-19 infection data and trends at UAB and in Alabama
“I’m here to talk to you a little bit about the data that we… typically look at in our regular COVID monitoring” as part of UAB’s Incident Command Committee, said UAB epidemiologist Suzanne Judd, Ph.D.
Judd began with a slide (shown below) that projects the number of people in Alabama with COVID-19 immunity from infection and from vaccination over time.
“Herd immunity is the amount of immunity we need in the population in order to stop a virus or bacteria from spreading,” Judd said. That number varies wildly for various bacteria and viruses, she explained. “For COVID, most scientists guess that’s about 70% of the population. To be conservative, we looked at 72% of the population, which is 3.5 million Alabamans [who] need to have the vaccine. That’s the magic number we’re hoping to get to.”
Based on a number of assumptions, “it looks like we could reach some level of population immunity that provides a real slowdown of the virus as late as early fall and as early as, probably, right now,” Judd said.
Community case trends in the state and at UAB show a rapid drop in cases after the early January peaks, Judd said. “This could happen for a lot of reasons: people are no longer getting together for the holidays, people have changed their behavior or we’re reaching some level of population immunity” that slows the spread of the virus. That last scenario is “quite possible, given the number of COVID cases that we’ve seen here at UAB,” Judd said. “We’re going to continue to monitor these data trends…. You’ll notice I haven’t used any words that indicate this virus is going away or that it will be eradicated. We will likely continue to monitor cases as a public health community for the foreseeable future.”
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COVID-19 variants
Question submitted online
What is UAB doing to track the spread of COVID-19 variants?
“Absolutely, we are tracking them,” Judd said. “We actually look at the cases every single day — at the number of cases in our community and every week we look at trends across UAB, the state and nationally. We aren’t going to let the ball drop just because we are opening up.”
There is reason for optimism around variants based on data from Israel, Judd said. “Israel has the most aggressive vaccination campaign in the world right now and even though there were documented instances of South African, Brazilian and UK variants in Israel, they didn’t have huge case spikes,” she said. “That’s not what we call causal [evidence], it’s observational… but the data from Israel do look good in terms of the vaccines working to stop the spread of variants.”
“At UAB Hospital we do test for variants in our labs on a limited basis,” Nafziger said. “We don’t test every sample for them. There’s just no reason to do that because it doesn’t change anything that we’re doing with our strategies for safety. We know that the variants are coming; there’s nothing that we can do right now to stop that. But the reassuring news is what Dr. Judd just stated. It looks like the vaccines are working on the variants.”
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Human Resources
Vaccines and UAB values
“It is such a privilege to be a part of the UAB community and to have the opportunity to get the vaccine earlier than many in our community,” said Chief Human Resources Officer Alesia Jones. “A significant portion of our workforce has taken advantage of that and continues to take advantage of that. There are some that are still a bit reluctant, and so, as we continue to educate everyone in our workforce, I want to also make sure that we all remember to keep the UAB value of respect on full display as it relates to this.
“If we agree or disagree with someone's choice, here at UAB one of our core values is to respect that decision,” Jones said. “There may be some people who believe that… sharing their vaccine status is an invasion of their personal health information. We want to give them that space to do that. So be careful in asking those questions [about vaccination status].”
HR gathering concerns around reentry plans
“There are lots of questions about the reentry plan,” Jones said. Reentry to campus started in May 2020, she said, and the current planning “is just a continuation of that.” Many of the questions submitted prior to the town hall were addressed in the March 25 article in the Reporter, Jones noted.
“HR is working directly with each unit and each unit’s leaders and their HR representatives to gather information around concerns with our plans with returning in the summer,” Jones said. This information will further inform the work of the Remote Work Task Force.
See UAB United for latest updates to safety protocols
The UAB United website is the official source for “the most up-to-date information on safety protocols,” Jones said. Safety protocols for May and beyond are being finalized and will be posted to UAB United as soon as they are available.
Coping with anxiety around reentry
“We have heard and feel that there is some anxiety about the return to campus for many of our faculty and staff,” Jones said. “We care about you, we care about your health and we care about making sure that you are safe and feel safe when you come back to campus. So I want to direct you to two resources that can help you in managing that anxiety.” The Employee Assistance & Counseling Center “is always there to help you,” Jones said. (See this Reporter story on how the EACC has increased free counseling sessions to 15 per calendar year.)
In addition, the B Well app, created to provide students with personalized tools and easy access to available health and wellness resources, now is available to employees. (See this Reporter story on the B Well app for employees here.)
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Remote Work Task Force update
Jones and Tom Brannan, co-chairs of the Remote Work Task Force, provided an update on the group’s charge and progress. The task force’s charge “was built off the supposition that there are subsets of UAB employees” in workgroups A and F “that are able, from a technical productivity and compliance standpoint, to work remotely on a long-term basis,” Brannan said. “With this in mind, the task force was charged with developing an institutional remote work recommendation post-pandemic for these potential subsets of employees.”
The task force was divided into four subcommittees that focused on:
- Competitive advantages and disadvantages of remote work
- Identifying subgroups of employees within Workgroups A and F that could potentially transition to long-term hybrid or remote work successfully
- Technology and data governance
- Human resources and legal considerations
“These committees are finalizing their recommendations now,” Brannan said. “Once we have their recommendations, a comprehensive draft recommendation will be created to share with UAB leadership and the System office. We also appreciate the feedback that was received from the manager and employee survey, which was conducted in February, and the student survey, which is being finalized now.”
The goal is to have a recommendation complete by the end of April to be submitted to UAB leadership, Brannan said. “As a reminder, the Remote Work Task Force’s role is advisory only,” he said. “Any long-term telecommuting decisions at UAB… will be made at the campus and system leadership levels. Units at UAB do not have the authority to grant telecommuting arrangements independently.”
Throughout this ongoing process, “we will always keep the safety and health of our employees and our students and our patients and their families first and foremost,” Watts emphasized in his opening comments.
Question submitted online:
What do I do if my manager is making me come back, but I want flexibility?
“There should continue to be conversations with the manager around what the flexibility request is and if they can make it,” Jones said. “We encourage flexibility but also we recognize that there may be some times, based on the business need, that individual requests may not be able to be accommodated.
“If you have had those conversations and there is a need to have further discussions, reach out to your HR consultant, who will be able to help facilitate that conversation,” Jones said. “But I also want to be clear that if the manager is not able to make that accommodation for business purposes, based on the needs of the organization or the department, we may not be able to totally ensure that everyone will get the flexibility that they are asking for — but we will certainly try.”
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Provost update
Summer and fall operations
On March 1, “we made the announcement that this summer term we will be moving back toward in-person and online courses and returning to normal processes in terms of pass-fail, withdrawal, incompletes and other kinds of student policies,” said Provost Pam Benoit, Ph.D. “Then in the fall we will be moving even more toward more in-person kinds of classes and the normal processes for students.”
Earlier in the week, “we had a really robust discussion with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, and one of the things that came up there was, how do we use what we learned during the pandemic and the use of technology in our classrooms to help us innovate going forward,” Benoit said. “I want to thank publicly both eLearning and [director] Pam Paustian and [director] Scott Phillips and the Center for Teaching and Learning. They helped us see that there are many new opportunities, and we want to make sure we continue to pursue those as we go forward.”
Planned workshops that will be hosted at the Center for Teaching and Learning “will help people really think through how they might innovate in their classrooms now that they have some additional skills that are part of their skillset,” Benoit said.
Three feet of social distancing instead of six feet
“For summer, we have a couple of changes that will occur,” Benoit said. “One is that we're moving from [a required] six feet of social distancing to three feet of social distancing. That will be in the classroom, and it will be in public areas. One of the questions I saw that was in the chat [for the town hall] is, ‘Why would you go to three feet? Isn’t it safer to be at six feet?’”
Several factors influenced this decision, Benoit said. “One was, particularly for classrooms, we know from the data that's been generated that COVID is not being transmitted in the classrooms — that it's mostly outside activities to the campus where those positives are occurring,” she said. “Secondly, we saw from the chart that Suzanne Judd showed earlier that the positivity rates are declining significantly, which allows us to feel more comfortable with the three feet. And we worked very closely with our public health and infectious disease experts on this recommendation. They looked at the research and the research, as I understand it… suggests that six feet was done out of an abundance of caution and you probably even have seen the CDC director talk about how she believed three feet was adequate. So all of those went together to inform our decision of moving to three feet.”
As Dr. Watts noted in his opening comments, “we will continue to mask, even if the state decides that it's not going to have a mandatory mask ordinance,” Benoit said. “We will continue to observe hand hygiene. The other kinds of safety protocols that have been in place all along, all of those will continue. It's that combination that allows us to feel comfortable with the three feet.”
Domestic and international travel
Domestic travel for UAB business will be permitted after Aug. 1, Benoit said. “But we will not be doing international travel…. We will continue to monitor the international situation. You have probably read on the news that there are some countries that are currently in lockdown and seeing massive increases in cases, and we clearly don't want individuals to be traveling to those locations.”
In-person commencement
“Our students have wanted an in-person commencement for so long, and we now are so pleased that we will be doing an in-person commencement at Legion Field on April 30 for the graduate students and May 1 for undergraduates,” Benoit said. “The graduates from 2020 who didn't get that experience are invited to come back — we welcome them and their families so we can celebrate not only their incredible accomplishments and graduating but also that we are at the point where we now feel very comfortable having an in-person ceremony.”
Wellness Day April 14
Many faculty and staff will be able to participate in the scheduled Wellness Day on April 14, Benoit said. “Where we have been able to give this extra holiday, this is the chance to really focus on having some downtime and relaxing and being stress-free,” she said. “I remind faculty again that… while we need to have students doing some instructional activity it needs to not be a high-stakes activity. It needs to be a fairly modest activity so that people really can use that time to relax and have a stress-free day.”
Some people have asked why UAB didn’t add even more wellness days, Benoit added. “One of the difficulties for us is that wellness days, particularly for faculty, are driven largely by our accreditation rules,” she said. “So any time we give an additional day we have to make sure that we are abiding by the number of ‘seat hours,’ hours of instructional time that our faculty and our staff are providing.”
Benoit concluded: “I do see the light at the end of the tunnel, and every day that light is a little brighter. So we're looking forward to seeing you all back.”
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Incident Command Committee update
“Throughout this pandemic and now as we hope to emerge UAB leadership has been making operational decisions for campus based on the evidence and the advice of our infectious-disease and public-health experts,” said Chief Compliance Officer Katie Crenshaw, J.D., who is chair of the university’s Incident Command Committee. The committee “continues to meet several times a week to monitor data about UAB’s experience with COVID on campus and to advise UAB leadership on strategies that will promote health and safety on campus,” she said. “I would encourage everyone to stay tuned to the UA System dashboard that is updated each Friday and is available online to all of us.”
“As we are looking at new data in terms of our community’s experience [with COVID-19 infections] and our experience on campus UAB leadership in conjunction with the UA System Health and Safety Task Force is considering our health and safety protocols.”
Changes to Healthcheck requirement coming
Many people have asked if Healthcheck and other activities such as active sentinel testing will continue in the summer and fall. “We anticipate that additional announcements will be made hopefully as early as next week about continuation of UAB Healthcheck,” Crenshaw said. “We’re looking right now at certain employee workers that will continue with a daily Healthcheck requirement. We anticipate that for other employee work groups that daily requirement will expire May 10. Stay tuned to UAB Reporter and email announcements for how those requirements will impact you.”
All employees who experience COVID-19 symptoms or have a potential exposure to a person infected with COVID-19 “will continue to have support from UAB Employee Health,” Crenshaw said.
Active Sentinel Testing continues through April 22
“As we move into the summer and fall employees will retain access to COVID testing when they have symptoms or close contact and UAB Employee Health refers them” for testing, Crenshaw said. “That said, the final day for GuideSafe Active Sentinel Testing, which is the institution’s program for routine asymptomatic COVID testing, will be April 22. So please take advantage of those opportunities as they arrive in your inbox from the Team Health email address and the Verily system through April 22.”
Campus events
Plans for safely holding campus events continue to evolve, Crenshaw said. “Those standards will, of course, include masking… and appropriate distancing. More specifically, our plans for events will address capacity and attendance limits, how we approach food and meals at those events, visitor requirements and additional processes for obtaining necessary approvals.”
Steve Murray and Melanie Martin in the Finance and Administration office have developed web forms that will be used for campus events and all units that are planning events to submit information about their health and safety protocols, Crenshaw said.
Summer camps
Beginning June 1, UAB will allow summer day camps to resume on campus, Crenshaw said. “Units who are sponsoring summer programming for children will be required to obtain approval from the UAB Youth Protection office and submit information about how they will manage health and safety of participants as well as program staff and they will be required to meet all of UAB’s health and safety standards, including masking and distancing.”
Childcare resources
Many employees rely on summer camps for childcare, Crenshaw said. Human Resources and Emily Wykle in the Office of the President have developed a list of available childcare resources that is available on the Human Resources website. “That currently includes childcare resources through the end of the school year but it will be updated with summer options as those programs and that information become available.”
Question submitted online:
I will have issues with childcare this summer. Will there be flexibility?
“We’re gathering information about the summer and if there are specific needs required for summer as it relates to work arrangements and child care and other family obligations,” said Chief Human Resources Officer Alesia Jones. “I would say to talk with your supervisor and your HR liaison to make sure that that is properly reflected in the HR dashboard and the information that is being gathered.”
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Facilities and cleaning protocols
“We know more about cleaning and protocols now than we did a year ago, and more than we did in the fall [of 2020],” said Chief Facilities Officer Greg Parsons. “We’re staying up to date with the latest information from the Centers for Disease Control…. Rest assured we’re going to continue to clean at the same rates that we found to be effective throughout the year.” Air systems in UAB buildings “will continue to operate with the maximum outside air potential” as well, Parsons noted.
“One of the things that’s fairly clear is the directional signage — the one-way traffic — is probably going to go away,” Parsons said. “I don’t think that we will have the same volume and quantity of signage that you saw before. You may see something about elevator usage, and we may post some things where it could be less obvious as to what needs to be done.”
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Parking
Several employees asked what would happen with parking changes made while much of the campus was working off-site. “We’re going to transition that,” Parsons said. “If they were previously in a lot that is close to their place of work they may move back.”
Employees who gave up their parking permits while they were working remotely “need to get in touch with UAB Transportation Services to re-implement that,” Parsons said. “Transportation Services will be happy to assist them with finding the best option.”
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Merit pay and hiring freeze
Several employees asked about the possibility of merit increases this year and the outlook for hiring restrictions. “Related to the hiring suspension, we had made a commitment to evaluate that on a quarterly basis,” said Allen Bolton, senior vice president for Finance and Administration. “We just finished our second quarter of the year, so we’ll be pulling that data together through March to see the impact and communicating with the campus leadership as well as the system leadership. This is a systemwide initiative.”
It is important to remember that there is an exception process for “essential hires and essential promotions that you feel need to occur for market-based reasons,” Bolton said. “We’ve had that in place since the hiring suspension was launched…. So please put your justification together and forward that through the normal exception process.”
As for merit-based salary increases, “we are hopeful for a merit plan for the upcoming fiscal year,” Bolton said. “We are pulling our budget together… and assembling that information and we are anxiously awaiting what the state will do and we are looking at what tuition may look like for next year as well, because we’ve got to have the revenue to support any increase in expense on that side. You will probably hear about merit proposals sometime in the early to mid-summer.”
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Research labs and social distancing
Christopher Brown, Ph.D., vice president for Research, added a clarifying comment around distancing requirements in UAB research labs. “You must wear a mask in a research lab in any situation,” Brown said. “The social distancing [requirement of three feet for the rest of campus] is strongly encouraged but not required…. We recognize that a lot of lab activities don’t allow for that.”
Labs that include undergraduates or high school students must work with UAB Youth Protection to ensure safety, Brown added.
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“I hope that as you've listened you recognize that we are being as transparent and clear as possible,” Watts noted in his concluding comments. “As Dr. Judd said, we follow the data and we will make the best decisions for the health and safety of the UAB community…. I also want to say thanks to all of our employees. It’s been quite a year and we have handled it as well as any campus in America.”
