The launch of the newly refreshed University Services Centre (USC) website marks a step forward in the centre’s mission to provide clear, concise and user-focused support to the York University community as they navigate services.
The USC consolidates high-volume services from across the University into an integrated unit to make staff services easier to access, faster and more consistent. With a dedicated focus on service excellence and a single point of contact for key administrative staff services, the USC’s goal is to reduce the time community members spend on administrative tasks, enabling them to focus on strategic and value-adding work to achieve the University’s mission and priorities.
The new website supports this goal by enabling community members to find the information they need quickly and easily. It provides detailed information about each of the USC’s teams and the services they offer, as well as user guides, instructional videos and more, with standardized elements across all pages to create a seamless interface. The structure of the new site was developed based on community feedback, further highlighting the centre’s collaborative approach to service.
“The new website provides the community with more information and tailored self-serve resources than ever before, making it easier to understand the services being provided, access forms and guides in a central place, and request service,” says Anthony Barbisan, assistant vice-president of the University Services Centre. “It also provides greater transparency into current timelines for key USC processes to ensure accountability for high-quality, timely services and help community members requesting services plan effectively during high-volume periods.”
The new website is flanked by additional key projects to improve service delivery for the community.
One of the website’s areas of focus is expense reimbursement. USC Finance Services staff focus on processing employee and student expense claims, ensuring the compliance of University policies, procedures and external funding guidelines, and delivering trainings on the expense reimbursement process to community users.
To effectively respond to pain points and challenges regarding expense reimbursement, four new learning tools and opportunities will support the community through the process, in an effort to reduce the time spent preparing and revising expense claims and help ensure the centre can process claims efficiently to speed up payment. The new resources incorporate feedback from community members received through inquiries, working groups and service tables to ensure the final solutions were developed with, not for, the community – an original principle of York’s vision for service excellence.
The introduction of an e-learning course will provide community members with a walk-through of Concur – the platform used to submit expense claims – and detailed instructions for submitting expense reimbursement claims. Short instructional videos are also available on demand when a quick refresher about a step in the process is needed, including how to add common expense types like mileage and per diems. A new quick reference guide will also be available, at the point of submission, to ensure all required information is provided before submitting a claim. For additional support, the USC will be rolling out bookable, one-on-one support sessions, where community members can ask the USC staff questions about their expense claims in real time – avoiding errors and further reducing delays.
In addition to this work to streamline the expense reimbursement process, the USC recently completed its institution-wide roll-out of the recruitment and onboarding (R&O) service provided by USC People Services. This service was shifted to the USC in response to pain points identified by hiring managers, support staff and human resources people partners regarding a range of administrative tasks for high-volume, non-academic recruitments.
Through this work, the USC team consolidated and streamlined approximately 700 different recruitment and onboarding practices from across the University into 23 best practice processes. During the past year, the R&O team supported 2,300 job postings and screened 56,000 resumes. Consolidating this service into the USC will ensure greater consistency in both recruitment and the institutional onboarding experience for new employees, and the USC’s approach to continuous improvement will lead to further improvements in service quality and efficiency.
The USC’s Classroom Operations and Contact Centre teams are also working to improve the experience when requesting technical support from classrooms, by making it faster to reach the right team and ensuring calls are answered by a live agent during peak periods.
To learn more, visit the new University Services Centre website.