ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Ohio University announced it will ask employees at all campuses and locations to work remotely, when possible.

A memo was issued by President Duane Nellis to academic deans and other leadership at the university Saturday evening. It is posted below in its entirety:

Employees “who can” to transition to a remote work environment beginning Monday, March 16, 2020 until further notice.

As you may be aware, Governor Mike Dewine announced today that Ohio now has 26 confirmed cases of COVID-19. This situation continues to evolve rapidly, and our state is in many ways serving as a national leader in taking necessary steps to reduce the spread of this virus. We too, need to continue to take aggressive measures to reduce risk. With that in mind, under the guidance of health officials, we have made the decision to immediately begin to reduce the density of personnel, including student workers, on all of our campuses.

We need you to communicate with all of your unit leaders, including academic leadership, immediately and ask them to take the following steps no later than noon on Monday:

All academic and administrative units will create remote work plans that identify any and all employees (faculty, administrative staff, Classified, or bargaining unit) who can do all or a portion of their work remotely and ask them to transition to a remote work environment beginning Monday, March 16, and until further notice.This directive applies to all campuses and locations. In administrative units, this means supervisors or managers; in academic units, this means deans (or their designees). Deans will provide a summary of their remote work plan to the Executive Vice President and Provost.

Student employees should be instructed not to return to campus for in-person work. Academic and administrative units are encouraged to identify meaningful remote work for student employees if possible. Any requests for exemptions for student in-person work must be approved by the Executive Vice President and Provost (for academic units) or appropriate University Vice President for all other units. Employees who must remain on campus to complete critical functions shall be instructed by their supervisors to avoid close contact. This includes eliminating or dramatically reducing face-to-face meetings by employing technology resources including Microsoft Teams or other online collaboration tools. OIT will provide more guidance on remote work technology in the days to come. All Vice Presidents and the Executive Vice President and Provost should identify facilities and offices within their portfolio that can and should be closed in order to reduce the density of our workforce during this unique timeframe. Those recommendations should be brought forward to leadership as soon as possible but no later than Wednesday, March 18. IMPORTANT UPDATED TRAVEL GUIDANCE: As communicated earlier this week, we are asking any employee who has recently traveled to country that has a CDC Level 3 Travel Health Notice or who believes they may have been exposed to COVID-19 not to return to work for at least 14 days and to contact their local health department immediately for further information. In addition, any employee who has recently traveled outside their campus community to an area with confirmed COVID-19 cases may not return to in-person work on campus for 14 days. Academic and Administrative supervisors should provide remote work if at all possible.

During this unprecedented time, we want to provide employees with as much flexibility and support as possible to ensure we continue to have a healthy and productive workforce. If you have employees whose work is not essential at this time but whose role is difficult to complete remotely, human resources has provided below tips for providing meaningful remote work to employees in these situations. We encourage you to work with employees to ensure they are in fact doing meaningful work while achieving reduced workforce density on our campuses.We want to thank you for your immediate attention to this important communication. Please begin now to reach out to all supervisors in your division to ensure they can contact employees prior to Monday if at all possible.We also want to reassure you again that at this time no cases of coronavirus have been reported at any Ohio University campus or location, and we continue to believe the risk of transmission on our campuses is low at this time. However, as we have seen in other communities, we must not hesitate to take serious preventative measures in order to protect our community as the spread of COVID-19 continues in the United States.Thank you for your dedication, your tireless work, and your extreme flexibility as we work together to respond to this historic situation.With kind regards,M. Duane Nellis

President

Elizabeth Sayrs

Executive Vice President and Provost

_________