More than 3,500 UVA employees are facing a choice that could have serious consequences for their pay and benefits. Between October and December, certain staff members must decide whether to stick with the current state human resources [HR] plan or switch to a new University plan that will go into effect January 1.
Brad Sayler, computer support tech for the Civil Engineering department, didn’t need to ponder. “I have decided to remain as classified staff because I do not trust UVA administration with my benefits and HR plan,” he says. “UVA claims that the new system will be an improvement over the old one, but UVA’s history in these matters indicates otherwise.”
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“I have decided to remain as classified staff because I do not trust UVA administration with my benefits and HR plan,” says Brad Sayler. |
The new employment plan is an outcome of the 2005 Management Agreement and Restructured Higher Education Finance Administrative Operations Act that gave UVA increased autonomy from the state. Not all staff members have a choice—those hired after July 2006 will be automatically enrolled. And for those with a choice, once they switch to the new system, they won’t be able to switch back to the state system.
Because the new plan, which has only slowly taken shape over the last two years, has created some anxiety among staff, the University has made available a network of peer advisers and supervisors, who are trained to answer questions about the new benefits.
“What I am so excited about the new plan is that we combined three new things but keep the things people really look to the University to be a stable employer,” says Susan Carkeek, vice president and chief human resources officer, pointing to changes in career development, performance evaluation and the compensation system.
“The most asked-for change [on a staff survey], with 90.4 percent response rate, is pay for performance,” says Carkeek. UVA is switching to a 5-point rating system for evaluating an employee’s work from a 3-point scale system. The latter, she says, didn’t give supervisors the opportunity to track specifics of somebody’s performance.
This supervisor-management based system could be detrimental in the long run, says Jan Cornell, president of the Staff Union at UVA and longtime critic of University restructuring. “What if you don’t get along with your supervisor but do an outstanding job nonetheless?” she asks.
UVA is also looking to new market-rate pay bands. In the current state system, pay bands “have nothing to do with the market,” says Carkeek. The new plan uses national, regional and local market data for each position, she says, but there are a few important distinctions. For positions that require particular expertise, such as professors and high-ranked administrators, the University will base their salaries on national market data. For “something more available locally,” says Carkeek, UVA will use Virginia state data.
“We have on occasion used ‘even more local’ survey data, for example the Albemarle County Chamber of Commerce survey,” she says. “However, we do this only on very rare occasions,” such as when the Albemarle County salaries are higher than the data from the Commonwealth survey.
Other policies that are new to the staff include an informal “Alternative Dispute Resolution” that adds to the current grievances procedures. Also, University staff in managerial and professional positions will have the opportunity to enroll in a retirement plan managed by the University, rather than the current Virginia Retirement System. The benefit of the new option, says Carkeek, is that “it’s portable, and they can take it with them as they go through their career.”
But Cornell is less than satisfied. “Do they think regular workers can or even want to manage a portfolio which in 30 years might very well leave them with no retirement?” she says.
Cornell and Sayler don’t understand the need to adopt a new system that is, they say, complicated and ultimately detrimental to the well-being of new employees. Carkeek thinks otherwise. “The employee gets to have as good an employee experience as our students have for a student experience. How Jeffersonian is that?”
New leave benefits are still being worked out and will come info effect in January 2010.
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