Trustees Approve FY09 Salary Increases

From Kim Harkness, Human Resources: The trustees have approved a 5.5% salary increase pool for Operating and PAT staff. This commitment expands the original 4.5% pool detailed during budget prep and adds an additional 1% to the pool.

That additional 1% reflects the trustees’ commitment to assure fairness between employee groups within USNH.

The OS and PAT Councils have reviewed models for how the 5.5% could be distributed. Based on their latest input, the models have been revised and will be presented to the President’s Cabinet at their retreat this week. The actual increases will be reflected in the paychecks of August 22 for PATs and August 29 for Operating Staff.

What can you be sure of? The trustees established a 3% across-the-board increase for all eligible employees. That’s money you can bank on! But to distribute the rest of the pool, the principles that guided the OS and PAT Councils’ discussions may be summarized by the following precepts:

• We are desirous of treating all employees fairly and want to leverage this salary pool to meet the most critical needs while assuring fair consideration for all staff members.
• Given the difficult economic situation today, we feel that a 3% across-the-board and an additional general increase distributed as a flat dollar amount provides our staff with the best advantage against an uncertain economy.
• We reaffirmed our commitment to folks receiving range movement and are keeping with the most recent years’ practice of providing 3% if a classification is moved to a higher range in order to alleviate compression.
• We want to continue making progress on multiple fronts and want to provide relief for those staff members whose rates are most deficient from their target and would support use of equity dollars to also provide changes in OS bases (e.g., increasing hours to the 40-hour base) where the workload or coverage needs are a critical consideration.

The trustee guidelines indicated that .5% should be used for market equity and the other 2% was to be distributed by campus discretion to equity, merit, reclassification, or general increases.

For the third year in a row, Human Resources has reviewed the backgrounds of each staff member, including their years of experience and years of degree-awarded education, to establish a target rate for each person compared to the range associated with their position. This review also included special credentials such as achieving a Journeyman or master’s designation in the trades. When we began addressing the compensation irregularities three years ago, almost 70% of our staff was deficient. In today’s review, less than 23% of staff is showing a deficiency to target and only 27 staff (or 8%) was more than 5% from their target rates. This progress is something we should all be proud of because it took a campus’s commitment to one another to make it happen.

As soon as a final increase plan is approved, we will e-mail the details and start coding them to the record. Please share your feedback and thoughts with your OS and PAT Council chairs (Tim Garland, OS; Kim Schmidl-Gagne, PAT), Council representatives http://www.keene.edu/opstaff/members.cfm, http://www.keene.edu/pat/members.cfm, or myself.