After over a year of planning, the University of Wisconsin-Madison human resources redesign plan has garnered praise and criticism alike from campus stakeholders since its release Friday.
The new plan aims to improve university employee recruitment and retainment in response to the recent decline in state support by making changes to employee benefits, compensation and diversity efforts.
The plan includes a recommendation to change current state statute to allow performance- based pay for faculty and staff, which Academic Staff Executive Committee Chair Jeff Shokler said will be a good way to motivate employees to improve.
“It would just be another tool in the toolkit of ways in which we can reinforce good service and quality performance for employees on campus,” Shokler said.
The new plan defines academic staff as salaried positions unique to specialized higher education positions, such as lecturers. Conversely, classified staff, which are personnel the university has in common with other state agencies, would be renamed “university staff” and include all positions paid by the hour.
Classified staff would see the biggest changes, including the addition of governance rights which will allow the group to formally express their concerns to administration, with the implementation of the plan.
However, the plan has also met significant criticisms regarding stakeholder involvement in the development process.
David Ahrens, a representative of Wisconsin University Union, which is a faculty and academic staff advocacy group with approximately 100 members, said the process has merely been consultation, rather than collaboration, with employees.
“There’s a sense of ‘we’ll let the employees advise us,’” Ahrens told The Daily Cardinal last Thursday. “But we’re really not involved in this collaborative work of creating and enacting and implementing a personnel policy.”
Current classified staff member Gary Mitchell said he felt similarly to Ahrens and believed there was too much focus on involving human resources staff.
“Their goal seemed to be to just make the process easier, not more fair, not more transparent,” Mitchell said. “It just was supposed to be just easier.”
But Bob Lavigna, project leader and director of Human Resources, said his team worked hard to engage the campus community, facilitating over fifty events across campus that engaged more than 7,000 community members in the process.
“We are really quite proud of the level of engagement and participation across campus,” Lavigna said. “I’ll quote the chancellor who referred to this as ‘perhaps the most collaborative activity we’ve ever done at the University of Wisconsin.’”
