Feedback given on the human resources plan

UC must attend to salary, incentive pay issues

Based on our many town hall information sessions, the Davis campus continues to support the current Human Resources Management Initiatives proposal.

The major themes that have come out of our campus presentations have stressed the virtues of:

• Combining the separate programs into one;

• Delegation of authority to the campus to design programs that respond to employee and management needs;

• Expanding training and development programs (e.g., funding, courses and release time)--the real key to implementing the parts of the HRMI proposal that rely on supervisor and manager competencies;

• Streamlining the grievance policy, utilizing expedited arbitrations, training and appointing independent reviewers and using a campus mediation service;

• Support for strengthening sections on performance appraisal, compensation and development to encourage staff and academic manager accountability at all levels within the organization;

• Ongoing review of the incentive program to ensure that it can be administered fairly, truly meet our needs and satisfy the expectations of management and our employees (see below);

• Establishing an open and continuous review of labor market salary studies; and

• Redesigning the classification system to reduce titles, broadband certain classes and simplify the classification process.

• There is virtually no support for expanding the incentive program until it is absolutely clear that we have established a base salary program that will assure everyone of competitive salaries--salaries that will ensure our being able to hire and retain the best employees.

• Similarly, we must assure that our geographical market areas are realistic, i.e., that when we have to recruit statewide for a particular position, the geographical market area should be statewide, also.

It is our intent that when the HRMI proposal is approved, we will begin open discussion of campus and UC Davis Medical Center implementation procedures to ensure input into how we plan to administer the policies. We view this process as critical to establishing both understanding and ownership of the policies.

Although the new HRMI policies will become effective on July 1, 1996, we expect to continue to collaborate with UC Office of the President to review and revise the policies as we gain experience. The widespread review at UC Davis demonstrated our continuing commitment to full participation in the design of our policies.

We will remain open, and where necessary, recommend future revisions. I will close by repeating the most important concern we've heard. The salary program and incentive pay plan deserve our special attention.

We must actively demonstrate our commitment to competitive base salaries. We cannot reduce future annual salary programs as a way of increasing the funding for the incentive plan until we have competitive base salaries.

Competitive base salaries are key to rewarding employees, to remaining competitive and to retaining our current valued staff. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Dennis Shimek Associate Vice Chancellor for
Human Resources and Risk Management