Staff panels help guide classification element of Comp & Class redesign

	Jill Fishbaugh, director of external relations in the College of Education, and Scott Ketelsen, associate director of University Relations, are two of 10 members who served on the Marketing, Communications, and Outreach expert panel as part of the University's ongoing Compensation and Classification redesign project. Photos by Tom Jorgensen.

Last year, University of Iowa Human Resources (HR) announced a project to redesign the compensation and classification system for all nonorganized professional and scientific staff. The current system is more than 30 years old and had its last revision in 1985.

The new structure that will result from the redesign will organize all the work done by nonorganized professional staff at Iowa into a set of job functions, and then divide each of those functions into specific job families with clear responsibilities and progressions within each family.

This new structure is intended not only to improve the University’s ability to compete in the marketplace for talent, but to recognize and reward the individual employee and improve the ability to progress in a career at the University. Since the project began, HR has been working with Buck Consultants—a national consulting firm with expertise in job classification and compensation practices and experience working with institutions in higher education—to create a process for the redesign.

The project is working with expert panels made up of individuals from across the University to develop job family progressions for each of the job functions identified thus far in the project. (The list of job functions is available on the Compensation and Classification web site, www.uiowa.edu/hr/classcomp/redesign/overview.html#function.)

As a first step, HR chose one potential job function—Marketing, Communications, and Outreach—as a pilot to test the process. An expert panel was chosen from UI staff recommended by units who perform this function with staff who would fall into this category.

Jill Fishbaugh, director of external relations for the College of Education, and Scott Ketelsen, associate director of University Relations, were among the 10 staff members chosen for the pilot project’s expert panel. Their experience has modeled how future expert panels will work.

“Our task was to develop a job classification structure that would work for individual employees and units across the University,” Fishbaugh says. “Through a great deal of thought and discussion, we tried to create an ideal structure. As a result, we focused on what the job families would look like in the ideal situation, rather than the current job structure. We agreed upon a set of job families within the Marketing, Communications, and Outreach function, and within those families, identified up to three progressions within the job families, defined by skills and experience.”

Examples, Fishbaugh says, of the job families identified for the Marketing, Communications, and Outreach job function are media relations, marketing, strategic communications, writer, editor, creative media production and support, and public relations.

“The job family progressions will be a huge improvement,” Fishbaugh says. “It will mean that a staff member will be able to see the options to progress in a career at the University, and campus employers will be better able to recognize the good work and potential of University staff.”

So what was discussed regarding compensation?

“We did not discuss pay,” Ketelsen says. “The discussion of pay does not come until much later in this process, and even then the redesign will not result in any direct changes in salary for current employees, though it may affect the potential for future increases.”

“As a group, we observed what worked and what didn’t so that our experience could guide future expert panels,” Fishbaugh says. “University HR staff and Buck Consultants attended all our meetings and were able to make adjustments in the process as we went along, as well as utilize our suggestions for those future panels.”

“The work we did as the first expert panel is only a first step and our design at this point is quite malleable,” Ketelsen says. “It will change and grow as the process moves along. In the next step in the process, individual employees will complete job questionnaires and those results will also shape the job families and progressions developed by the expert panels. After that comes job benchmarking, development of the compensation structure, and only then will all job classifications be assigned a level for determining the market range for pay.

“It will be a couple of years before the new system is complete and can be implemented,” Ketelsen adds, “but the world is changing, and we need to keep up.”

For those in other job functions, Ketelsen says that it is very important to be sure that those chosen for the expert panel have the complete support of their supervisors and departments.

“We had four meetings of the entire panel, each lasting three to four hours,” Ketelsen says. “We also broke into subgroups that met separately. There was a lot of conversation that went into our decisions and suggestions.

“It’s a lot of work, and our experience is that the panel does its best work when everyone is there and focused,” Ketelsen adds. “Not just the panel members, but their departments and co-workers need to understand the importance of this work. Not to be at the table when these decisions are being crafted would be a disservice to the staff as well as the University.”

For more information about the expert panel process, including the project flow chart, the expert panel membership, and more, visit the project web site at www.uiowa.edu/hr/classcomp/redesign/index.html.

by Charles S. Drum