October 10, 2002
Staff salaries remain below market
Despite experiencing a two-year period in which general merit raises were granted just once, the UW professional staff’s salaries remained at the same level compared to the market as in 2000.
A survey recently completed by the consulting firm of Towers Perrin showed an overall weighted average for salaries that is 6.4 percent below the market. Two years ago, this gap was 6.6 percent.
A combination of factors explains this stability: in-grade promotions granted by units from their own resources, turnover that resulted in new hires at or close to market salaries, and steady growth in new pofessional staff positions.
There are now more than 5,000 professional staff, a growth of about 25 percent over the past two years. The bulk of this growth is in research areas and information technology, according to Shelley Middlebrooks, director of compensation for UW human resources. “While new hires help to raise the overall average, areas that have long-time employees experience market compression,” she says. “But the current overall average salary for Professional Staff is still approximately 1 percent less than at the same time last year.”
In addition, the current economic slump has had its own effect on wages in the market, which has prevented the salary gap from growing. “We’re in a totally different market environment than two years ago,” Middlebrooks says. “The strategies we employed for dealing with a tight labor market no longer apply. But we still have the challenge of trying to keep high-quality staff in light of scarce resources and lack of merit increase fundsallocated by the state Legislature.”
With general merit adjustments in the market expected to be in the range of 4 percent this year, a 6 percent gap is likely to become a double-digit gap. Towers Perrin points out that this is not a grave situation if merit raises are withheld for only a year. But if increases are small or nonexistent, and especially if they lag market rates when the economy rebounds, the UW is likely to experience a surge of recruitment and retention problems.
The average market gap does not illustrate the range of salary situations among professional staff jobs. Managers and strategic advisors (grade 7) as a group are 16 percent above the market; managers and strategic advisors in grades 6 and 10 are 13.7 percent and 13.5 percent ahead, respectively. At the other extreme, research scientific/engineering jobs (grade 5) are 48.3 percent behind, information tech-nology (grade 11) is 39.3 percent behind, and public information/communications is 37.2 percent behind.
Human Resources has designed a new compensation program especially for the research scientist and research engineer jobs, enabling supervisors to target competitive salary rates in grant proposals and apply a more appropriate metric for reviewing research jobs. This has resulted in a streamlined process for filling research positions, but its effect on salaries is hard to predict.
In all, Towers Perrin surveyed 61 benchmark positions representing 2,196 employees. Information was collected from the higher education community, the regional market and the national market, as appropriate to the position.
The full survey is available now at copy centers throughout campus and at Human Resources offices. It will be available shortly on the Web.
