Compensation and Staffing News

April 2022

 UUA Office of Church Staff Finances Mission
Guided by the values of our faith,
we equip congregations for excellence as employers
and their staff for financial competence and well-being.
Editor's Note: We're aware of continued formatting quirks, including font issues, on certain platforms. Thanks for your forebearance!

Rethinking UUA Salary Recommendations:

How Do You Use Our Resources?

Last month we shared our goals around revising the UUA Salary Recommendations with the
intentions of advancing equity, improving practicality, and leading with integrity. An important part of our revision process is gaining an understanding of how congregational leaders are making use of our current salary resources.

Please Complete a Short Questionnaire
Do you play a role in determining salaries for any employees of your congregation? If so, please take this short questionnaire to help us understand how our salary-related resources fit into your congregation’s decision-making processes.

We know that there are usually multiple parties involved in setting salaries. It is perfectly fine for us to hear from more than one leader in your congregation. In fact, we expect to! Please share the questionnaire with others involved. We're seeking as broad a take as possible on how resources are currently used by supervisors, by personnel and finance leaders, by board members by anyone who has anything to do with the process.

Thank you for participating! To simply select the best answer to each of the 8 questions should take no more than 5 minutes. (Can you do it right now?) We've provided comment boxes for each question and are grateful for anything you'd like to tell us. We plan to share key learnings from the questionnaire in next month's newsletter.  

Coming in May: Compensation and Staffing Survey 
Collecting information about actual compensation from congregations has been a longtime desire of our team and we're excited to share that a Compensation and Staffing Survey will be released next month. Stay tuned!

Your information is incredibly valuable to the process of developing equitable and practical recommendations, and we will make a survey summary available to participating congregations. We are eager to hear from you, to learn from you, and to partner with you in this process. 

For now, thank you for completing our Salary Resources Questionnaire.
Complete Our Salary Resources Questionnaire
Got Questions?

The Office of Church Staff Finances has a relatively new and rapidly evolving source of concise answers to your most frequently asked questions. The UU Employers Compensation and Benefits Knowledge Base functions as a companion to the many resources available through the UUA website and other sources. 

Our Knowledge Base is designed to provide short answers to common questions, with links to more detailed information. You’ll find plenty of entries already posted, and we are regularly adding new answers. We encourage you to bookmark this page, and we hope that our Knowledge Base will help you find quick and quality answers when you need them!
UU Employers Knowledge Base

 UU Retirement Plan Tip #8

From September through June, we're diving into the UU Retirement Plan's Top 10 Tips.

Tip #8: Auto-Enrollment

If a congregation elects Auto-enrollment on their Employer Participation Agreement (see Election #1), they have committed to deducting a certain percentage of every employee's compensation from their paycheck for remittance to TIAA as a contribution to the respective employee's account. The Auto-enrollment percentage specified on the Employer Participation Agreement is the default; an employee can stop or change the amount of their contribution at any time. 
  
Auto-enrollment requires continuous attention and diligence to ensure compliance. The majority of congregations participating in the UU Retirement Plan choose NOT to auto-enroll their employees. Employers who have adopted the Plan with Auto-enrollment
must inform employees upon hire, retain evidence of discussing Auto-enrollment provisions (using the Employee Contributions Agreement), and ensure prompt remittance of the contributions for each employee. (For more information on how to operationalize Auto-enrollment, please refer to this Knowledge Base article). 
  
The purpose of Auto-enrollment is to make it easy for all employees to save for retirement, regardless of their age, hours, or length of service. The good news for congregational staff is that whether or not the congregation has chosen Auto-enrollment, staff can still elect to make employee pretax contributions at any time to take advantage of long-term investment gains and tax savings. Encourage your staff to complete an Employee Contributions Agreement today!

Please contact RetirementPlan@uua.org with questions or for help correcting errors.
See UU Retirement Plan Top 10 Tips

Retirement Plan Changes

Our New Retirement Plan Director
Many of you have already gotten to know Gloria Guldager ("goo-layer"), who joined the Church Staff Finances team last May as our Retirement Plan Employer Liaison. Following a comprehensive search process, we are very pleased to announce that Gloria has been promoted to Retirement Plan Director. Gloria brings a wealth of skills and a can-do spirit to her new role at a dynamic time in the life of the Retirement Plan! (Read on.)

Seeking New Retirement Plan Recordkeeper
After over a decade with TIAA, we've recently issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a new Retirement Plan recordkeeper. Participating employers and individual Plan participants have already received a letter explaining the process. We expect to transition to the new recordkeeper in late 2022 or early 2023. 

The transition to a new recordkeeper provides us with many opportunities to significantly improve the administration of our Plan for all parties the UUA Retirement Plan Staff, the over 600 participating UU employers in the Plan and, of course, the Plan participants. This
benefit cannot be overstated. Although there is much work ahead to enact a smooth transition, we are confident that we will be able to provide a much-improved experience for employers and participants alike.  

The most frequently asked questions about our recordkeeper transition are answered in this Knowledge Base article:
Learn About Our Recordkeeper Transition

We're Hiring x 3!

In this season of new beginnings, three members of the Church Staff Finances team are entering new phases of their career journeys: Jim will be retiring at the end of June, Sarah is leaving the UUA for a new job opportunity, and Charissa is in the process of transitioning to a position in the UUA HR Office. While it's hard to bid farewell to great coworkers, we're very happy for each of them...

And we look forward to welcoming new team members. Might you or someone you know be interested in one of these job openings?
We expect the Retirement Plan Employer Liaison position (Gloria's previous role) to be posted soon, as well.
View All UUA Job Openings
Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
Sign up for Compensation and Staffing News

UUA Compensation and Staffing

24 Farnsworth St, Boston, MA 02210

Unsubscribe - Unsubscribe Preferences