Compensation and Staffing News
May 2022
Compensation and Staffing Survey Month |
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 formatting quirks, including font issues, on certain platforms. Thanks for your forebearance! |
Seeking Participation from Every Congregation!
Compensation and Staffing Survey
How are our congregations staffed? And how are staff actually paid? We have no way of knowing unless we ask...so we're asking! Collecting information about congregational staff and their compensation has been a longtime desire of our team. As we rethink our approach to providing salary recommendations, having "actuals" will help us ensure that our recommendations are useful and realistic.
The staff member or lay leader most familiar with each employee's hours and compensation should complete the survey. (This is often the administrator or the treasurer.) We think you'll find the survey quite intuitive, but please start by reading this Compensation and Staffing Survey webpage, which outlines the information you'll need and offers a few tips for completion. Once you've gathered the necessary information, it should take less than a minute to enter your congregational information plus 1-2 minutes per employee.
For now, we're simply asking for job titles, hours, wages paid, and benefits received. Over time, we hope to collect additional information that will allow us to better understand staff compensation and to explore collective biases (gender, racial, etc.).
Will you please make sure the right person from your congregation (if it isn't you) sees this survey and completes it by the end of May? We are eager to start working with the data. Thank you in advance for sharing your congregation's compensation and staffing information with us! |
Timing for Retirement Plan Recordkeeper Transition
Last month, we communicated through a variety of channels, including this newsletter, that we are seeking a new recordkeeper for the UU Retirement Plan after a number of years with TIAA.
Whether you are a congregational leader or a Plan participant, please be reassured that you do not need to do anything at this time. Once the new recordkeeper is selected, the transition process will take a number of months and we will keep everyone in the loop. We expect the actual change to take place in late 2022 or early 2023. Stay tuned! |
Unused Professional Expenses
By providing a professional expense line to a staff member, a congregation allows that professional to treat certain items as business expenses. Such items are not considered part of the employee's compensation and are not reported for income tax purposes. This arrangement is called an Accountable Reimbursement Plan and it must be administered according to IRS rules. One rule is that receipts must be provided for expenses over $75. (Your congregation is free to set a lower limit.)
As we approach the end of the budget year for many congregations, keep in mind that unused professional expenses may not be converted to salary. According to IRS rules, allowing an employee to take their leftover professional expenses as salary nullifies their Accountable Reimbursement Plan, which then makes the entire amount of their expense line taxable.
As with any budget line, a professional expense line might not get completely spent over the course of the year. Professionals generally find that their expense needs vary from year to year. If this was a lower-expense year for an employee but they expect to need more next year, consider adding all or some of the unused amount from this year to the amount budgeted for their professional expenses in the coming year. |
UU Retirement Plan Tip #9
From September through June, we're diving into the UU Retirement Plan's Top 10 Tips.
Tip #9: Type of Plan
The Unitarian Universalist (UU) Organizations Retirement Plan is an IRS-qualified, 401(a)/401(k) defined contribution, multiple employer church retirement plan.
When you reference the UU Retirement Plan in your congregation's documents, be sure to describe it properly. Note that it is not a pension plan (in which a defined level of benefit is promised) nor is it a 403(b) plan.
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Rethinking UUA Salary Recommendations
Insights from April Questionnaire
Thank you to everyone who participated in last month’s Questionnaire about how you use UUA Salary Tables and related resources. We received a total of 147 responses, representative of the overall distribution of congregational sizes. We learned a lot from your collective feedback!
You told us that 90% of you use the UUA Salary Tables as the only source (41%) or the most important resource (49%) for determining your minister’s pay, and 86% view the tables as the only source (31%) or the most important one (55%) for your other professional staff. Reflecting the challenge of determining appropriate pay for locally sourced employees in non-UU-specific roles, just 13% use the tables as their only source and 40% said the UUA recommendations were important for these positions.
Positive comments about the UUA Salary Tables included:
- They provide an authoritative reference that we use to shape conversations.
- Wonderfully succinct and easy to draw on for efficient implementation.
- Invaluable to me as a minister in negotiating compensation for myself and other staff.
Some of the concerns named:
- It can be challenging to use the UUA Salary Tables for staff whose responsibilities do not match well with the positions provided in the tables.
- Rates for generic or non-UU jobs are not consistent with local wages.
- The ranges and guidelines for use are too broad.
as only 9% reported using this resource regularly. Another 40% said that you do refer to the
guidance, but a full 51% said you did not know that it existed, or simply don’t use it at all. While to some of you this values-oriented guidance is viewed as most essential, others find it too complex.
As we rethink the UUA Salary Recommendations, your thoughts and opinions are very valuable. Thank you for engaging with us in this process and please continue to share your thoughts with Jan and Sean. We can be reached at comp@uua.org.
Is this you? A treasurer from a midsize II congregation expressed interest in talking with us about retirement contributions and administration. If you are this person, please write to us: comp@uua.org. |
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