Compensation and Staffing News
June 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 formatting quirks, including font issues, on certain platforms. Thanks for your forebearance! |
Compensation and Staffing Survey
Deadline Extended to June 10
We are very pleased with the response to our Compensation and Staffing Survey. But it's a busy time of year and we've gotten a few requests for an extension. And, of course, the more responses we receive, the better our analysis will be. So while we had planned to close the survey at the end of May, we'll be leaving it open through June 10.
Please note that we're asking about compensation and staffing as of May 1. Many of you already know about hours and pay for the program year starting in July, but please use May 1 info so that we're comparing apples to apples. (If on May 1, you happened to have a recently vacated position that is already re-filled or is about to be, you can include that and note it on the survey.)
As we explained last month, the staff member or lay leader most familiar with each employee's hours and compensation should complete the survey. Please start by reading this Compensation and Staffing Survey webpage, which outlines the information you'll need, provides a PDF view of the survey, 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.
Will you please make sure the right person from your congregation (if it isn't you) sees this survey and completes it by June 10? We are eager to start working with the data. Thank you in advance for sharing your congregation's information with us! |
UU Retirement Plan Tip #10
This program year, we've been diving into the UU Retirement Plan's Top 10 Tips.
Tip #10: Support
Through the UU Retirement Plan staff team, along with the Director of the UUA Office of Church Staff Finances, the UUA Retirement Plan Committee, and Plan Recordkeeper
(currently TIAA, changing in late '22), the UUA:
- Assists UU employers and plan participants,
- Issues information and provides resources,
- Establishes administrative access for remitting, and
- Works collaboratively with employers to help ensure that participants' employment information is current and correct in the recordkeeper's system.
We hope you've found this yearlong review of the Top 10 Tips useful. Feel free to share feedback to help us make them better! |
Rethinking UUA Salary Recommendations
Introducing New Directions
Through recent newsletters, we've told you that we are revisiting our approach to UUA Salary Recommendations in order to improve practicality, advance equity, and lead with integrity. As we work through the particulars, we want to provide two high-level highlights about what to expect when we post the '23-'24 salary recommendations in late 2022.
Focusing on Process
We plan to put a greater emphasis on procedural justice. Compensation is about more than finding the right numbers – it's about the process used to make and implement pay decisions. We want to help ensure that congregational pay policies and practices are equitable and transparent. We already offer a page with Compensation Process Guidance, along with the process suggestions contained in our Guide to Salary Recommendations. Now we want to truly put process at the forefront and to better integrate process guidance with numerical recommendations (i.e., the Salary Tables).
We love being able to provide process guidance because it is a essentially set of principles and practices that can be applied across all positions. For instance, when you post job openings, do you make it a practice to include a starting salary or salary range? Are you tracking the ratio between the pay rate of your highest-paid employee and your lowest-paid? Process guidance is offered explicitly with equity and transparency in mind.
Shifting to Grade-based Recommendations
Ever since the UUA first began publishing Salary Recommendations in the mid-1990's, they've been based on particular jobs within functional areas. The original recommendations covered 8 common congregational jobs. We now provide salary recommendations for 25 job titles, with requests for more coming to us each year. There are three main reasons that this system isn't serving you (or us) well:
- As congregational staffing becomes more customized and innovative, it isn't practical to supply market-based data for each new type of position.
- Because our recommendations are based on national wage data, we're concerned about perpetuating cultural wage biases, e.g., lower pay for positions historically held by women and/or members of marginalized communities.
- Internal equity (relative pay across positions within an organization) has gotten de-emphasized. Put another way, the external market rates on which our recommendations are based often fail to reflect the level of skill and responsibility expected for actual positions within a particular congregation.
For these reasons and more, we will be moving to a grade-based approach. Instead of Capsule Job Descriptions, we will provide capsule grade descriptions. We'll still make use of national church and nonprofit wage data. And we'll continue to provide ranges to help you account for the experience and/or performance of an individual employee. A grade system lends itself to today's evolving staffing structures and will help congregations be more intentional about equity within their staff teams.
UUA Salary Recommendations are tied to people's livelihoods and their experiences of our UU workplaces. This is critical work. We're excited about the directions we're heading in and believe we can better equip you to attract and retain great staff; to improve employees' understanding of, and feelings about, their pay; and to live UU values within your walls. We will keep you apprised as we continue our work on the program over the summer and into the fall. |
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