Rethinking UUA Salary Recommendations
As explained in our June newsletter, UUA Salary Recommendations are evolving in the coming year to put a greater emphasis on process and to shift to a grade-based structure.
More about Grade-based Recommendations
Creating a pay structure based on grades involves grouping different jobs together that are considered roughly equivalent for pay purposes. This is the approach taken by the UUA for our own staff. We're working on a grade rubric based on general job attributes such as qualifications, authority, impact, and working conditions.
Just as a job title and capsule job description cannot perfectly capture a specific job, neither can general grade descriptions. Deciding on the appropriate grade for your staff will require judgment, similar to the judgments you make now about job titles. And, as now, you may decide that one of your staff positions falls in between two categories.
We expect that you'll find the grade rubric more practical than the capsule job descriptions, as it can be applied to nearly any staff position. We also hope it helps you take a fresh look at internal equity, i.e., reasonableness of relative pay across positions within your congregation.
Congregational Size
As you know, UUA Salary Recommendations have been based on membership. But we all know that the number of members does not completely define a congregation's size. For this reason, we're exploring a framework based on both membership and budget, to be complemented by general descriptors of what congregations "look like" at the different sizes.
Compensation: Not an Exact Science
The system we've been using isn't perfect. The revised one won't be either. A lot has changed since the original UUA Salary Recommendations were introduced in 1995. Recognizing that compensation is as much an art as a science, we look forward to providing recommendations and resources designed to help you make clear, equitable, transparent decisions about pay for your staff in today's environment.
