By SHANNON O. WELLS
For some faculty members and department leaders, re-classification of some Pitt employees from “exempt” to “non-exempt” for overtime pay — one outcome of Pitt’s ongoing compensation modernization initiative — has ushered in unwelcome changes.
Doug Reed, associate professor of immunology, said asking re-classified employees to work more than 37.5 hours a week now carries an overtime-pay obligation his grant-fueled department simply can’t cover.
“And that’s where we run into problems, because now we can’t ask them, because we don’t have the money in the grant,” he said, noting that many research technician-related salaries are paid entirely from grant money.
The implications, he said, extend to lab animals for whom Reed is ultimately responsible. “For example, Dec. 22, which is a paid holiday for the University. I have mice, and somebody’s got to come in and check them. I can’t pay (technicians), so I have to come in and do it, which is fine. But at the same time it’s really kind of aggravating that these changes were made,” he said. “And we’re just told this is the way it’s going to be.”
Consequences of job reclassifications were among concerns aired during the Nov. 17 Senate Research committee meeting highlighted by a presentation on compensation modernization by Maureen Pastin, director of compensation; James Gallaher, vice chancellor of Human Resources; and Mark Burdsall, assistant vice chancellor of consulting services in HR.
Calling compensation modernization “very much an organic process,” Pastin said she expects the years-long project “to continue for years to come as we soften the edges and refine it and really make it a living, breathing tool for our organization in terms of managing compensation, as well as opportunities for staff for movement through jobs.”
Now in its third and final stage of implementation, the compensation modernization initiative is intended to update the classification system that’s been in place since 1999. As the market has evolved, Pastin explained, the system was “not keeping pace with how we needed to manage our jobs and market-price them to our peer groups in other areas.”
“And we needed to come up with a system, really, that provided more mobility and offered additional opportunities in recruitment and retention and career development,” she said, while creating an “expanded, more job robust and competitive, contemporary structure for greater role clarity and consistency throughout the University.”
Focused on the development and launch of “career pathways” to provide employees with resources to aid in professional advancement at the University, phase 3 represents the “ongoing expansion of the project,” Pastin said. That includes development of “career ladders that would illustrate job groups, the career-movement potential within the University,” while continuing to establish ongoing internal equity-review studies.
“We are now at this point, with the program being constructed and implemented,” she added, “and now we’re trying to enhance it and make it a living breathing, retention tool that we can use. It really will be a good retention and recruitment initiative to keep talent at Pitt.”
The first phase of the project, which evaluated and aligned University positions for more accurate internal and external job market comparisons was completed in spring 2022. The second phase, implementing the new structure, including adoption of new job groupings and standardized job descriptions across the University and release of a new job catalog, concluded earlier this year.
During the second phase, department leaders received guidance on the new job structure and salary ranges.
“Phase 2 was really the deployment of all of these objectives,” Pastin said. “So we made the job catalog available to everybody, introduced a new pay grades and guidelines, and provided a very extensive database of supporting documentation, explanation of the process and the project and then the systems that we have in place to support it.”
Responding to Doug Reed’s concerns, Pastin explained that changes in exempt vs. non-exempt status were based on the U.S. Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
“We zero-based all the jobs and we valuated them based on the FLSA standards for whether a position is exempt or non-exempt and applied those tests,” she explained. “And as a result of some of the new jobs that were created … some of them were falling into different categories from an FLSA status.”
Human Resources is undergoing what Pastin called a “large project” to address these and other changes across the University. “We are still working on the actual process for making the (classification) change and making sure that people understand why the change was made.”
Equity and compression
Responding to a Research committee question on comp modernization challenges and how HR is addressing them, Pastin mentioned confusion from the increased number of classifications that’s placed many employees in new salary ranges.
“Their job didn’t change, but they were now in a new salary range based on the structure,” she said. “Quite often they would say, ‘Wait a minute, I was at the midpoint of my old range, and now I’m in a salary grade closer to the bottom.’ How was that fair, basically. The response … is that competition modernization provided the equalizer. We set the groundwork for setting up a structure that is more market competitive and easier for us to manage against market-survey data.”
Expanded salary ranges, Pastin added, provide those in a lower range more future “salary potential” than they likely had before.
“It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison,” she said, noting that salary ranges under the old classification system were not really based on market levels. “It was almost like we were setting up those ranges internally. We were sort of competing with ourselves at that point.”
Salary ranges are now based on the job being done and how it’s priced in the market. “We use salary surveys where the market is reflected by individual organization and different universities that have the same jobs and what they’re paying,” Pastin said.
Key factors in changes include equity, or how individuals are being paid compared to new hires, and compression, which led to some employees coming in lower in their respective salary range.
“So there’s some compression that needs to be dealt with,” she said. “Changes in the range, where somebody might be in their new range, would obviously be impacted by any promotions or career-development opportunities that they have. And then, of course, the annual increase process will help to move individuals further into that range as we go forward.”
Reading the map
Katherine Wood, Research committee co-chair, said despite the good intentions for future increases, she doesn’t see it “as being much consolation for the employee (to) take a cut in pay now” so they had “more potential to get increased pay or increase pay over a longer period in my career.”
Pastin clarified that she knows of “nobody that took a pay cut” as a result of compensation modernization. Rather, some individuals were brought to the minimum of the salary grade if they fell below it, or were brought to $16.50 an hour as the new minimum wage if they were below that, she said.
Wood, a research assistant professor in Pitt’s Vascular Medicine Institute, also expressed concern about lab managers and technicians whose responsibilities go well beyond job descriptions to which they were switched.
“They were fairly up in arms about that,” she said of workers who have been placed in “classifications in my lab that do not account for everything that they actually do within the lab. It’s kind of minimizing their roles within the lab, and they don’t feel (they’re) going to be compensated appropriately.”
Pastin explained that individual responsibility centers (RCs) did the actual job mapping for the updated catalog, and some disconnects may have resulted. “I’m happy to look at that specific situation if you’d like,” she said. “That sounds to me like it might be a mapping situation, where someone placed a new job in the job catalog.”
The catalog, Pastin added, is not exhaustive or intended to identify every duty in a job, because “we present that as sort of the bones, the essence of a job, and they are designed to help us match closer to salary surveys. So, you’re not going to see every single item in a job.”
More specific descriptions “certainly can be added at the department level for documentation purposes,” she added. “But the (catalog) jobs are intended to identify the major responsibilities and roles of a position and designed to map easier to salary surveys “so we can get market data.”
‘Education and communication’
Anna Marsland, biological and health program chair in the Department of Psychology, said about five of the 15 staff members in her research program had their Research 3-Level status re-categorized, leading to “a lot of bad feeling happening” because of “perceived inequity” among her staff. The re-categorizing, she added, was based on descriptions she wrote three or four years ago.
“Since then, they’ve gone through a pretty extensive training in the lab, and they are functioning in different roles … and taken on additional responsibilities as they have developed and learned within the lab. And I was never consulted by anyone about how to classify staff members,” Marsland said.
“By the time it came to my attention, we really had a major issue with staff members saying that they were going to leave and feeling like they had been demoted because they had gone from a Research 3 Level to a Clinical Researcher 1, which required a high school diploma and no experience.”
Employees who are college graduates with years of research experience “felt very much like they had been demoted and that their career trajectory had been negatively impacted as a function of this change,” she added. “And as I’m talking with other faculty with large labs in psychology, I’m not the only one that has had this experience.”
Mark Burdsall said while his department and Pitt as a whole want accuracy in establishing equity and “everybody to be aligned to the correct job,” it’s also a matter of “education” and “communication” in the job mapping process.
“I think it’s between you … and somebody that was responsible for this mapping or alignment process to talk about why they did what they did, and why you feel like it needs to be what you feel it is,” he said. “At one time that was done by (HR’s Department of) Compensation … now it really is between you and your organization’s hierarchy.”
Burdsall said while his department is available to help trace the origin of job-mapping changes, he emphasized that “ultimately, we want everybody in the University in a staff position to be accurately identified in the catalog.”
In the previous structure, with 7,300 staff members, he noted, “we saw 7,300 individual job descriptions. But by doing the job specific catalog, we now can look at like-type people in jobs across the University.”
“So if your leadership comes to us, from possibly Arts and Sciences, and says, ‘Oh, what does this look like in other areas for a job that may exist in other areas,’ ” he added, “we now have that data that we can then provide.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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