By SUSAN JONES
It’s been just a year since James Gallaher started at Pitt as vice chancellor of human resources. Besides making an impact through his job, Gallaher’s move here also brought three additional members to the Pitt community — his twin daughters, who are now Pitt freshmen, and his wife, Eboni Zamani-Gallaher, who is a professor in the School of Education.
“I’m still learning a lot about Pittsburgh and the University, but my family’s here now,” he said. “We’re really enjoying it.”
Earlier this fall, Gallaher gave several presentations about the strategic plan for HR. Now, he and his office are working through those plans.
He talked about a wide range of HR issues during an interview with the University Times in early November.
Compensation modernization
Until it gets a little bit further down the road, compensation modernization will always be the number one priority, Gallaher said, stressing the three-to-five-year process this will entail.
“It’s a part of everything that we do going forward in terms of making sure that we develop the job families and that we tweak things as we need to,” he said. “That’s kind of a carryover from Shaping the Workplace, and it doesn’t go away until it’s further implemented.”
He said they’re at that tail end of the first phase, “which is working through the job mapping and putting the structure together. We’ve got, I think, 200 or 300 jobs that still need to be mapped that are pretty unique and special.”
There also are several behind the scenes projects that need to happen to get ready to implement the new system, “and it’s quite amazing because that requires quite a bit of IT support.” Trying to figure out a time a make the transition has been challenging.
“Once we do go live with the structure, there’s going to be a lot of questions about a lot of different things,” he said, and they’re trying to make sure they have a good plan to minimize any problems. “Because the last thing we want to do is stand it up and things don’t work accurately, or someone goes to post a job and the right information isn’t there.”
Gallaher said the job family analysis also is looking at equity across the board, so that incoming staff hired after new market-driven rates are determined aren’t earning more than veteran Pitt staff in the same position.
“We’re working through those types of questions to figure out how we do want to address it,” he said. “In that situation, do we have to bring someone in a little bit higher and then look at equity within that job family and make adjustments over a period of time. Do we do it at one period of time for job families? Do we do it by job? Do we do it by individual?”
Employee hiring and retention
With compensation modernization, the plan is to eventually be more competitive, but that doesn’t mean Pitt will be right on point with the market.
At a recent meeting of Association of American Universities HR directors, Gallaher said everyone talked about the challenge of hiring and retaining staff. “I think it’s always been (about) more than than pay.”
“There’s a lot of things that I think, depending on the demographic that you’re recruiting, that are big pluses that people sometimes don’t realize,” he said. “Our benefits are much better than most employers, our retirement plan is much better than most employers.”
While many of the benefits, such as free tuition for dependents and matching retirement funds, are appealing to older workers, they may not appeal to someone right out of college. Gallaher said part of the strategic plan is to figure out “different different ways to present information to a different population. I don’t know how many individuals that are under 25 realize that if they come to the University and work here for 10 years, there’s student loan forgiveness. We don’t talk about that.”
He also said they’ll look at where Pitt might have benefit gaps, “because maybe there are some things we can add from a benefit standpoint or from a work-life standpoint that would help to recruit those folks.” One area that his AAU colleagues discussed was beefing up mental health benefits, since that is a growing issue.
Someone at the AAU meeting also reminded them that studies show the number one reason that people leave a job are supervisors and “it’s always been that,” he said.
HR needs to get creative about helping supervisors improve the way they lead and connect with employees, Gallaher said. “I think that’s another strategy that can help to retain employees if you understand their needs and challenges.”
All supervisors are expected to participate in the training program that started before Gallaher arrived at Pitt, but how that’s enforced is not clear. He said they are working with responsibility centers to get a list of supervisors who haven’t participated to try to reinforce the need for that training.
He also thinks that Pitt needs to do a better job of telling people “why it’s great to work at Pitt.” And universities in general need to promote the idea that “higher education is a really cool place to work. We have a really cool story to tell. We impact the world. We do things that change the world. And I think that is a compelling story.”
In his own career, Gallaher has made the transition from corporate work at General Motors to higher education. “I’m a car guy, so it was like the perfect job for me, but I was thinking why am I busting my butt every day, day in day out? It’s great that we make cars and I love cars, but I realized that I wanted to do something that had an impact in society.”
One idea Gallaher is exploring is building pipelines of potential job candidates, particularly in health sciences, “on an ongoing basis, just so that we have a list of folks ready and able, even if they’re at other institutions.”
Working from home
Most of Human Resources continues to work primarily from home, Gallaher said, although the leadership team is in most days and the shared services office has people on campus every weekday.
“One of the things that I’ve done is to put forth a structure for face-to-face meetings, where every other all-HR meeting is face to face, every other leadership meeting is face to face, every other one-on-one meeting that I have with my direct reports is face to face,” he said. “That’s the balance that I’m trying to strike — making sure the folks that need to be here at certain times are here on some regular basis, but that we also provide that flexibility for folks that have gained a lot of work-life balance from working remotely.”
At the AAU meeting, Gallaher said, everyone agreed that “you have to provide some level of flexibility if you’re going to keep your staff in this environment.”
Other issues
Getting basics right: His top priority specifically from the strategic plan is “really getting the basics right … that part where we talk about onboarding and process improvement, that’s what I see as a top priority from that,” he said. “I heard some people say that these big ideas are great, we want a learning management system and all these other technology things, but how about you make sure that we get faster responses to inquiries and things like that.” Gallaher said he plans to have an HR dashboard that will say how quickly the office is turning requests around.
HR advisory panel: Gallaher thinks this group will be more like the Shaping the Workplace committee. HR will get feedback from the panel about its plans before they are put into practice and the committee will serve as check on HR to make sure it is operating efficiently. He hopes to get this panel organized by the first quarter of 2023. It will include a broad swath of employees, from senior leaders to represented workers to a Staff Council representative. “I would love to have representation from every RC but I don’t think that’s feasible.”
All Temps revamp: Gallaher mentioned at the strategic plan meetings that he wants to rethink how All Temps works. He’s not sure what shape that will take yet. One idea is having executive recruitment as part of a unit like All Temps — something he’s seen at other universities. HR also might look at expanding the temporary worker program to the regional campuses.
Offboarding: He said they want to be able to look collectively at why people leave Pitt. By HR doing exit interviews, they can determine if it is a pay issue or a supervisor problem, and then “develop strategies to address what we find out.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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