Human Resources sheds light on new pay plan

http://www.hrs.virginia.edu/

Q. What is my growth potential with the new broader roles?

A. The broader roles provide opportunity for career growth within the employee's position. Career growth can be thought of as added responsibilities within the role and band, rather than just upward movement to a higher pay band.

Under the current system, career growth could typically only occur through reallocations or through competitive promotions. Because the in-band salary adjustment process in the new plan can provide salary adjustments for increases in knowledge, skills and abilities applied on the job, as well as increases in responsibilities, employees can be rewarded for job-related training and development without having to change positions.

Many of the re-defined roles also include both supervisory or "lead" positions and non-supervisory positions, which provide for career progression into supervisory responsibilities. Employees will also be able to move laterally (to a different role in the same pay band) from one career group to another career group (the new term for job classifications), which may provide additional career growth opportunities. Employees will still have promotional opportunities to higher pay bands through the recruitment process and role changes (i.e., reallocations to higher pay bands). The career group descriptions provide a "dual track" so that employees do not always have to advance to management positions in order to grow professionally, but could be rewarded for expertise in their field.

Q. Since the existing pay-for-performance plan was seldom funded, why should we expect anything different with the new plan?

A. There were several problems with funding the Employee Incentive Performance Program. One of the problems occurred because the current plan had fixed steps, which meant that the General Assembly and the governor had to fund those fixed steps -- increases had to be funded at 2.25 percent (one step) for "meets expectations," 4.56 percent (two steps) for "exceeds expectations," or 6.97 percent (three steps) for "exceptional" ratings. In most years, the state could not appropriate enough money to allow agencies to provide the three levels of increases for the three levels of performance.

In the new plan, there are no pay steps and the number of ratings has been reduced, which will provide the governor and the General Assembly with more flexibility to fund increases based on the revenues available each year. This means that the new plan avoids the problem that occurred where there had been a limit placed on the number of employees who could receive certain levels of increases.