August 24, 2011
To: UT System-wide Faculty and Staff
From: UT President Joe DiPietro
Re: Preliminary Compensation Study
Earlier this year I was pleased to bring you news of the Compensation Advisory Board and its ongoing work to put together a long-term plan to help meet our priority of fair and competitive pay and benefits for all University employees. The first action from the early discussions was the increase in the minimum starting pay rate for regular employees to $8.50 an hour, which went into effect July 1.
The next step was to conduct a study to compare our pay and benefits with other universities and industry. That study has been completed and the preliminary results are being shared with our Board of Trustees today. I want to make you aware of where we are in the process.
It came as no surprise that our average salaries for both faculty and staff are a little below the market medians. On the other hand, when you consider benefits such as health insurance, retirement, tuition assistance, time off and long-term disability, we do well. Overall, benefits for both staff and faculty are above average compared to general industry. Compared to selected higher education institutions, faculty benefits align with the average and staff are slightly below.
This is important information to know, but it is just the starting point. It does not mean there will be immediate changes in compensation. There is much more work to be done. We will be doing additional studies in the coming months to better understand details by job category. Then we will begin work on long-term, multi-year total compensation plans. Those will be aimed at making us as competitive as possible while ensuring internal equity and fairness and working within financial resources available to us.
The University of Tennessee is a good place to work. The goal of this process is to assure that continues in the future.
Campus and institute leaders have just received entity-specific data and will spend the next few weeks reviewing the information. They will share more details with you in the days and weeks ahead. I encourage you to read more about the study at: http://humanresources.tennessee.edu/cab/market_assessment.html.
It will be a long process, but the end result will benefit you, and I look forward to sharing more information as it becomes available.
Thank you for your commitment to the University of Tennessee.
All the best,
Joe
