Dear Chapman Staff and Administrators,
Approaching winter break and a new calendar year offers us a chance to reflect: looking back at the operational challenges created or made worse by the pandemic and also looking forward at some opportunities for addressing these stressors and for enhancing your staff experience.
We have seen our workplace and our world change in the last two years. The impacts of the pandemic still ripple around us as initiatives have been delayed, as workforce preferences have evolved, and as local and global health insecurity continue to create stress and uncertainty. You’ve worked hard, you’ve persevered, and you’ve demonstrated commitment. We sincerely thank you for your resilience and dedication, but at the same time we need to honestly acknowledge your understandable frustration that stems not only from the uncertainty of the world but also from your desire for consistent workplace practices, for better systems and processes, and for clearer pathways for career advancement. Improving your staff experience is at the heart of Human Resources’s mission, and I want to share with you some of the initiatives we already have underway to respond to your feedback and concerns:
- Retiring the Staff Handbook: Many of you have shared that the handbook is outdated and underutilized. The result has been a perceived lack of consistency in how we administer our workplace policies from department to department. We know this creates mistrust and frustration, and in response we will be retiring the Staff Handbook and replacing it with freestanding policies with accompanying implementing procedures. Not only is this important to you but also it is important to the work we are doing in other HR initiatives like process enhancement and career mobility, to which I now turn.
- Improving HR Systems and Processes: Chapman has grown tremendously over the past twenty years at a pace that is both commendable and staggering. We recognize that our infrastructure needs investment and alignment to help you do your work more efficiently and with greater satisfaction. That is why President Struppa and Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Harold W. Hewitt have tasked several members of senior leadership – myself included – to address your needs. Partners from HR, IS&T, Budget, Financial Services and beyond have been commissioned to better integrate and enhance our PeopleSoft enterprise systems so that we leverage personal and manager self-service features not currently available; so that we add standardize our business processes and benefit from improved workflow automation; and so that we “democratize data” by giving you access to the data you need to make informed business decisions. This is a big project that will take time, but please know we are already working with an external consultant on devising the necessary implementation and deployment plan.
- Enhancing Career Mobility: When our classification system was first designed in 2012, it worked for a regional college. Today, we are a nationally ranked R2 research university. Our classification system needs to better reflect where we’ve grown. The development of Career Compass, our new staff and administrator job classification system, will start with the gathering of your input in Jan. 2023. Career Compass will add sophistication to our classifications by introducing both Job Families (clusters of like positions, either by functional role or by specialized services) and Position Levels (adding depth to each job type). More importantly for you: transparency. We understand your frustration with the current classification system: it’s not only too flat but also too vague. Just like a handheld compass is used in to identify true north, Career Compass is intended to assist in the discovery of your career potential, whether that means progressing within a current role (a “track”, if you will) or “moving across the lattice” to see what skills and experiences you would need if you want to change your career path. To assist us, we are working with Segal, a consulting firm that specializes in higher education classification and compensation strategy.
I hope you enjoy learning more in this special edition of Working@Chapman, and I hope you will join my team and me for our upcoming HR Forum where you can learn more about these and other activity drivers in the Office of Human Resources as we continuously strive to enhance your staff experience.
