By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Duane Ritter

Duane Ritter, director of employment, compensation, and records in Human Resources, has been in charge of an ongoing project to modernize UGA’s classification and pay system. The process began in 2001 with an independent study that found—to no one’s surprise—that the system adopted by the University System of Georgia in the 1970s had become riddled with inconsistent job descriptions and titles and non-competitive salaries. Ritter talked to Columns about the revamping process, which is nearing completion.

Columns: Tell me why the university started this process.

Ritter: I’ve been here five years, and when I was being interviewed the human resources director told me our classification structure doesn’t work. The titles don’t reflect what people do. We have obsolete titles that no longer describe the type of work being done, and whole groups of titles that are completely nondescript, like “program coordinators,” which can mean anything. We’ve lost the ability even to analyze our staff—we don’t know, for example, how many information technology employees we have because we can’t run a report based on people’s titles and say with 100 percent surety that we’ve got everybody doing information technology.

Then there was the issue of how we pay compared to the labor markets that we compete in. There is a general sense that we’re below the market for many jobs, but we couldn’t do an accurate market analysis because we couldn’t identify who at the university is doing a particular job.

It was a 30-year-old system and there was little growth or evolution.

Columns: I know you began by asking us all to write out what we did. And then you had to read and sort those?

Ritter: Right—thousands of them, a massive undertaking. We got fairly good response and people really gave us good descriptions of what they were doing. So we read through those descriptions.

Columns: How many staff?

Ritter: There were four of us, and thousands of job descriptions.

We read through them all. Then we put them into job families—people that seem to be doing the same type of work. And then we looked for different levels within those categories, with different titles we should use. We felt that was the best way to approach it—doing it all at once. We could have said, “Let’s just look at one kind of position, and do all those and move on,” but we didn’t know if we had them all.

Columns: And with the hiring freeze, many people are doing more than one thing.

Ritter: Right. And that problem became more serious the more we did—jobs weren’t being filled, so people are really in mixed jobs. We’ve also had full-scale reorganizations in some departments. Conceptually you’d like to do something like this in a vacuum, but the reality is that it’s a moving target.

Columns: How do you classify people who do more than one thing? Do they get the title that is mostly what they do?

Ritter: There’s no perfect answer to that. It’s based on “what do they mostly do,” but there’s also the question of the most significant thing that they do. It’s a combination of time spent and complexity level. It’s different on almost every job we look at. And at some point you also have to realize that everything isn’t going to be perfect.

Columns: You must feel you know UGA well right now.

Ritter: One positive aspect of this is that we’ve spent a lot of time out on campus talking to people, so I think we have a deeper appreciation for what everybody’s doing.

Columns: How far are you now?

Ritter: We’re looking at individual titles in job families. We have talked to people we called subject-matter experts for each family—people who understood that type of work who could give us feedback. We’re wrapping up the design stage.

So we know the new titles, and how they’re described, and now we’re making sure everybody is assigned to one of these titles. That’s an easy task for bus operators and police officers and carpenters, because those titles are all in one department. We’ve pretty much got those jobs slotted. It gets harder when you get to groups like information technology—IT people are everywhere.

There is a group of IT managers who meet on an ongoing basis, and we got them involved in the process. Their feedback helped. We’re comfortable that we’re moving in the right direction.
We’re not as close on some other families—like the administrative support group, another group that is spread throughout campus.

But we’re almost ready to convert to new titles for the families that are concentrated in one department. By the end of this year we should have most of these titles in place.

Columns: Will you introduce the new titles all at once, or in groups as you’re ready?

Ritter: We’ve had a lot of discussion about that—there are advantages both ways. We’re going to try to do them all at once with the new titles becoming effective in January.

Columns: I assume that you’re going to try to do this so that nobody’s salary will be immediately affected. Is that going to be a problem?

Ritter: Yes, it’s a problem. No one’s salary is going down—that’s not even on the table. But we’ve gone through all this slotting independent of salary ranges.

We had initially intended to address salary issues as part of this study. We had hoped to establish market-based salary ranges and adjust salaries. Unfortunately, the funding doesn’t exist right now. We expect no salary adjustments as a result of this initial implementation.

Columns: This is not the best time for the university to deal with this.

Ritter: Right. We have got to think about how we put this into a budget process, so that over some span of years we can solve it. It won’t fix itself—we have to have a plan. And the timing is terrible. Ever since we started, the budget situation has just gotten worse.

Columns: In some ways it must be satisfying to get this organized.

Ritter: And that’s where the danger lies—and the frustration—because you can see what you want to do but it’s not easy. It takes patience and time. It would have been better to have half a million dollars set aside to deal with the problems we uncovered, and six extra people to do the work, but we have to be realistic. It’s been a professional challenge—but it needed to be done.