Compensation

The Board of Regent’s policy states that the University strives to achieve and maintain a compensation structure that, when combined with benefits and other rewards, is competitive relative to institutional peers and other appropriate labor markets and serves to attract and retain a high-performance workforce. For most job families, the market is defined as all organizations across the Twin Cities metro.

Salary Ranges Reflect the External Market

• Minimum: The lowest rate of pay the University is willing to pay for the job.  

• Midpoint: The median rate (or 50th percentile) being paid for this job in the external market

• Maximum: The highest rate of pay the University is willing to pay for the job.  Typically the most the external market will generally bear for this job.

Salary Ranges for specific job codes can be found on the Job Classification Specifications.

• Job Classification Specifications

The University wants to encourage managers to make pay decisions (move people through the salary range) based on the employee’s job mastery they have of their position. Years of experience, education, or years of service with the University should not be a primary factor in distinguishing pay between employees Typically, when a person has more experience and more certifications/education, they often have stronger job mastery but this is not always the case. We have internal equity in salaries if we are providing payment to employees based on their relative performance and job mastery, rather than their years of experience.

Human Resources will partner with you to provide a strategic recommendation on salary by performing a salary analysis. This analysis is guided by Compa-Ratio, that takes job mastery, internal equity, scope and complexity of the position, years of experience and education into consideration.

Signals that Salary Adjustments May be Needed

• Difficulty Attracting & Retaining Talent

  • • Offers are being rejected by your top candidate(s) due to low salary 

    • You have noticed high turnover and higher salary is noted as a primary reason for departure

• Experiencing Compression 

  • • Occurs when you have too many employees paid low in the salary range, including employees who are high performing with strong experience.

    • Usually noticed when you hire from the outside market and the salary of the new hire exceeds internal salaries for top performers.

• Salaries, after applying merit increase (if any), are within 2-3% of the range minimum.

  • • These salaries may fall below range minimum when the salary ranges are adjusted the following January.

The numbers listed on the bottom of the chart are the compa-ratio for that level of job mastery, explained in the next section.

Adjust Based on Constraints that May Affect Range Placement

The funding for any pay programs or salary increases are always based on the department’s/unit’s ability to pay. Almost all organizations struggle to fund all of their needed pay adjustments. You may have to prioritize the areas in need of increases, giving first priority to roles that have low compa-ratios but also:

• Have high turnover and

• Are very difficult to fill and 

• Are mission-critical in nature

• Augmentation vs. Overload vs. Overtime Decision Chart

Off-Cycle salary increase requests are a form of in-range adjustment to an employee’s University institutional base salary. Off-cycle increases may be requested for an employee for the following reasons:

• Market Adjustment

• Internal Equity Adjustment

• Retention

Temporary augmentations fall under two general categories: workload and assignment augmentations.

• Workload augmentations may be proposed when there is a need for a unit to increase an employee’s workload due to staff shortages, the need to increase efficiency or effectiveness within the unit, or special projects that exist outside an employee’s current job scope. Often the additional or new duties do not rise to the level which would justify a change in classification.

• Assignment augmentations may be given to an employee who is officially assigned by management to perform all the duties of a vacant higher classification, for five or more workdays, may be eligible for an augmentation per policy. Augmentations for longer than a year will be reviewed for possible reclassification.

Any of the above increase type requests must proceed according to the following steps:

• Supervisor/Responsible Administrator contacts HR with request to perform a salary analysis (internal, external, or combination) to determine an appropriate increase amount.

• Once the increase amount has been determined, submit the Dean's Office Salary Increase Request Form.

• HR will send the request to the function area Senior Leader for approval.

• If approved, the request is forwarded to Finance for budget approval.

• HR will process the increase and issue a notice letter.