TechTalks Transcript
Recruiting and Retaining Information Technology Personnel
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Linda Cabot [LC] |
 John Bucher [JB2] |
November 16, 2000
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JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for fall of 2000 and to this session on the Challenges and Magic in Recruiting and Retaining IT Professionals. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and I'd like to thank our CREN member institutions and also Campus Pipeline and Palm for their joint sponsorship of today's Tech Talk. I think it's great to see the word just getting out about the Tech Talks. Let me welcome Howard Strauss as our technology anchor for Tech Talk. Howard is a well-known Web technology expert and portal expert. And Howard, I have to ask today, are you going to work in the word "recount" into our discussion?
HS: No, I'm not going to discuss anything. I think that elections have been discussed enough, really, so I'll just skip that.
JB: All right, we'll let you off the hook.
HS: Okay, you can read about elections tomorrow morning in the news. Anyway, thank you, Judith.
HS: I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest experts, Linda Cabot and John Bucher, that will answer the questions you'd like answered and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive.
Once upon a time, two or three decades ago, universities were the place to be for anyone interested in information technology. In many respects, universities at that time were the dot-coms of today. Universities had the fastest and newest computers, were doing cutting edge software development, had the most eclectic group of techno-savvy colleagues and had working conditions, benefits and a culture that made working a delight for the young computer professionals who gathered there. The dot-coms of that era were awful places to be for the computer intelligentsia. Instead of working on neat new operating systems, compilers or equation formatters-as they would at a university-they worked on some drier-than-dust accounting applications that had to be written in COBOL! At universities, IT folks were the high priests of the new technology. The work they did was vital, crucial, critical, central, essential, fundamental and utterly inscrutable to anyone outside the innermost circles of the priesthood, including the faculty who were in awe of this new breed of advanced technologist. If you worked at a commercial data processing firm, you were a mere clerk! Keeping and retaining IT professionals back then was trivial for universities. You just chose the cr�me de la cr�me from the hordes of hopeful applicants who besieged your doors. The folks who didn't make the cut wrote COBOL programs or sold life insurance. It really didn't make much difference what they did.
Things are quite different now. The priests of IT have become the peons of the back office IT infrastructure. Getting paychecks printed and doing the bidding of university bean counters is certainly essential, but not much more so than cleaning buildings and keeping the grounds neat. At universities, the faculty are the stars. Once the IT folks were too, but that has changed. In our current environment, entry level Java programmers come to our doors asking for starting salaries higher than the salaries of people two or three levels above them! Dot-coms dangle free munchies and 70% salary increases in front of our best IT folks. Traditionally, universities have not paid industry-competitive salaries. They've asked their staff to give up a little standard of living for a big improvement in quality of life-less money, but more benefits and perks.
But the younger people we are after are after money, not benefits, many of which they don't care to use. How are we going to keep them at dot-edus after they've seen dot-coms? What can we do to replace stock options, free snacks, free parking, free health club memberships and the starring role that IT folks have at dot-coms? How can we make these folks, who are very, very employable just about everywhere, want to stay at our universities?
Part of the challenge is to understand what's really important to these employees. Sure, money's important, but so is feeling important, working on important stuff, having great management and being given the freedom to be yourself. The very difficult problem is how to give IT folks what they want without breaking the bank or turning the university into a playground for programmers. But as Einstein said, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
At Oberlin College last Friday, John Bucher, the Director IT-who is one of the experts here-was dashing off to a class on the history of opera in the middle of the day. At 4:30, he joined the entire IT staff for the weekly sherry hour. This is certainly the kind of camaraderie and quality of life enhancement that holds a group together, but much more needs to be done.
We've gathered some IT folks here who universities have managed to retain, at least for the next hour or so, to explore some of those issues on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Thank you so much, Howard, and we're anxious and very pleased to have two wonderful experts with us today. First of all is Linda Cabot from Georgia Tech and then John Bucher from Oberlin College in Ohio. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are also both members of our CREN board of trustees. They also both have very rich backgrounds in IT management in higher education and think that they will have a lot to share with us about perhaps answering some of those tough questions you've just asked, Howard, regarding quality of life and balance and how do we meet the crisis of support in higher education. Linda is currently the Director of Customer Support at Georgia Tech and she's been at Georgia Tech for 13 years, serving in a variety of advocate and support positions. She's also very active in higher education professional organizations and perhaps interestingly pertinent to today's topic, she was also a national certified career counselor for a number of years. Our second expert, John Bucher, is the Director of Information Technology at Oberlin College. Prior to coming to Oberlin, he was at Kansas State University and prior to that he was the Director of Computing Services at the University of South Dakota. Like Linda, John is very active in IT professional organizations and has important links with ACM SIGUCCS, Educom and Educause. Welcome back, by the way, to Tech Talks, John, and welcome, Linda, for your first time here.
LC: Thank you.
JB2: Thank you.
LC: Nice to be here!
JB: Great! Are you ready for all the questions? I think we have enough questions for about three sessions, don't we?
HS: That's right, we do. I'll just read the questions. We don't have to do any answers.
JB: Well, by the way, you know, we talked about the title, "Challenges and Magic," and I think we're going to have a lot of challenges, and maybe we'll find a little bit of magic, too.
HS: I think it's going to take some magic to do this.
HS: Linda and John, I mean, is this a new problem, and is it a real problem in fact, trying to recruit people for information technology in colleges and universities?
LC: It is for Georgia Tech. We have been experiencing a problem in our geographic region now for the last, well, I'd say several years. I guess it really reached a peak about a year ago and we've really started to implement some, I think, very proactive type of strategies to try to help us along, you know, hiring and being much more, I guess, a carrot for people to come to the university environment vs. going to the dot-coms or the commercial sector.
HS: What about you, John? You're in quite a different location.
JB2: Right. Well, it certainly has been a difficulty for us as well, although it seems that we have times of troubles and times of not-so-troubles. In the last four years, it appears to have gotten a little bit better, at least here in the northeast Ohio area. Perhaps we're doing some things right, but it's certainly, the problem has not gone away and I don't anticipate it going away for some time.
HS: Do we think this is just a general shortage of IT people, or is it that universities have a more difficult job attracting people than commercial firms?
JB2: Well, you'll get different views of that. I guess my quick reaction to that is it's a matter of shortage of people, and yet on the other hand, there's no doubt about it that universities and colleges have a set of circumstances that oftentimes can kind of put us in a real disadvantage there, salary being one of the major things that you mentioned earlier. But I think that there's just not that many fish in the sea, so to speak. You put your line in and you're looking for a system administrator or a database analyst or some such thing and you're not going to find as many people as you might have a few years ago.
HS: But doesn't Econ 101-which I took once upon a time-say that if there's not many fish in the sea, then the cost per fish is going to be pretty high? I mean, isn't that what we're saying?
JB2: I think so.
LC: I think so, too. I mean, and I think that again, when you get into certain geographic regions, that the cost gets extremely high. We certainly have a shortage and I will put, you know, a caveat saying a shortage of trained people. For us it is, you know, certain, I guess, skill sets that we are looking for because of the architecture of our environment, and it's difficult to find them.
JB: Linda, you mentioned that you had put into place some proactive strategies that you thought were making a difference. Do you want to-what were a couple of those?
LC: Well, I mean, we've really for three years now been working on, I think, a very good professional development program where we are defining career paths and helping people know what would be their next step once they come on board with us. We've put a lot of funds into getting training for our, you know, IT staff. It's really been part of our strategic plan that we do that over the last several years and we've endorsed that wholeheartedly. We've been successful in some instances of having market equity adjustments for the IT positions here in the Atlanta area so that we can keep the people that we have. So I think that, you know, a lot of them are things that other folks are doing, too. I think maybe just the depth of problem might be a little bit different between me and maybe John in Ohio. But we're competing with an awful lot of companies down here in Atlanta.
HS: When you say "market equity," what you mean, I think, is you're paying them more money.
LC: I guess! Yeah, that would be my succinct answer. Now, I don't say that every-�
HS: But can you really compete with the commercial firms? I mean, what I've seen-�
LC: No, I mean-no, we can't.
HS: When people wander around here, they say, "If I worked for, you know, whatever commercial firm, I could make, you know, 50% more or 70% more or 100% more."
LC: And that's a true statement here also. But I think that we are closer, if you will, to some of the-particularly for, like, our UNIX positions. I'm not saying we're there, so just don't misunderstand that. But I think we're at least trying to make it more equitable for the folks and just the fact that we are trying shows that, you know, we care about and that we're going to battle for the folks that are here. And so then you have to use some of the other benefits of being in a university environment, like tuition reimbursement and the chance to be involved in new things, which used to be the big carrot. I mean, at least for Georgia Tech, that still is true. You know, a lot of the folks here do get to get involved with the latest and greatest technology and that's still a good carrot for us. It's not the only one, though.
JB: And you're still able to do that one?
LC: We still are able to do that one because of all of the different initiatives that we have going at Georgia Tech. But, you know, as I think Howard said in the beginning, the younger the employee, they are motivated somewhat by money. And you know, there is the reality that we lost a lot of our folks over a year or so ago to the Bell South and, you know, other type companies that are in our area.
HS: Is the same sort of thing happening to you, John, or is it-I mean, are you having to pay lots more money to get people?
JB2: Well, indeed we have to be concerned with market equity. There's no question about that. But as I sit here and listen to Linda and think about some recent conversations I've had with people on both the west and east coasts, I sort of suspect that there may be a large difference between what we're paying or what higher ed pays and equity, or market equity, in different parts of the country. That is to say that perhaps in the San Francisco Bay area, Silicon Valley and so on, you may have differences that just are not reachable by higher education. And yet perhaps here in the Midwest, there may be some situations that you actually could get, if not all the way there, perhaps you could get to within 85 to 90% of par.
HS: Is there some question about the mobility of the workforce in that around your area, Linda-�
JB2: Yes.
HS: --you perhaps have a more mobile workforce, they're more willing to move somewhere, and perhaps in John's area, they're less willing to move.
LC: Well, I think-�
HS: Is that happening?
LC: I think that that's probably true, although I am not aware of a lot of folks that have left because they're moving to another location.
HS: Oh, no, I'm just saying, you know, they're more willing to take a job anywhere on the east coast or something like that.
LC: Right, right. I guess that just might be the difference of a metropolitan area to more of a rural area. I'm not real sure. I think we have a lot of people who are coming in because they want to come to Atlanta. They're either tired of the cold or they're tired of the north or whatever and we are able to bring some of those folks on board.
JB2: I saw situations in both Kansas and South Dakota where people could not move very easily because of family considerations, and so sometimes that worked for you and sometimes that worked against you. We've all heard of the Golden Handcuffs. Well, sometimes the handcuffs happen to be not so much gold but maybe a plot of land that somebody owns and is doing some farming. So it is the case that from different parts of the country to other parts, you may have a different scenario where people are more mobile or not so mobile.
LC: Right.
HS: So we're talking about some of the folks who have an easier time of it vs. some others and you're mentioning rural vs. urban. It seems like Linda was talking about the size of the institution. Right, Linda? You were suggesting that a bigger institution has more opportunities.
LC: Yes.
HS: And things, so that makes things a little easier. Are there any other things that are like that?
LC: As far as a larger institution?
HS: Well, as far as things where some folks have an easier time of it. I mean, it sounds like if you're a real big place in a rural environment, you're in good shape.
LC: I don't know whether that would be the true case or not. I just know that, I guess, in Atlanta if you're dealing with dual-career couples, you know, you may have one that is working at the university and there are certainly many more opportunities for the spouse to be working elsewhere still in the same geographic area. If you're working in, you know, Kansas, that might not be the same thing. I don't know. I've never worked in Kansas. I know that bringing people to Tech, you know, we have to be concerned about a lot of things and one of the biggies right now is quality of life issues. We are just now implementing alternative work schedules and last year, we implemented-even though we had it during the Olympics-we really started rolling into the telecommuting so that folks would not have to commute downtown, you know, every day because the reality is for us that we don't have a lot of the folks that live within 15, 20, 30 minutes of the campus.
HS: How long is your commute in?
LC: Mine? Mine on a good day coming in is probably about 40 to 45 minutes coming in, and it's raining today, so it'll be an hour to an hour and half to two hours going home.
HS: So you could spend three hours commuting.
LC: I could. Easily.
HS: Wow!
LC: That's that quality of life issue.
JB: So that's one of the challenges that you have to overcome, that you've got perhaps the latest technology toys but then the commute you have to worry about. What about the-are there any particular skill sets right now that are harder to hire for than others?
LC: Well, for me it's, we are always having a shortage of UNIX folks and Oracle DBA's are hard for us to find. And of course, we're in the midst of a PeopleSoft implementation so having folks that are involved in or know anything about PeopleSoft, it's not that you can't find them. You can't afford them. And so we're between a rock and a hard place there and a lot of times what we have to do is a saying that one of my colleagues has is that we have to grow our own. And that's why we're spending a lot of funds in the training arena.
JB2: And we should add networking engineers to that group of-�
JB: Yeah, I was just going to ask you about-�
HS: Well, it sounds like you'd add anything to that group if you need them.
JB: Yeah!
HS: I mean, because we have a problem here at Princeton getting people who are qualified Java programs because we're doing Java. I mean, if we weren't doing Java, we'd have no problem in that area. But it sounds like every area where you're growing.
JB2: And then again, let's also point out that a really top-notch helpdesk staff is not all that easy to find either.
LC: Hah! No, it is not.
JB2: And, you know, the quality of service that you offer to your campus community is going to oftentimes revolve around that front line of folks. You know, when you really get down to it, every position is quite important in its own way. The infrastructure, of course, we all worry about and that's why those of us who have that responsibility for-we're at the chief level of an organization, really worry about keeping the network up, e-mail server going and so on. But it is the case that in this business of high pressure, insatiable demands, we cannot afford even to have any position not functioning at its highest quality.
LC: Right. And I think that one of the dynamics that we happen to, I guess, experience a little is we have young folks that come to Georgia Tech and, while we do do our best to get them to stay and at least give us a couple years after they finish their studies or whatever, it's amazing how many younger folks-not everybody, now-they're used to instant gratification. And that sometimes is a little bit difficult to have happen in university educational environments.
HS: Doesn't that make a lot of the benefits you offer kind of not too interesting to people? I mean, you want somebody with instant gratification, then you say, "Well, we'll pay the tuition of your children who are going to go to college 15 years from now."
JB: Or they'll pay your tuition.
LC: Right, right. I mean, that's not going to help anybody who hasn't even thought about having a family, right.
HS: Or you say "We're going to give you wonderful retirement benefits.''�
LC: And they go, "Yeah, right."
HS: And they're 22!
LC: Right! Yeah, [inaudible].
JB2: And that's where creative recruiting comes into play.
HS: You hire old people.
JB2: Well, I certainly don't want to say that.
HS: Senior citizens.
JB2: No, but you want to-you probably want to craft your recruiting strategy in ways that will, of course, get you the most likely candidates. Not just the ones that are qualified, but also the ones that are qualified in the special way to fit into your environment. If you have the opportunities with a good training budget and if you have opportunities for professional development, you might be able to be creative on the recruiting end and then bring somebody in that has an aptitude and a whole lot of potential that you could mold into the kind of person that you really need. Especially if they're going to be a solid team member and if they're going to stick around for a while.
HS: Don't you have the problem of you take this person and you make them into something wonderful and then they become very attractive to lots of other companies?
JB2: Well, sure, but-�
HS: You're doing training for the company down the street.
JB: And John, while you're answering that, maybe we can incorporate. We've got a question here from Greg Richie at Penn State and he's asking about following up on that question, when you grow your own folks, how do you insure that you get a return on your investment? Do with a contract? How do you keep your freshly-trained staff with you? I think that links right into what Howard was saying. Is there a way to do that, or have you experimented with that?
JB2: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is you make sure that you have an environment that is a retention-oriented environment. One where people want to stick around, where they can see professional and personal growth, where they feel comfortable coming to work every day. Not so much-well, certainly in what they do but also in how they do it and who they do it with. And that's the magic of retention in my opinion. There's always going to be folks that are looking for that next bump in salary or for that next professional advancement, and certainly we all do that at certain times in our career. But on the other hand, you want to craft a situation where the retention factor is high enough to perhaps even offset some salary or some professional advancement opportunities. And you do that through that magic.
LC: But the reality is that there are times when you may sink a lot of money into training an individual in a specific application and they become very good at it and a company outside that is also using that same application can dangle a carrot that, yes, you're going to lose the person and you do lose the person. Georgia Tech being a state institution doesn't have an employee sign a contract or anything as far as, okay, you're going to turn me into a Solaris administrator and if I leave within, you know, three months after my training, I owe you money back.
JB: Um-hum.
LC: We've talked about it but it's a little bit difficult to do that when you are in a kind of a state environment, a state university system. Instead, we hope that we begin to, I guess, cultivate some loyalty factor. You know, some loyalty factor that they not only are liking what they do, they want to be able to see it through so that once they've learned the application, they can actually get to use it and see how it works. That's not always-you're not always successful there. But-�
JB2: You know, this might be the time to bring up the issue of broadbanding salary types, the notion that you can create a type of pay structure that is broader and flatter than a traditional pay system. One that's characterized by wider salary ranges and fewer job titles and vertical levels.
HS: But doesn't that just help HR? I mean, it makes HR's job easier. Does it really help employees? And do employees really care?
JB: Yeah, I liked your phrase, "loyalty factor." What are some of the things folks are doing to build that loyalty factor?
LC: Well, I think again, for us, the big things are that we are trying to accommodate people as far as the normal benefits that, I guess, every university has with their health and disability insurance and that type of thing.
HS: If bad things happen to you, you're okay. But if bad things don't happen to you��
LC: Yeah, but we're also trying to really help them as far as develop themselves professionally.
HS: Do you allow people to telecommute? Either of you?
LC: We do.
HS: John?
JB2: We don't have a situation where we're doing that right now, but I could see a situation where we might craft a solution for somebody.
HS: But Linda, do you let anybody telecommute? How does that work? LB: Well, basically we are leaving it up to each individual director or department within OIT to look at the positions and make a decision in that directorate on whether their service level would be impacted. If they believe that it will not, then they allow people to telecommute. And like I said, we're just moving into more of the alternative work weeks where people will be able to work four ten-hour days or five nine-hour days.
HS: To save a whole day of commuting.
LC: Right. And then we're going to pilot that through the 30th of March and then stop and take a look and see what has happened, you know. Has our service level changed in any way?
JB: How many folks are you thinking about piloting that with?
LC: Well, we're offering it actually to the entire OIT department and not everybody will be able to participate in it, again, depending on what the job responsibilities and job functions are. But for those that can, we're hoping that there won't be any productivity decrease. In fact, we're hoping that because it's a benefit that they've asked for, that productivity will in fact increase.
HS: So you think that the good points of telecommuting really outweigh the downside?
LC: I do, so far. We've done telecommuting now for over a year or more.
HS: And it's worked out real well for you?
LC: And that has worked out very well, and it really has worked out well from the employee perspective. I mean, because we do have so many people who commute into campus from quite a long distance, they're real appreciative of not having to do that once a week and then, you know, being able to still do their job at home.
JB: So you have the telecommunicating as when they work at home one or two or three days a week?
LC: Well, right now in my department, we allow them one day a week.
JB: Okay.
LC: And again, because we've left the decision up to each individual director within OIT, it may be different in another department, but I'm not aware of it.
JB: Actually, one of the questions coming in on telecommuting is from your fellow Georgia institution, University of Georgia.
LC: Oh, okay!
HS: Yeah, that was actually the second part of the question.
JB: Yeah, Sylvia Elliott, whom you probably know.
LC: Yeah, I don't recognize the name.
JB: Here we go-�
HS: John, did you have a comment on that?
JB2: Well, I guess I wanted to point out that there's always something that is more or less important to individual employees. That is to say, if you've got an awful commute, then perhaps larger angst is focused on that commute. If you make that commute less of a hassle for that particular employee, it may be a very advantageous thing to do. On the other hand, if the commute isn't that big of a deal as considered by the employee, they could transfer their angst over to something else. We talked about that earlier. And I want to, if I can here, just-I have this view, when I picture what it takes to retain staff, and I even think about this as myself. I sort of picture a bar chart with various bars allocated to the various parts of a job. Certainly salary is there and where the office is and how far your commute is and what your professional opportunities are and professional and personal growth and so on. And you try to get-as an employer, as a supervisor, I try to create and maintain a situation where not one bar is too far out of kilter with the rest of them. Does that make sense? That is to say, everybody wants a salary to be properly situated and not too far off of market, and yet on the other hand, if you only pay attention to salary and don't pay attention to these other things, you're going to lose good people. It's just not going to work for you.
LC: I think that you're right, that you have to have a balance, and I guess the challenge, if I may, for us is as John was saying, each individual employee has something that they particularly are enamored with. And for me as a director and other directors, it's to figure out on an individual basis, what is it that lights your fire?
HS: How do you get HR to go along with that? I mean, HR, it seems, treats people as big blocks and so if some employee comes in and says, you know, "What lights my fire is, say, taking no vacation but getting paid for it." Really. How can you get HR to do that?
LC: Well, I have to, you know, commend our HR department. They have bent over backwards over the last two years to really work with us, to not only design some of the programs that we're putting into place, but we've gotten a technical recruiter on board that we are able to use that-�
HS: Yeah, but do they treat IT people differently than other staff? And will they treat individual IT people differently?
LC: I think that the reality is that they may have to, at times, treat IT people differently than staff. But then, I say that hesitantly because there's a perception that faculty get treated differently than staff.
HS: But of course they do!
LC: Yeah! And so maybe-�
HS: But we know it's true.
LC: So maybe it's just the IT people's turn, all right? They do get treated a little bit differently because of, again, the difficulty in getting those positions filled.
HS: Is that a point that we can make in this Tech Talk is that that's something that universities need to do? We need to get HR folks to realize that, because of the way things are right now, that IT people have to be treated differently? Don't we have to [inaudible]?
LC: I think that you might want to start off with getting HR folks to work with you.
HS: HR folks listening to this webcast right now?
JB2: I was going to ask that question! I have some anxiety about making a stab at this, but let me go ahead and try anyway. HR offices don't like to come out and say-I mean, let's face it. They don't want to say that they have a different style of treatment to one category of employees vs. the other. That's not-�
LC: That's not an HR stance.
JB2: That's not an HR stance!
HS: That's certainly not traditionally what they were doing. That's why I wonder if we have to make them change.
JB2: Well, but let's admit that on any campus-and I've worked on four different campuses, so I can--you know, a sample size of four, for what it's worth. You know, you have a situation where you have some positions-never mind IT vs. others. Let's just talk about some situations are harder to fill than others. This has always been the case, and that changes from year to year and it's going to change from campus to campus. My guess is that most HR offices would be willing to admit that you have to deploy different methodologies and perhaps some flexing of the rules-let's just use it that way-depending on the type of position that they're trying to fill. And so I'm hoping, I would expect that those of us who have good relationships and have entered into a discussion with our HR directors, this is what we go for. Not a breaking of the rules, but within the flexibility that's allowed-and of course, that's going to change from institution to institution and state to state and whatever to whatever-you try to deploy that. I can tell you, working in a state institution is a whole lot different than working in a private institution.
LC: Yes! I was going to say, I would say that the operative word that John has used is "flexibility." I think that if you can get the HR people to understand that you need to have the flexibility to make the offers that will get people here or to have a technical recruiter for technical positions or to offer that, you know, we can make-when it's appropriate, you know-market equity adjustments. It's not to say that people are treated differently. It's just the reality of the situation, the you've got to have that technical infrastructure if you want to continue to run.
HS: But Linda, you're back to talking about, I think, market equity, which is to say, okay, so HR will say, "We'll pay somebody a little bit more," or something. "We'll pay them even more than what they thought we were going to." But I think you told me earlier that at Georgia Tech, you have to pay for parking.
LC: Yes, we do! Yes!
HS: Well, if somebody comes in, some great Java programmer comes in and says, "I find that onerous. I won't pay!"
LC: I don't think that that would go over very well, since everyone has to pay for parking. And I think that if anybody started having-�
HS: And HR wouldn't say, "Well, we could reimburse this person for parking"?
LC: Yeah, but, you know, again, being a state institution and everything and open everything, I believe that that would get out and that would cause us more heartache than it was worth. I would rather try to adjust his salary so it would accommodate it.
JB: So you'd give him an extra fifty dollars?
LC: You can take that way out.
JB: There's a question that came in from-or a comment that came in, actually, from Tom Weber. You probably saw it there, Howard, too, from Penn State, and he mentions that there's a couple of places at their university that they offer screening tests to some existing employees to see if they can identify what their basic aptitudes are before they go through or put them through new training and retraining type of programs. Are either one of your institutions doing something like that?
JB2: We have not done that except for, I think, a couple of years ago, we used a test to screen out some folks for a helpdesk.
HS: I noticed you said "screen out."
LC: Not "screen in."
JB2: Well, I guess I ought to stop and think here.
LC: Filter, filter, filter.
HS: Filter, okay.
LC: We don't have a skills-based testing for the technical positions that we do for our folks. What we have are group interviews, that we can pretty much get a handle on what the skill set is. What we are beginning to do with our professional development program that would be web-based is offer some tools to our employees that if they either are in a technical position and it's not a good fit, to give them some opportunities to look at other career paths or, you know, things where they can laterally move or other career or other jobs that they would be able to leverage some of the skills that they have maybe in the technical arena to a different one. And we're going to use some-they are out on the market and known in career counseling in psychology fields, you know, we're going to use the Strong and we use the Self-Directed Search to help them get a handle on what are some of my opportunities?
HS: Do either or both of you have a career track for people who remain technical, who never become managers? I mean, can somebody at your institution who never becomes a manager earn as much money as a manager?
JB2: See, that's kind of what broadbanding refers to in a way.
JB: You accommodate that under broadbanding?
JB2: We don't have a formal program of broadbanding the salary here, but we certainly-�
HS: I've seen some broadband things where one of the bands is defined as "managers." To get into that band, you have to be a manager and that's a band above these other bands.
LC: We have them that are lateral, where you may be a systems support specialist and they go from grades one to five. And when you get up in the higher grades, those are in the same pay structures as maybe a supervisor or manager's position, so they can stay on the technical side because they don't want to be a manager.
HS: Do they get fancy titles if they do that?
LC: They can call themselves pretty much anything they want to call themselves! But on the books, you know, with what we have to do as far as the institute at that level, it's a grade. You know, like a one, two, three or four in a certain career track.
HS: When you folks do lose people-you said you've lost people.
LC: Um-hum!
HS: Do you try to go up and try to find out why these people left?
LC: We have exit interviews.
HS: Okay, and-�
LC: They're voluntary. We don't force them to do that, but we do have exit interviews and we do take the information that we get and try to use it where appropriate to, I guess, help us rationalize some of our fights we have to have.
HS: Do you see any patterns or trends, or is it just really individual cases?
LC: Well, I know that for us, about again, I would say not so much right now, but I would say about a year ago, we were losing a lot of folks because they were being offered significant salary increases outside. Those that we've lost since then-and I'm not saying none of them are salary because certainly they are-but there's been a variety of reasons. Some people came to Atlanta and didn't like it and so went back to their home state. Some people decided that there was not fast enough career progression and so they wanted to go somewhere else. Maybe they felt like they weren't having as many opportunities to get involved in some of the projects that they would like to get involved in and they've left for other reasons. Maybe a spouse left.
HS: How come you didn't know that? I mean, if somebody was there and they were unhappy because they weren't getting involved in enough projects, are you doing things to-it would seem like you could save people by discovering what made them unhappy. I mean, obviously, if they're offered a zillion dollars, you can't deal with that.
LC: I think that-I'm sure that John will endorse me on this-I think that depending on the managers and their relationship with their line staff, you may know of those things and you can, you know, counterbalance them and see what you can get them involved in. But every manager, just like every individual, has a different style and some people don't really work at knowing what it is that pleases their employees.
JB2: I have a much smaller staff than Linda, of course. Actually, our staffs might be the same but she's a sub-unit of the office there at Georgia Tech.
LC: Right.
JB2: And this is just one of the advantages of working at a smaller place. I can pretty much stay on top of situations with my 35 staff. I'm close to my managers and I hope they're close to their staff, and if something's going on there, I feel that we can get to it before it gets too bad.
LC: And one other thing I'll mention is, two years ago, we created a workgroup advisory council. And it is made up of the employees and it becomes kind of a neutral party that employees can go to if they don't feel comfortable coming to their direct supervisor or their manager or their director or the vice president, even. And that has proved beneficial because that has been a conduit, if you will, for gathering people-I mean, gathering ideas or gathering suggestions that maybe people don't feel comfortable saying on a one-to-one basis that we have been able to turn into some of the programs that we've got going here.
HS: That seems like a really interesting idea! Could you tell me more about who is that person or those people?
LC: It's a group of people. It's called-we call it our WAC group. It's our workgroup advisory council. And it is a number of employees that are representatives and each of our directors. We have seven different directorates in OIT. We have about 250 employees in OIT. And they are on the council for a year or two, you know, depending on how involved they get. And it is a place for employees to come to a group that is seen as their peers and neutral to make suggestions on what would make OIT a better place to work. If they have gripes, they can go to them with gripes. They are not mediators! And they, you know, are not representatives of OHR.
HS: And are they-if they come to this group with a gripe, is that gripe kept confidential/�
JB: You had mentioned, both-John, you had mentioned you had 35 folks, and Linda, you said you had about 250. And I was kind of curious. How many open positions do you have right now?
JB2: I have one.
HS: How long has it been open?
LC: We have more than that!
HS: How long has it been open?
JB2: Just a couple months.
LC: Okay, we do our statistics, I think, every Monday and our last one for just IT technical positions, I think we had like 17 to 20 openings.
JB: Okay, so it's a little bit under ten percent there.
HS: Do you have positions that have been open for a long time, Linda?
LC: Yes, we've had some positions that have been open for close to a year, and those are our UNIX system administrator type positions that are coupled with someone who has maybe Remedy application experience or PeopleSoft application experience or BAN application experience or those type of things. So yes, we've had some that have been open.
HS: For folks who are having real problems filling positions and things, did you suggest that they consider outsourcing, going off to some application service provider? I mean, if you do that, they have the problem!
LC: Yeah, and we have on occasion hired contractors, but we haven't what I would call outsourced entire units of any functional area.
JB: So these positions are open within groups across the organization?
LC: Across the board, right.
JB: Okay. We're getting--you know, we'd like to invite our listeners, there's still time for a couple more questions. We've got, I think, one question that we haven't asked yet. Howard, do you have any others that you would like to ask?
HS: Well, there's actually a question from Sylvia. We only answered one of her questions.
JB: I'm so glad you went back to that one!
HS: Of course, she noticed that we answered her second one and not her first one. But Sylvia says, "Do you give certification training as a perk or do you require it as a qualification? And if you give it as a perk, do you employees leave soon after?" We talked a little bit about that, but is training a perk or is it a requirement?
JB2: Let me say that we have not made it either a requirement nor have we offered it as a perk. I've been approached by a couple of staff members over the four years that I've been here to pay for certification training for them and I've stayed away from that. I think different places will have to come down on that as they see fit. I've preferred not to do that.
HS: So you have no problem, say, training somebody in whatever, Microsoft Office, but you don't want to give them certification in Microsoft Office, that sort of thing?
JB2: I think that's how I feel about it, yeah!
LC: And we're the opposite.
JB2: Are you?
LC: I was going to say, we do encourage them to go and get their certification and we do pay for that. In only my department-I don't know how the other directors are handling it-if they go for their certification test, which is $100 for each one, they can take it as many times as they want, but when they bring in their passing score to me, then I reimburse them that $100.
JB: Interesting, okay.
HS: John-�
JB2: What bothers me about that is how do you keep that equitable across your entire staff?
LC: Because I allow anybody to do it. I don't say, "No, you can't."
JB2: But some areas have certification possibilities and some don't.
LC: Well, in my particular department, just about every area does, so maybe I'm lucky in that sense. Now, they don't have to. We're not forcing it on them. They don't have to get certified, but that's an option if they would care to do that.
HS: Okay, Ray Twigg has a follow-up question on the alternative work week schedules and he wonders if you've actually measured whether productivity increases or decreases or stays the same?
LC: We haven't on the alternative work week schedules because we're just going into that. If he wants to check back with me in March, I'd be glad to share. On telecommuting, we have begun to measure-well, we've been keeping track and everything. Now we've been going in and taking a look at specifically what's turnaround time, volume, productivity, projects completed, that type of thing. And from the project perspective, it has been very positive. From sheer volume, because one of my areas is the kind of helpdesk function, it seems to be a little bit lower when they are on the telecommuting schedules and I'm now investigating as to why. I [inaudible].
HS: We have a question in from an HR coordinator. We were hoping to get some HR people here.
HS: And we have one from University of California Davis, from Nancy Harrington. She has a bunch of questions, actually, enough to take us probably to the end here, which is great! She wondered if either of you worked in a unionized environment and what effect that has on this whole situation.
LC: I do not, thank you!
JB2: I do-�
LC: Oh, you do?
HS: But hold it a little bit. Linda said "thank you"! You're suggesting that you think that a unionized environment would make things more difficult for you?
LC: I do. I do think it would make things more difficult.
JB2: I do work in a unionized environment and I want to be very careful with my answers here. Not because I'm coming down on either side of a unionized environment, but because I want to make sure that I make myself clear. There are times when you, as an employer, as a supervisor necessarily feel somewhat constrained from working in a union environment. After all, a union environment-at least the ones that I know of-have well-defined job descriptions and well-defined pay grades and so on. There are sometimes, especially in technology, opportunities where you'd like to kind of push the boundaries of both the job description and the salary ranges and you can't. In our situation here at Oberlin College, we have a local union called OCOPE, the Oberlin College Office and Professional Employees, and of my 35 staff members, I think ten or eleven, as I can recall, are union members. This union was just that, office and professional workers. The union has been around for 30, 35 years, I believe, and has been a very successful component of this college environment. And yet it is the case that, especially in a fast-paced environment such as information technology, union structure doesn't always provide you the flexibility that you'd like. On the other hand, working within the rules and knowing what those guidelines are, I believe you can successfully manage in that type of environment.
HS: Okay, one of you promised that you would mention sometime during this webcast COPA.
LC: CUPA.
HS: CUPA, okay. It sounds like cuppa cawfee here. A cuppa. Whichever it is. Could one of you just say a few words about CUPA because it seems like a really interesting thing.
JB2: Our HR office probably knows much more about this [inaudible].
HS: We'll get her up on the phone and have her answer this.
JB2: I believe it's the college and university HR association.
LC: I think it's actually called College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).
JB2: Right. And they're very active. They publish salary surveys and many other kinds of resources.
HS: And we have a wonderful link to them on the CREN website.
HS: A couple last questions here about what people can do. I mean, if folks out there today have people ready to leap out the door because dot-coms are holding stock options and high salaries in front of them, what should folks be doing right now to try to stop that?
JB2: Let me say that if people are ready to jump out the door, you've already lost that battle with that particular person.
HS: Okay, that's a really good point, too.
JB2: You have to construct an environment where people from the get-go feel trusted, feel wanted, feel part of a team, so they never get to the point where they're standing on the threshold ready to leave. That's a bad situation and if that's the situation that you've reached, then you better step back and take a look at your entire management process because something is wrong. Linda, what would you add to that?
LC: I agree wholeheartedly with what you just said about if they're ready to leap, then all you can is hand them a pillow. But-�
HS: A pillow?
LC: You know, so it doesn't hurt when they fall or whatever.
JB: Or when they jump out the window!
LC: Or when they jump out that window! But I think that what you have to do is long before they get to the leaping mode is to communicate with your employees, to survey your employees, to find out what it is that they want and again, you're not going to be able to do everything that everybody wants.
HS: Like free parking. Forget it!
LC: At least on our campus for right now, forget that. But you can certainly be aware of what it is that they would find to be of benefit to them and to make them want to stay with you. And then you need to, you know, you have to pick your battles. You're going to have to prioritize the things that might be leveraged to the whole group and everybody would get some positive benefit from that, and deal with the kind of idiosyncrasies one a one-to-one basis. But I really think that the big key is you better stay tuned in. If you tune out because you get too bloody busy or if you tune out because, you know, your focus is elsewhere, then you're courting disaster.
HS: Is there anything that we really need to change? I mean, any substantial thing we really need to change at higher ed to adapt to this changing IT kind of shortage? I mean, do we really have to change HR?
LC: I think-yes.
JB2: You know, there was talk within the customer service circles here about ten, 15 years ago about getting close to our customers. And one phrase that comes to mind is let's get close to our employees as well.
LC: Right.
JB2: I mean that in a trusting way, such that people feel that we have an environment where they feel they're part of, that they're an important part of, that they're appreciated and trusted.
LC: And I would add that there are a couple things that I think you can actually really do change. I think for most of us in education, the time from interviewing a person or even posting a position to getting the interviews and to being able to make an offer is too long.
JB2: Amen!
LC: We can't turn on a dime. So if there's anything that we can do to, you know, shrink that process, stay within the bounds of your institution, my institution or whatever. But if you can figure out a way that we can turn quickly, then I think that would be one game, and I don't think we can do that without really forming a tight collaboration with OHR.
HS: Why does it take so long? Is there one or two things that are really the hangup?
LC: Well, we have-although we've made some improvements, so let me put that caveat up front. You know, we have a fairly big or long approval process, you know, that has to happen.
HS: Is that HR approvals or you guys?
LC: Well, I mean, we have several that we have to do locally and then it has to go over to HR and then, you know, you have to have EEOC look at it and we have to make sure that we have, whether it's an underutilized position, you know, as far as from affirmative action and stuff. And so we have lots of little hurdles that we have to jump.
JB2: Let me jump in here, too, and say that I am a strong believer in doing all that we can to have a very clean recruiting process. That means letters to applicants saying, "Thank you for your application." That means letters to the unsuccessful candidates. That means making sure that when you interview somebody, they're picked up on time and that they have a nice experience. All of that stuff. I think that's really important. And having been a candidate myself for positions, I know that, you know, an institution can leave a sour taste in your mouth and you don't want to do that. LC: Right, right, and those you do have control over.
JB2: Absolutely! You can't control some of the bureaucracies on campus, but you can be right there as quickly as you can. An institution can leave a sour taste in your mouth and you don't want to do that. LC: Right, right, and those you do have control over.
JB2: Absolutely! You can't control some of the bureaucracies on campus, but you can be right there as quickly as you can with those various components of that recruiting process.
HS: Okay, I think that in many cases, that's what it comes down to. It comes down to just individuals doing good stuff, really giving people a picture of what the whole university's about.
JB2: Indeed.
LC: I do think that's true!
HS: Judith, I think it's time to wrap up here.
JB: I do think it's time to wrap up here. I was about to. You know what, this has been just a great session and I think our experts have provided some insights and advice that everyone can benefit from, so this was great. Do you have a final comment before we close up, Howard?
HS: I think we ended it on just the right tone here. Individual folks doing their part being really the most important thing, even in a giant institution.
JB: Okay, so the people-to-people. All right, well, great. Our next session then is going to be two weeks from today on November 30 and it features two experts on Windows 2000. We're going to be looking at the question of just how does one go about planning for Windows 2000 in higher education and some starting questions and answers is kind of where the field is at right now. We'll have Paul Hill from MIT and David [inaudible] from the University of Colorado with us. I'm also pleased to say that Richard Jones from the University of Colorado, who was a Y2K expert with us a while back will, in fact, be cohosting that Tech Talk so we'll have lots of expertise, Howard.
HS: That's great. Are you going to be off in France again?
JB: No, actually, I'm going to be off at the CREN board meeting with John and Linda, so there we go! Many thanks to everyone, all the institutions who support the Tech Talks, and again to our sponsors for today's session, Palm and Campus Pipeline. Both Palm and Campus Pipeline are helping to build our everywhere-anywhere computing environment of the future. Thanks to all the Tech Talk folks who helped make the event possible today. A special thanks to our dynamic duo today of Linda Cabot and John Bucher. To technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, the Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the whole support team at Merit; the Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, John. Bye, Linda. Bye, Howard. See you all soon.
LC: Bye.
JB2: Bye.
HS: Bye, everybody.
END OF WEBCAST
