Minutes of the PSRC Meeting Tuesday February 29, 2000
Present: J. Drozdoff, G. Jones, R. Moore, R. Ruegg, A. Trudel, J. Yandon, C. Ballard ex-officio: K. Reiniger, A. Hurst
Excused: S. Austin, G. Sheffer
Roman called the meeting to order and welcomed the new members to the executive. He also thanked Klaus and Andy for past service as Chairman and Secretary, respectively. The newly elected members are : Roy Moore, Anne Trudel, Glen Jones and Curtis Ballard. The Chairman asked Klaus to review the Committee's activities in the past year. Klaus stressed the importance of maintaining open communications between management, Human Resources and P&S executive while also making our position clear.
Activities included: The "Family Plan Project": HR is in the process of defining 4 areas (families) of job classifications that will provide a basis of comparison with industry for salary and benefits to TRIUMF employees. These 4 families are Administration, Technical Support, Scientific Support and Scientific. Roman and Stu are the PSRC sub committee dealing with this. Some time ago Klaus wrote to HR noting that while this process is taking place we could still proceed with comparisons based on a small number of generic job descriptions. The letter also noted that as far as the PSRC was concerned the real issue is job descriptions which are relevant and comparable to industry standards for each TRIUMF employee, not initiating families. If these are required for administrative purposes then so be it, but lets get on with it. Roman has not met with HR for sometime as HR has been busy with other work (i.e.. Policies and procedures). Roman noted that HR is nearly ready to do a presentation to all representative groups for the Administration Family. The Policies and Procedures Manual has been updated and will be posted on the web site when all employee groups have signed off on the document. There are still some changes to be implemented in the Policies and Procedures Manual for the BAE group.
The "Director Search", which has been placed on a lower priority since the director's term has been extended. The search committee members will remain the same. We need to become an active voice in the process.
The web page, which thanks to Roy Moore, has been set up and is available to all staff. There are plans to have a correspondence section and a few letters to management will be posted.
The PPR (Performance, Planning and Review) process and salary increases.
Some questions were posed and discussion followed i.e.
- Is reworking the job classification structure (Family Project) the best way to proceed? 2. Is the grid system finished?
- What about scale increases vs. bonuses?
- What about the work plans?
- What are we as the executive going to push for?
The ensuing discussion included the following highlights: Any new system examined by management should not delay any salary increases, industry comparisons or corrections to obvious anomalies in salary.
Management should set aside money for 3 areas. The first area which should be addressed immediately is to correct any obvious anomalies in salary. The second objective is a scale increase across the board to cover inflation. The third area of allocation is to catch up with industry standards over the next few years.
The grid system is still in place, but the career progress has been halted.
As a group, we prefer salary increases and merit increases to a bonus.
The dollar value of the bonus is not enough to be an incentive and should, therefore, be more "meaningful". Bonuses should only be in place for level 4 and 5. No bonus for a level 3. A discussion on what is "meaningful" will take place next meeting, possibly next week.
In the "Family Plan", there will most likely be a range of salary with a job horizon that an employee will be slotted into based upon PPR evaluation.
According to management there will be no increases or bonuses without a PPR process, so it was decided that we should seek to move the evaluations up to cover a time period from March to March and have the results by July 1st each year. This corresponds better with the year end goals and it gets the reviews over with before the summer holidays. The work plans could then be completed by September.
It was decided that our most important goal was to get the industry comparisons done, which will hopefully lead to higher salaries. Therefore, it is important to have accurate job descriptions for each employee. It was also pointed out that an "industry salary comparison" could be quite time consuming which is why it is important to get useful job descriptions as soon as possible.
Roman will discuss with Jim Hanlon how management plans to implement the new money received for the next five year plan.
Other business Other business included reviewing the constitution. A committee was formed to look at updating the constitution. Members that volunteered were Roy Moore, Ann Trudel and John Drozdoff.