Compensation Home

Guilford has been engaged in a process of creating a compensation plan for the college to cover all employees: faculty, staff, and administrators. This process arose from a series of faculty and community discussions in the 2014-15 academic year. A good summary of those discussions is available on this site here: Salary Policy Home (2014-15)

In the 2015-16 year, an ad hoc Compensation Committee was convened by President Jane Fernandes to begin work on a new compensation policy. This process has progressed in several phases, including:

• Creation of a first draft of a compensation philosophy (completed December 2015, draft philosophy here)
• Communication of that philosophy to the community and collection of feedback and commentary
• Research and discussion into a minimum living wage as a baseline for wages for college employees
• Establishment of an agreed-upon set of peer colleges to use when setting compensation targets and benchmarks
• Creation of a formula that would establish target salaries for faculty members based on factors such as faculty rank, time of service, prior experience, and discipline
• Creation of a process to establish target salaries and classifications for staff positions

The committee and its subcommittees provided opportunities (both electronic and in person) for discussion and feedback throughout the year. Each of the above phases (except the final one) was either complete or well underway by the end of the Spring 2016 semester, with points of agreement and proposals ready in many cases.

The formula for faculty salaries is of particular interest to faculty members, and we held two faculty forums during Spring 2016 to discuss the issues related to the crafting of this formula. In May, the Faculty Salary subcommittee produced a proposed formula for faculty salary targets.

Although we are currently in summer session, when many faculty members are away, I felt it important to give faculty a chance to examine and discuss the proposed faculty salary formula.

The faculty salary proposal is detailed on this page:

Faculty Salary Policy Materials

I’ve set up a discussion area here with subsections for various topics and choices surrounding the policy.

Faculty Salary Policy Discussion Area

Useful documents and links to other materials are described below.

UPDATE: New materials have been added from Fall 2016. See the links immediately below.

Links and Documents

• New items from Fall 2016:
  • The updated recommendations from the subcommittee from September 2016
  • A set of slides describing the recommendations and the thinking behind them to be presented at the Faculty Meeting on September 28, 2016.
• Ad hoc Compensation Committee minutes and records (login required)
• Draft compensation philosophy (Draft 6)
• Jane’s report to Clerk’s Committee (May 24, 2016)
• Compensation Project end-of-year report (May 23, 2016)
• Faculty Salary Policy Materials (for online viewing, includes proposal and slides listed below)
  • Faculty Salary Subcommittee Report and Proposal (May 6, 2016)
  • Faculty Salary Subcommittee Proposal accompanying slides (PowerPoint, May 6, 2016)
• Salary formula calculator (updated, based on the proposal released September 22, 2016)
• Peer Comparisons Materials (for online viewing, includes the two documents below)
  • Peer Comparisons group update (April 15, 2016)
  • Peer Comparisons data sheet (April 15, 2016)
• Models for salary adjusments (Dave Dobson’s idle speculations, June 3, 2016)
• Salary Policy Home (from 2014-15)
• Notes from informal meeting June 17, 2016