Pay for Performance -- Program Update

To: UC Santa Cruz Staff

From: Steven Stein, Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Human Resources Officer

Greetings Colleagues,

This is an update regarding the 2016/17 Pay for Performance Program. SHR and a cross-functional work team continue to work on changes designed to simplify and focus the program.

Just as a reminder, even as we build changes into our existing tools, processes and procedures, we want to remind everyone about a few basic best practices:

  • Managers, supervisors and their staff benefit from creating goals that support the university mission and are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) or SIMple (specific, important, measurable).
  • Managers and supervisors demonstrate their engagement with staff by holding frequent 1:1 meetings with their team members to review progress and provide feedback and coaching as appropriate.

Training is a key element of our overall effort and we have some new offerings scheduled soon.
“Focus on Performance” is a classroom training experience with two modules that will be offered to the campus (See Training & Development Course Listings.) Training is also available upon request to your department/division. Please contact Bill Parro, wcparro@ucsc.edu 831-459-2861

The “Focus on Performance” training modules are: Goal Setting and Feedback (2 hours), and Performance Appraisal Training (1 hour).

THE PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL TOOLS AND PROCESS

Our work team recently polled employees for feedback on the rating scale used. The results favored using a 5-point scale over a 3-point scale by a margin of 60% to 34%. After careful consideration of the results and numerous thoughtful comments, we have decided to retain the 5-point scale, but we have changed the definitions as follows:

  • 5 = Exceptional
  • 4 = Consistently exceeded expectations
  • 3 = Met expectations
  • 2 = Improvement Needed
  • 1 = Unacceptable

More information about the ratings and other aspects of the program can be found in the SHR website on our Pay for Performance support pages.

One single on-line electronic “form” will replace the four different pdf forms.* The form is simplified, streamlined and features an electronic workflow. Thanks to our IT colleagues Tim Gustafson and Andrea Hesse who have devoted time and effort to develop this tool. We plan to use it until the UCPath system goes live which is now targeted for July 2018.

The schedule for the 2016/17 review cycle is:

  • Appraisal period end date -June 30, 2017
  • Appraisal due dates -
    • July 28 for policy covered staff
    • September 1 for represented staff

In addition to finding more information at the P4P page, please contact Bill Parro, wcparro@ucsc.edu 831-459-2861 if you have any questions.

*This may not apply to all employee groups.