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[derosa]

I am member of a small committee, appointed by the President of our institution, which is about to begin a conversation about merit pay.  We are primarily a teaching institution, with growing pressure to increase our scholarship.  Anyone care to share success stories...or horror stories about merit systems?  Anyone have any interesting and recent publications on the topic that I should check out?
Thanks.

[prof_viola]

Hi, DeRosa,

Sorry, no publications to share, but my cc has what I think is a good, fair merit pay plan.  Pay raises, COLAs, etc., are standard across the board, depending on "steps" up the pay scale for years in service.  To supplement that, faculty can apply for "points" toward moves up the steps when they publish scholarship, present work at conferences, take courses or workshops to improve their teaching, etc.  Perhaps worth looking at?

Good luck!

[derosa]

I guess I am more interested in what you are calling the "supplements."  Is there any way for me to take a look (or for you to describe) the plan.  I am also interested in why you think it is good and fair.
Thanks for responding.

[svenc]

I am at a large, research intensive public university that has merit pay tied to fairly lengthy annual reporting requirements for each faculty member.  These raises are separate from contractual COLA increases. 

The process works very well.  There is a de facto "standard" merit increase for satisfactory performance, but it can vary from no merit for unsatisfactory performance to multiple steps up the salary level for exceptional performance in a given year.  There is a set number of steps that each college can distribute amongst its faculty.

The best thing about the system (besides an increase in salary) is that everyone on campus gets formal feedback on a yearly basis as to their performance.  In the circumstance that you describe (where expectations are changing), I would imagine this could be especially valuable information.  The system is perhaps most useful for new faculty, who are given ongoing feedback about their progress toward tenure.  The assessments are done by a committee in each college that includes the dean, chairs, and several elected members.

Yes, the system is essentially competitive, but the key here is that the number of steps available to hand out is sufficient that every satisfactory performance gets some reward (this is in lieu of automatic pay for years of service).  The mandatory reporting requirement for every faculty member does mean that there is a significant investment of time in the whole process.

[crjuprofsteve]

My university gives merit pay tied to annual evaluations.  We don't get merit increases every year - that depends on whether money is allocated by the legislature for that purpose (for most of the years I've been here, we have not been allocated money for merit increases, so they're comparatively rare).

When merit increases are allocated, it is in the form of a percentage - say, 3%.  What this means is that each department has a pool of money, if you will, that amounts to 3% of the faculty salaries in the department.  The chair is then responsible for allocating this money.  Some faculty will get more than 3%, some will get less than 3%, and some might get right at 3%.  There is no minimum amount (so it's possible to get no increase), nor is there a maximum amount (hypothetically, one faculty member could get the whole sum while everyone else gets nothing).  However, the process must be tied to annual evaluations, which rank our overall performance on a 0-5 scale, which is a weighted composite of 0-5 evaluations in the areas of teaching, research, and service.  Some chairs have elaborate Excel spreadsheets where they enter the evaluation numbers and it produces the corresponding raise.  Others are more ad-hoc in their approach.  When chairs make their recommendations, they are very carefully reviewed by the deans.  For instance, our former dean would not allow chairs to give the same raise to all (or most) faculty in a department, even if evaluations were similar.  And some years, the chairs were allowed to consider salary inversion and compression, as well as market value, in merit raise decisions.  So that's the merit raise process.

Three times in the past six years, we've had salary compression, inversion, and market value adjustments separate from the merit process.  These have basically been the result of fairly sophisticated statistical models that predict what we should be making, and then our salaries are adjusted to the extent possible with available funds.  This is funded entirely with institutional funds that have resulted from savings produced by early retirement programs, etc.

Once we got an across-the-board type of increase.  That is uncommon, however.  We do not have a means to receive regular cost-of-living adjustments. 

[eatapeach]

Our system for merit pay is in the past because it was a disaster.  I have to first say that it was implemented for staff and not faculty but if you decide to implement a system, then here are some things to consider:

1) You need to fund it.  There should be a pool of money always available for the merit pay system.  Our plan allowed for merit pay raises to be added to the percentage increase if, and that was a big IF, there was a surplus in the pool of money alloted for salary that year.  This meant that if you attained a rating of exceptional in the year that there was no money, and another had the exceptional rating in a flush year, the same accomplishments were very unevenly awarded.  It actually became a negative motivating factor to all that had exceptional ratings in the wrong year.  And those who got the merit raise in the right year, had a boost every year afterwards since it was added to the base pay. So one year of exceptional paid off forever, even if the person became a slacker after that.  If you are going to have merit pay, have it be a one time bonus each year and not part of the base pay.

2) Have the amount of the merit pay be a set amount.  One year there were so many people awarded exceptional ratings that by the time that the pot of money was divvied up it was a meaningless amount.

3) You need some equitable standard for awarding it.  It is complicated to come up with a standard that could apply across the board.  If humans are involved in the decisions, there is always the possibility of favoritism and retaliation in the awards. If merit is tied to evaluations, I predict trouble.  Almost any thread here will give you a warning about how difficult it might be to have an equal basis for considering eval's in different fields, and it likely would encourage grade inflation since one of the best ways to encourage good evals is to give grades that no one deserves.  In our case, there were supervisors who gave everyone in their department  exceptional ratings if they merely showed up to work each day and other supervisors that held their departmental staff to extremely high standards for an exceptional rating. And in one case it was discovered that a supervisor awarded exceptional ratings based on the needs of the employee.  People with hard luck stories in their personal lives were given an exceptional  because of the obstacles they faced, not on the basis of the work they did to benefit the college. Again, human involvement is always susceptible to the flaws of our nature.

I am sure there are ways to make a merit pay system workable.  We just did not find it and went back to the old way with non-transparent boosts in salary to the pets of the president and other sycophants who show no loyalty to the college and either leave quickly to take other jobs or are fired for falling from grace at some point in the future.  This just seems so much more tolerable because no one has any expectations of actually earning a merit raise and those who work hard do so because they are internally motivated to do their best already.   So carefully consider what it is you want to motivate people to do.  If you want more research done, let people apply for generous research grants.  Just my humble opinion.