Month: June 2008

Scott Williams walked out of the John Paul Jones Arena feeling optimistic. The boiler mechanic at UVA’s heat plant had just finished seeing the University’s expo for its “Career Paths” plan, a major component of the new human resources plan that will take effect in January.

Susan Carkeek, UVA’s HR officer, defends the new “Career Paths” plan. “The whole point of doing this is to recruit and keep our best employees,” says Carkeek.

“It will be better in the long run —more money,” says Williams. “The only thing I’m worried about is taking benefits away, things like days off and holidays.”

Previous coverage: Staff question new HR plan "Town hall" marks unveiling of University system Staff concerned about trust, pay Still waiting for glimpse at new HR system From the ground up UVA gets its official HR restructure-er

University officials point to the new HR plan’s compensation system of market- and merit-based pay as a benefit to UVA staff. Under the current state system, wages and raises are capped. Williams says that if he worked the same job in the private sector, he’d make around $50,000 or $60,000 a year.

How much does he make now? “Not even close to that,” he says.

But Williams’ concern about lost benefits speaks to some employees’ skepticism of a new HR plan that is still being developed and is short on specifics. The new HR plan comes out of the 2005 Management Agreement that gave UVA autonomy from the state’s human resources system. All UVA staff hired after July 2006 will be automatically switched to the new University HR system in January. Employees hired before then, however, have a choice: stay with the current state Classified system or jump over to the University’s new system.

The University’s plan won’t be finalized until October 1, when employees will receive a side-by-side comparison of both HR plans that the Management Agreement requires UVA to provide.

The Career Paths program is a major component of the new system, and one that UVA officials are heavily touting. Susan Carkeek, vice president and UVA’s chief human resources officer, says that Career Paths came partly from employees’ concerns about the lack of opportunity for advancement.

“People were staying, and people were advancing,” says Carkeek. “But I think it was in spite of the system, not because of the system.”

UVA rolled out details of the new programs last week and put them on display at the JPJ. Taskforces comprising nearly 200 employees and supervisors identified a whopping 73 career paths in 15 different career fields. Inside the Arena, large signs listed each career path, most of which include four stages within the same job. The stages lay out a metric for advancement—the job description for each stage and what skills, experience and certification employees need to advance.

“With the majority of the career paths that have been laid out,” says Carkeek, “it should give employees information they’ve never had before.”

Employees will receive pay increases with advancement, though specifics haven’t been set yet. Carkeek says UVA would probably set ranges of raises for pay increases within career paths.

UVA employees Christine Harrer and Linda Patchel, who work in the microbiology department, both left the expo liking what they saw of the Career Paths program.

“It gives you a diagram of what exactly you need to do,” says Harrer. Come January, Harrer will have to decide whether to switch to the new HR system. She’s unsure if she will and says she wants to see what her options are before she makes the jump. Employees who switch to the new University system cannot go back to the current state Classified system.

The Staff Union at UVA has been casting a skeptical eye at the University’s new HR program, and members questioned Carkeek about where the funding for market-based salaries will come from. Carkeek has said that UVA will use existing funds for the new system.

“The whole point of doing this is to recruit and keep our best employees,” says Carkeek. “So there is no incentive for us to not have the best salaries and benefits that we can possibly afford.”

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To get the word out about her client’s property, Mary Leavell, a local real estate agent with Keller Williams, is a big fan of using off-site signs—those placards that point, usually with brightly colored arrows, to property for sale off the beaten path.

“The stats I’ve seen from the National Association of Realtors is that signage sells 40 percent of the homes,” Leavell says. She’s currently using an off-site sign posted on Monticello Avenue to help her sell a property on Sixth Street SE. “That number seems high to me, but Lord knows, if that’s the case, I’ll buy some signs and put them up and try to sell a home.”

Mary Leavell uses this off-site sign to point out a property on Sixth Street SE to travelers on busier Monticello Avenue. Such signs violate city ordinance.

“People have to know what’s for sale and where it is,” says Leavell. “As long as it doesn’t annoy the landowners whose geography you’re occupying, maybe it’s O.K.”

In the eyes of the city, however, off-site signs are not O.K.—even when they’re on private property. “The law says that you cannot have off-premise signs,” says Jim Tolbert, director of the city’s Neighborhood Development Services, which polices signage. “We get complaints about realtor signs being put up all over the place on a regular basis. Some of them just don’t get it.”

On April 28, the city zoning inspector, Craig Fabio, sent a letter to the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR), letting realtors know what’s allowed—which isn’t much. “Simply stated, all real estate signs posted anywhere, other than on the property that is for sale, lease or rent, will be removed by a City employee,” wrote Fabio. “All signage removed by the City will be recycled and will not be available for retrieval.”

“It’s like ivy, it creeps back, you cut it back, it creeps back,” says Dave Phillips, CEO of CAAR. “About every six months, we try to remind our members that they need to be observant of sign laws. They’re trying to market the property for their client, and the rules aren’t very clear, so they can easily get unintentionally violated out of convenience.”

The county doesn’t seem to have as many problems. “The realtors seem to be more responsible in that they put the signs in closer proximity to what’s actually for sale,” says Rob Heide, the county’s master of zoning enforcement. “Realtors are probably more responsible with their signs because they actually have to pay for those things, and they’re not cheap.”

But they’re cheap enough for Leavell, who uses the small, corrugated kind and doesn’t show any, uh, sign of stopping. “They just disappear and I know not where they go,” she says. “They’re not very expensive. If it does bother someone, they can just call the agent, and we’ll come and pick them up.”

“Realtors are just easy to blame for this,” says Phillips. “There are multiple varieties of signs out there for everything that you can think of that are in violation.”

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UVA women’s basketball coach Debbie Ryan joined a select few June 14 when she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee. Ryan was a member of the 10th group of inductees to the Hall.

Ryan is fast approaching Thomas Jefferson as an institutional figure at UVA, albeit with more wins. The 2007-2008 season was Ryan’s 31st at UVA in a career that has included 20 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances, 12 trips to the Sweet Sixteen, seven Final Four teams, and one championship game appearance—not to mention a career that has spanned more than three decades in which women’s basketball has jumped from a largely ignored (and underfunded) college sport to a sport that now boasts its own professional league.

Dawn Staley played four years under UVA coach Debbie Ryan. Staley’s now a head coach herself, at the University of South Carolina: “I’m a true testament to the effect a coach has on a player’s life.”

“It’s changed a thousand fold,” says Ryan, “from the amount of support the sport has received to the athletes themselves and how we’re really starting to see what women can do athletically. And we’re still probably just scratching the surface of that.”

Perhaps no one personifies those changes as much as one of Ryan’s former players, Dawn Staley. Staley was named national player of the year twice while at UVA from 1988 to 1992, played in the American Basketball League (a short-lived precursor to the WNBA), then the WNBA, and is now the head coach at the University of South Carolina.

“Debbie is a coach who allowed her players to learn from mistakes,” says Staley via e-mail. “It was an ‘on the job training’ approach. Most coaches would have stifled the growth of our talented team, but Debbie’s style created an atmosphere where we were destined to succeed. I have adopted that approach and found success with it.”

In a profession that tends to make nomads of coaches, Ryan says one of the reasons she’s chosen to stay at UVA for over three decades is its financial and emotional support for her program, even when women’s basketball wasn’t the draw it is now.

“We’re not one of those schools that lagged behind Title IX,” says Ryan. “We were always out front and wanting to be on the cutting edge of that. That always made me proud of being a part of this school.”

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