President Janine Davidson, Ph.D., announced raises for all staff and faculty members (including adjuncts) during Thursday’s Fall Welcome Back event.
MSU Denver’s compensation team will take 1% of the University’s total salary budget and divide that amount evenly to determine a flat amount that will be awarded in the form of permanent annual raises among all faculty and full-time professional staff members.
The Budget Office is still calculating what the amount will be, but said employees will see this raise beginning in their October paychecks and that they should keep an eye on the Early Bird for more details soon.
“MSU Denver is invested in you,” Davidson said as she delivered her “State of the University” address in the King Center. “This shows what we can do when we work together to achieve our goals.”
Davidson’s Welcome Back address focused on how people fuel the flywheel. The concept of the flywheel holds that applying the right effort in the right areas leads to compounding wins over time. Like a flywheel, each small victory builds momentum, making it spin faster and surpass the initial effort.
At the center of MSU Denver’s flywheel is student success — the key to achieving the University’s mission –— with retention, graduation and career readiness as the ultimate goals. Student success helps recruit more students and increase public and private funding, allowing the University to invest more in people and improve processes and technology, which further enhances student success.
Davidson highlighted some of the accomplishments that fueled the flywheel over the past year, including:
- MSU Denver’s first-ever statewide advertising campaign brought in twice as many applicants in the counties where ads ran.
- The University implemented a modernized budget, moving to a single-phase, zero-based process fostering transparency and stewardship.
- The transfer process was made smoother by reducing the average transcript evaluation timeline from 6-8 weeks to less than two business days.
- MSU Denver received the largest philanthropic gift in University history.
Davidson also announced a new initiative aimed at removing friction and improving processes across the University. The President’s Flywheel Challenge offers faculty, staff, and students the opportunity to submit a proposal that saves the University time or money. Implementable, successful proposals can net their creator a percentage of the money they save the University, up to $10,000.
Compensation Equity Study findings
The MSU Denver 2030 Strategic Plan’s fifth pillar is dedicated to organizational agility and sustainability with the goal to continue to improve compensation, benefits, professional development and the infrastructure backbone. To address this strategic goal, the University partnered with Salary.com to perform a compensation equity study. Salary.com representatives provided an overview of their findings at Thursday’s Welcome Back event, and later in the afternoon at several Town Hall discussions.
The findings show that overall, University salaries are competitive with peer institutions; however, outlier salaries and compression clusters exist. Stacy Dvergsdal, associate vice president for Human Resources, said during Thursday’s Welcome Back event that the University was committed to addressing those outlier salaries and other recommendations that resulted from the study. Salary.com also found no statistically significant pay disparities related to legal sex or race and ethnicity.
Video recordings of the Compensation Equity Study Town Hall meetings and more details on the findings will be available on the HR Sharepoint.
What does CADRE mean to you?
Human Resources is starting a process to update the University’s CADRE values (Community, Access, Diversity, Respect and Excellence) to be more inclusive and reflective of the University community. Revising the current definitions of CADRE will help better reflect University culture, include all employees and simplify definitions for easier use and understanding.
HR would like all changemakers to help better define the CADRE values by taking a short survey.
