March 17, 2000

Calls made for staff relief

By Kathleen Holder

Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef expected a handful of mid-level managers at a meeting, convened at their request, to discuss a campuswide staffing crunch.

Instead, when Vanderhoef arrived with Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey and Vice Chancellor for Administration Janet Hamilton, they found the second-floor Mrak Hall conference room overflowing with about 70 people.

The Administrative Management Group members had turned out in numbers that surprised even their own leaders to deliver an SOS.

Adman’s message: UC Davis’ staff is stretched to the breaking point and desperately needs reinforcements.

"We consider it to be a crisis stage," said Rick Markgraf, management services officer for Environmental Science and Policy and chair of the middle-management group. "That’s why we were moved to talk to the chancellor. We didn’t know what else we could do."

The chancellor and provost, while cautioning that they do not intervene in budget decisions made by vice chancellors and deans, said they are committed to bringing staffing issues before their senior management colleagues.

"We will point out that we have a growing concern–and that there is a lot of reality behind the concern–that we’ve got to do better by the staff, especially regarding salaries and the money available to hire them," Vanderhoef said in an interview last week.

"We have, ourselves, realized that staff salaries have lagged and we’ve got to make changes."

Those issues have been placed on the agenda for the Council of Deans and Vice Chancellors’ next meeting in mid-April. "We will ask them to attend to it and … to carefully consider what they can do," Grey said.

Holdover from earlier budget cuts

Both the top administrators and members of the middle-management group say the staffing crunch stems from a combination of factors.

Among them are:

• Budget-related staff cuts that were made in the early 1990s and have yet to be restored in UC’s budget allocation from the state;

• A shift in responsibilities and costs from central administrative units to departments for accounting, payroll, graduate admissions and other services;

• Growing reliance on technology and software that require employees to get up to a year in training in order to do their jobs; and

• A robust economy, low unemployment, growing numbers of businesses in the Sacramento region and increasing competition for qualified workers.

Middle managers said they fear that, without intervention, the staff overload will only get worse as the Tidal Wave II enrollment boom pushes the student population to between 30,000 and 31,000 over the next decade and the faculty continues to grow.

Grey said some relief for staff is in sight, with the state for the first time in years providing the campus full funding for enrollment growth this fiscal year. "That money is making its way down to the deans and vice chancellors," he said.

He said he was hopeful the state Legislature will approve full funding again for 2000-01.

Vanderhoef said the UC system has given high priority in recent years to other needs,–for example, raising faculty salaries to the same level as those of comparison institutions.

However, he said that a number of UC campuses–particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego–face increasing competition from business and industry for employees.

The labor market has gotten tight at UC Davis as well. Office managers said they frequently have to advertise two or three times to find qualified applicants.

"We’re no longer the employer of choice," Markgraf said. "The word has gotten out that we’re understaffed and people have to work a lot harder for little pay."

Moved to act

Adman leaders were so concerned about the situation that, rather than invite a motivational speaker to the group’s annual general meeting, they requested the March 2 session with Vanderhoef, Grey and Hamilton.

The group’s directors viewed the trio, which they dubbed "The Big Three," as the administrators best able to intervene.

Markgraf said that, in his 10 years in the 150-member management group, he had rarely seen such a high turnout. "Frankly we haven’t had a lot of general meetings because people can’t afford to come to them. They don’t have time."

Together, the approximately 70 people who came to the meeting represented more than 1,000 years of service to the university.

Vanderhoef said he was moved by their presentation. He made a point of commenting on the meeting at his Brown Bag luncheon update later that same day.

"The feeling that you couldn’t miss–and these were for the most part long-term employees–was that they love this place. They really feel strongly about the university," he said in last week’s interview.

"That’s why it didn’t become a whining session. They weren’t there to say, ‘Poor me and we’re working so hard and we don’t have enough people.’ They were there because they were afraid that we’re losing some of our luster. They were worried that we weren’t fully aware of what was going on at the staff level."

They cited concerns about what they said was time-wasting bureaucracy in certain processes, such as job reclassification. Vanderhoef and Grey said they asked the management group to develop recommendations for streamlining the way the campus does business to make it easier for staff members to do their jobs.

"These people are positioned to be our best advisers because they have a very good understanding of these processes from the beginning to the end," the chancellor said.

Markgraf and other managers said many in their ranks are becoming burned out as they pick up extra tasks from staffs already stretched to the limit. Their offices rarely can afford to pay for staff overtime or give them compensatory time off, they said.

"We have been told to do more with less, and we’ve done that, time after time after time," Markgraf said. "We find there’s more to do and we don’t have anybody to do it. Everybody’s working long hours."

The need for more staff extends beyond academic departments to administrative service units such as Accounting and Financial Services, Benefits and Human Resources, he and others said.

"More and more you can’t reach a person on the telephone," said Sandy Filby, manager of the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources. "Some offices are closed half the day so staff can keep their heads above water."

Managers said they frequently work into the evening or on weekends to keep up, with some putting in 60 to 80 hour weeks. Some managers said they cannot afford to take vacation time and end up losing it.

"There just hasn’t been a time we can sit back and breathe," said Lesley Byrns, who oversees a staff of 10 as principal staff assistant for Sproul Social Sciences. "There’s no time to plan, to talk about what everybody’s doing, about what I could be doing to make things better."

Less service to faculty, more work

Filby of the land, air and water resources department said staff members are providing less service directly to the faculty as they take on more administrative tasks and handle less photocopying and word processing.

"We’re hearing faculty [members] say how unhappy they are with staff, like it’s our fault that we can’t do what they need," Filby said. "They’re feeling that if somehow staff were more efficient, we could do more.

"The reality is our jobs have fundamentally changed. We’re managing more information and finding ways to use it effectively. We’re doing our jobs more intelligently and responsibly. Although faculty [members] think we have less work due to better technology, there is actually more."

Filby said the campus needs to act within 18 months to hire more staff. She likened the current situation to a disaster in the making.

"A lack of staff is bringing many service units and academic department staff to their knees. They simply can’t meet the basic operational requirements of their unit and the campus no matter how hard or smart they work. In many cases, we simply need more staff to function well."

Markgraf said the management group plans to continue pressing its case for more staff. "We’re trying to keep this in the eye of the campus," he said.