The University of Oregon soon will be improving its approach to labor and employee relations with the launch of initiatives designed to improve human resources service and support for campus.
According to Jamie Moffitt, vice president for finance and administration, the new initiatives will launch later this month and will tackle several key issues.
“We are enlisting assistance from within human resources and across campus to address several critical projects,” Moffitt said. “We’ve established four working groups that will focus on employee recruitment, the employee onboarding process, information technology to support and enhance HR practices and activities, and classification and compensation issues. These teams will work to improve processes, better use technology and assess how we can provide better HR support to campus.”
The teams will begin meeting at the end of September with a common overarching goal of creating better experiences for managers, employees and candidates.
In addition to these initiatives, finance and administration is partnering with academic affairs to create a new approach to labor and employee relations. William Brady, director of faculty labor relations, will join the human resources team, broadening his portfolio to include campuswide employee and labor relations matters.
“We will be using this restructuring as an opportunity to better coordinate our bargaining efforts and to strengthen our working relationships with union leadership, bargaining units and officers of administration,” Brady said. “A team of labor and employee relations professionals facilitates a strategic and holistic approach to engaging employee groups and supporting the university in its strategic mission.”
“We are looking to bring consistency across all areas,” Moffitt added. “Our goal is to create a human resources model that is responsive to the needs of all of our employees and enables everyone to focus on their individual contribution to the mission.”
―By Tobin J. Klinger, Senior Director of Public Affairs Communications