Nine to Five in Harvard's Halls

Every Tuesday morning new Harvard employees follow handwritten signs through the corridors of Mem Hall to a secluded basement orientation room. There, anywhere from a handful to more than 40 people--mostly women--spend two hours guzzling coffee, watching a slide show about working for Harvard, and listening to a spiel on employees benefits. Dennis P. Nations, a counselor in the benefits section and a moderator of the orientation session, tells the group the fat information packets they are receiving will make great bedside reading.

Nations may just be right. Harvard does offer a benefits package that includes three health care plans and entire infirmary, a credit union, a tuition assistance program and six child-care centers. It also provides full athletic facilities and more than three weeks' annual vacation. As one fo the state's largest employers, it can afford such little amenities.

But when it comes to paying employees, Harvard's salaries can't match a manufacturer's. Barbara Wickenden, personnel officer at the Education School, says the most frequent worker's complaint is about salary. "We cannot compete one-to-one with industry," she says.

Last year Harvard had a payroll of more than $150 million, but that had to cover 11,500 full-time employees as well as part-time workers. Daniel D. Cantor, director of personnel, points out that an inflationary spiral causes employee morale to topple because the depressed economy spills over into the workers' lives and job performance. Still, Wickenden says she doesn't sense any waves of discontent because of tight money; in fact, she says that in ten years of working in the personnel office at the Ed School, "I don't remember anyone leaving because they weren't getting enough money."

Harvard has nine salary grades for non-exempt employees (workers who must be paid overtime for working more than 40 hours a week under the Fair Labor Standards Act). Cantor says the largest sectors are grades three to five, where the wages range from a minimum of $667 monthly in grade three to a maximum of $1070 in grade five for a 35-hour work week. A beginning secretarial job may be grade three, and a beginning research assistant's job is grade five. Merit--the quality of employees' work and their assumption of additional duties--determines promotion to higher grade level.

Cantor and a University-wide personnel staff of about 75 people are in charge of making sure the non-Faculty positions run smoothly. To that end, the personnel representatives from each school meet twice a month to discuss University policy, recruitment strategies and to share tips, Wickenden says. "And there is a regular informal flow of complaint memos, bitches, whatever goes on throughout the different schools," Cantor says. To reduce confusion, the personnel office distributed a thick memo detailing all personnel rules to every department.

It would be easy to confuse policy at Harvard. The University has a yearly turnover rate of one-third among its supporting staff. Cantor says it's a standard figure for educational institutions: "Most universities, Harvard included, have traditionally had large segments of staff made up of people in a transient stage of life. Their spouses may be going to graduate schools or they may want to get work experience... The system is geared to accept a changing work force which is non-academic."

Furthermore, schools heavily dependent on research funds generally have higher turnover rates because jobs connected with a project end when the grants run out. Wickenden points out that many of these staff members had planned to work at Harvard for only the period of their grants, but she adds that if support staff members who have lost their funding still want to work within the University, she helps find jobs for them.

At the Ed School, where grants make up almost half the operating budget, Wickenden says the support staff's annual turnover rate is between 25 and 40 per cent. But almost 70 per cent of the people leaving do so because they want to return to school, often to the Ed School itself. "A lot of employees are marking time between undergraduate and graduate schools," she says. "The higher turnover in support staff is frequently due to our hiring people taking their first or second jobs. They don't plan to stay in them."

"If you removed quits because of a spouse returning to school a safe bet would be that there would be a 15-to-20 per cent turnover here," Cantor says. He points to an 18-per-cent turnover rate in most industries as a fairly stable norm.

But turnover is affected by employees morale, too, and morale continually flows and ebbs, Cantor says. "It's not as if you'd go along with a stable temperature of 98.6 and then hit a fever plateau. Morale is always changing," he says. A recessed economy or student demonstrations such as those in the late '60s could trigger depression among employees, he adds.

The personnel director says he tries to capitalize on high employee morale. Two years ago one of the personnel office's efforts to combat "bureaucratic void"--what Cantor calls the frequent malaise among employees at large institutions who feel insignificant--was to issue a computerized statement to every employee listing each of his benefits, such as retirement and hospitalization. "That statement helped people know Harvard does care, even though it's a big place. We got literally hundreds of responses, and all but one were favorable. One woman wrote in to say she thought we should not be wasting money on something so trivial," Cantor says.

"Most Harvard departments don't have rows upon rows of people working in the same room. You have an entity within a department. But we've got to come up with policies to counter the feeling of just being a cog," Cantor says. One of his policies was to give a Harvard chair to employees celebrating their 25th year at Harvard. About 100 people get that chair every year, Cantor says, adding, "It's a neat ceremony."

Another way to improve morale is to liberalize promotions. Cantor says it is relatively easy for employees to move within non-exempt salary grades--one-third of Harvard's open positions are filled from within--but that the jump from secretarial or clerical work to administrative or professional jobs is a problem. "The trouble is that moving up in that area the number of positions becomes devilishly limited," Cantor says. A typical Harvard department might have ten office workers and one administrator, but an industry would have larger departments, with a foreman, three assistant foremen, six supervisors and many assistant supervisors under them.

Cantor recently sent out questionaires to randomly selected support staff and supervisors asking their perception of how the personnel department was doing its job. An employee's perception of the personnel department's effectiveness can be used to measure morale, he says. The questionnaire culminated in an effort to make the department appear more accessible, Cantor says. "We got a report card of about a B," Cantor adds, emphasizing the personnel department has lots of room for improvement.

But he adds only about a fourth of Harvard's employees are unhappy in their jobs, and more than half are contented. Wickenden says job dissatisfaction is the least frequently cited reason for leaving jobs at the Ed School.

Still, employees do vent their grievances. At the Kennedy School of Government last month, an informal committee of faculty and staff members persuaded the dean to create the post of personnel officer. Some staff members had been complaining that the open working spaces were often too noisy or overrun with visitors, and that they had trouble working when students and guests lounged on their desks to hold conversations. Others had said the unavailability of supplies was exasperating.

The K-School had also had a turnover rate of 61 per cent in the school year 1977-78, when 27 of its 44 clerical and technical staff left. Its rate returned to about the University average of one-third last year. Cantor says he is not surprised by the high turnover, since the K-School had moved from Littauer Center to a new building. "Any organization that goes through rapid change almost inevitably experiences a fall-out. When the observatory lost the NASA program we had a whacking turnover rate. We all felt bad about it, but it happens. There is no one school at Harvard you can point to and say, 'Aha! They're the bad guys,'" Cantor says.

To ease transfers from department to department or school to school, the personnel office sponsors budget preparatory courses or basic accounting classes. "In some cases that is enough, but for other positions, you need an MBA," Cantor says.

One glance at the turnover rates would make it appear that the University is losing a lot of its employees. And quite a few people who begin working here are not happy. But Cantor points out that the majority are indeed satisfied working for academia. "Most feel working in an educational environment is more attractive, more relaxed, open and informal than industry," Wickenden says. Cantor points out that once employees have stayed at Harvard more than three years, "the turnover rate is almost invisible." Who knows, maybe they want that Harvard chair.