Article 8 on this year’s Town Meeting warrant is a request from the Personnel Board in conjunction with the town’s human resource director for $25,000 to hire a company to assess the town’s current personnel system and make recommendations for updating it. In a recent interview, Marie Sobalvarro, assistant town administrator and human resources director, said that Harvard is behind on updating job descriptions and the process by which it determines compensation. Job descriptions and pay grades were last updated in the 1990s, and many of them, especially for long-established positions, do not match the work actually being done. Nor do they match the descriptions and pay of the same jobs in other towns.
According to Sobalvarro, the Personnel Board wants a fairer, more streamlined system and one that is comparable to other communities. Its members want to feel that the points they are assigning to a certain pay grade make sense; outdated job descriptions and criteria make that difficult.
Sobalvarro later shared a job description for an office assistant in finance last updated in 1996. It states, in part, “Position requires close vision, manual use of telephone, adding machine, typewriter, and keyboard.” Under a heading “Special Skills or Experience” is “knowledge of office equipment and personal computers.” Such dated descriptions fail to take into account how much the nature of work has changed in the past 20 years, said Sobalvarro.
Another document showed levels of skills and the points allotted for each category. The points assigned determine the pay grade for the job. According to the document, an increase of six points can be gained by adding “stenography” and “operation of computational machines” to a lower skill set of “typing” and “use of business machines.” Said Sobalvarro, “Both the point allocation and the text driving the point allocation need review.”
Sobalvarro said that in addition to upgrading job descriptions and clarifying the point system that determines compensation, a study might recommend reclassifying some jobs. It might also suggest a merit-pay system. Right now, employees move in steps from one pay grade to another based on years of service. Performance-based pay increases would allow an individual to progress through a range of steps in a year. Sobalvarro added that reviews of all employees are kept on file.
