Human Resources/Compensation/Benefits

• Make Christmas Eve a holiday this year.
• Close the College completely during the winter break.
• Close campus except for essential services from Sat, Dec 20 through Sunday, Jan 4.
• Have employees use vacation days for the winter break, or offer the days as unpaid leave.
• Close the campus when local schools close for inclement weather.
• Require employees take five unpaid days off in the next year.
• Allow staff to voluntarily take extended (weeks or months) periods of unpaid leave.
• Close the College every other Friday except for essential services, and have staff either take vacation or unpaid time on those days.
• Shut down for the summer while students are on break.
• Offer part-time schedule for some positions.
• Offer voluntary reduction in hours (with benefits remaining at full time levels).
• A variety of suggestions have been made about various options for a 4 day work week and other flexible scheduling options.
• Let more people work from home.
• Reduce or eliminate overtime through work process changes, cross-training other employees, or changing staffing structures.
• Require salaried positions to work an additional five hours per week.
• Slow or freeze hiring of new positions.
• Freeze hiring from the outside; instead, use open positions as opportunities for internal promotion or movement.
• Use Tuck, DMS, and Vermont Law School students and partners to fill positions.
• Mail direct deposit pay stubs to HB's, rather than employees' home; or offer a secure online system for pay records and issue no hard copy.
• Reduce scope of recruitment office while hiring is slow and redirect staff to other internal HR needs.
• Determine areas of functional overlap throughout the College and evaluate the best structural model for those areas.
• A variety of suggestions have been made pertaining to reducing compensation for various employee categories, setting tiered salary reductions for all employees, or reducing hours by a small increment and reducing pay accordingly.
• A variety of comments have been submitted proposing various alterations to the the merit increase structure, including offering bonuses instead of percentage increases, reducing merit increase levels for more highly paid employees, or forgoing merit increases for a period of time.
• Give raises that are effective January 1 instead of July 1, filling the desire for increases but with 50% of the impact.
• A variety of alternatives to merit increases have been proposed, including offering professional development options or additional vacation time.
• Tie raises to endowment return to allow adjustments in challenging economic times.
• Offer employees the chance to self-select into two groups; one which agrees to salary reduction in exchange for job security, and another that will not accept a pay cut but will be willing to risk job loss. If the need for layoffs arises, cut from the second group.
• Eliminate, reduce, or change the 7% retirement benefit program.
• Eliminate, reduce, or change the Flexible Spending Account $250 benefit for hourly staff.
• Reduce the number of managerial positions. Reassign managers with needed skill sets to "front-line" positions.
• Use qualified administrative staff to teach classes that would be otherwise given to adjuncts, since administrators are already on the payroll and this would provide an interesting professional development opportunity.
• Offer an early retirement plan for those close to or past retirement age.
• Terminate poor performers.
• Reduce the amount of administrative support at the College; consolidate support or train support staff to handle a greater diversity of work.
• Hire a company to manage short-term disability in a manner similar to workman's compensation.
• Re-open the union contract that was just negotiated.
• Permanently or temporarily eliminate programs that are "nice-to-haves" but non-essential.
• Stop hiring consultants.
• Create a single heath care user group with DHMC, or with peer institutions, to lower the cost of covering health insurance for employees of both/all groups.
• Create a program using existing assets that supports a healthy lifestyle for employees to reduce the College's heath insurance expenses.
• Reduce fitness center fees to encourage use and save on health care costs.
• Eliminate the Benefits fair and post all the available information on line.
• Create an internal temp service using permanent, cross-trained staff that can also provide some centralized administrative functions when not deployed across campus. Stop hiring external temporary workers.
• Revisit the level of reimbursement for relocation of new hires; advertise for certain position types locally only.
• Move all employees to a once-monthly payroll.
• Stop providing free or subsidized housing to any staff or faculty; have those in College-owned hosing pay their own utilities.