Whether your institution is mandating, incentivizing or encouraging vaccinations for employees, HR has a critical role to play in how the plan is communicated and how barriers to getting vaccinated are mitigated. Here are five considerations for fall vaccination planning and resources you may also find helpful as planning gets underway.
A transformation of the workplace is taking place right before our eyes. From pandemic-driven urgency, workplaces are succeeding in meeting both customer expectations and employee needs through creative approaches that have redefined where, when and how work is accomplished. Those who seize this opportunity to reimagine work will reap the rewards of higher levels of engagement and productivity. Flexible work, an approach that allows an individual latitude in where they work, when they work and even how they work, is the recipe for organizations to emerge from the pandemic positioned to retain top talent, recruit the best from across the country and reach new levels of productivity.
The severe budget cuts in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many colleges and universities to freeze hiring, cut positions, and, in some cases, decrease salaries. According to CUPA-HR’s recently released Administrators in Higher Education Annual Report, when salary increases occurred in the higher ed workforce over the past year, they tended to go to faculty, professionals and staff rather than administrators. Higher ed administrators overall received near-zero pay increases.
CUPA-HR General Counsel Ira Shepard highlights recent rulings around the reinstatement of a professor’s First Amendment free speech and religious discrimination challenge to a university’s preferred pronoun policy on transgender students, an Equal Pay Act claim that a professor was paid less than comparable male professors, the NLRB abandoning a proposal that would have made student workers at private universities and colleges ineligible to form or join unions, and more.
From creating diversity efforts and development initiatives to leading change, human resources teams and HR practitioners across the country are doing great work every day. CUPA-HR’s Higher Education HR Region Awards program recognizes some of the best and brightest in higher ed HR, including HR Rock Stars who are doing exceptional work early in their careers and higher ed HR professionals who consistently promote excellence in all that they do.
On April 6, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a letter outlining plans to review the Trump administration’s final rule on Title IX, which changed how colleges and universities must handle allegations of sexual assault and harassment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. 
If 2020 has given us anything — aside from a new appreciation for the word “pivot” — it’s proof that higher ed is just as capable of adaptation as the corporate world. While research and data are still relatively new, and sourced almost exclusively from the corporate world, they can still help us in forecasting what might lie ahead. Here are just a few of the trends that are starting to take shape.
Mandating or strongly recommending COVID-19 vaccinations for faculty and staff raises a host of legal and practical considerations for higher ed employers. Listen to a quick soundbite from the webinar, “COVID-19 Vaccines for Faculty and Staff: What Higher Ed Employers Need to Know,” where presenters reviewed key issues employers need to consider before adopting a vaccination policy and plan.
Three reports stemmed from the 2020 Higher Education Financial Wellness Survey, conducted by the TIAA Institute and CUPA-HR and fielded in the fall of 2020. The final report, Financial wellness among the higher education workforce: Impact of COVID-19, examines how financial well-being among college and university employees has been impacted by COVID-19 and its economic consequences, including the topics of debt, non-retirement saving and use of financial advice.
The severe budget cuts in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many institutions to freeze hiring, cut positions and, in some cases, decrease salaries. The recently released 2021 CUPA-HR Faculty in Higher Education Report highlights the overall changes to faculty size and salaries over the past year.