The pandemic dominated our lives last year (yours and ours), both personally and professionally. The new UUA Compensation Standards, introduced last February, did not get the attention they deserve. The graphic above is designed to help you understand the component pieces of the Standards. May this framework equip your congregation, as an employer, to live more fully into our Unitarian Universalist values.
Salary and Benefit Recommendations
UUA Compensation Standards are both a replacement for and an expansion of our longstanding Compensation Guidelines. The Guidelines were a set of quantitative recommendations: salary tables and geo indices for setting wages, and contribution levels for insurance and retirement benefits. See the "Numbers" boxes on the far right of the graphic. These recommendations are one component of the new Standards. But our Compensation Standards complement these numerically-based recommendations with two important additions –
legal requirements and process guidance.
Legal Requirements
You might assume that congregations operate within the law when it comes to benefits and payroll, but this is not always the case. Rules and laws related to benefits and payroll matters are complex, and there is often no formal training for those with personnel-related responsibilities. Additionally, turnover among staff and lay leaders tends to cause gaps in institutional memory. All of this makes legal compliance an ongoing challenge, putting congregations at risk and negatively impacting employees.
We expect UU congregations to be faithful employers –
faithful to the law as well as to our values. To provide clarity about legal must-do's related to the administration of benefits and payroll, we created two new checklists. Please make use of both the Pay Administration Checklist and the Benefits Administration Checklist. (These are also available in Word on the Compensation Standards page.) See the left side of the graphic.
On the legal compliance front, many of you already use the Benefits Tune-up Workbook. We hear from leaders how helpful it is in "decomplexifying" Plan requirements so that you can administer UUA benefit plans with confidence. We're making minor edits and publishing the 2021 edition in early February. (If you've been using the Workbook, the Benefits Administration Checklist will be a breeze.)
Process Guidance
Your congregation's compensation policies and practices represent an additional opportunity to practice your values within your walls. In late 2020, we further expanded our Compensation Standards by including process-related recommendations and resources to ground your compensation decisions in equity and transparency. Currently, the recommendations listed apply to wages only. We will add a benefits section in the future. See the "Process" boxes in the graphic.
