Officials announce 'quality of life' plans

The initiatives stress job expertise and the balance of home and work lives. University administrators announced several initiatives to improve the quality of work life last week, as faculty and staff prepare themselves for the possibility of benefits cuts. The new plans came one week before the release of the University's new benefits plan this Tuesday. The program is designed to allow staff to improve their professional expertise and their ability to balance work with household responsibilities, according to Executive Vice President John Fry. Through a partnership with the Wharton Executive Education program, Human Resources will run programs to improve employee management skills. The Center for Community Partnerships will help develop a program to teach customer service and inter-personal skills, in an effort to prepare lower skilled workers for new career options. The initiative will also use the University's health and fitness facilities to provide benefits for employees. "The program will make available to people all the resources possible to encourage them to take care of themselves," Fry said. "That involves health care benefits but also recreational facilities and information. Fry said much of the current health care information is set up in a way that doesn't allow easy access or understanding. In addition to changing methods for providing information, a program called "GlobalFit" -- which began last summer -- offers employees savings of approximately 30 percent at many local health clubs. Other initiatives aim at helping University staff handle the pressures of balancing a job and a family. "If you are working as many hours as a lot of us are it can really make things tough at home," Fry explained. "The University may be able to afford being flexible in terms of hours and maybe working at home sometimes." And the long awaited job classification study -- another part of the quality of worker life program --Ewill come out in a few weeks. The study will attempt to reorganize job descriptions and compensation based on "what people actually do," Fry said. He added that the classifications had not been reviewed since the last administration, making them outdated with respect to the job market. The overall program developed in response to problems Fry and Vice President for Human Resources Clint Davidson encountered in the support and training of University employees. "To the extent that you have a classification procedure that is not taken seriously and training that is kind of done on the margin and I know that people feel they are not really being taken care of, you don't have a good situation," Fry said. Some workers said they were excited about the programs. Marie Witt, director of support and business services and the chairperson of the Penn Professional Staff Association, said she had participated in some of the programs already and found them useful. "The whole concept of giving professional employees the ability to update their skills and to acquire new leadership and management skills benefits both the employees and the University," Witt said. But others disagreed, explaining that recent layoffs are a larger problem for employees than lack of support programs. Librarian Jim Gray said the benefits are "meaningless" to workers who are experiencing job insecurity and concerns about benefits cutbacks. "When you are hearing the statement that people only have a job as long as their skills are needed by the corporation -- how can you get excited about exercise when you can't eat?" he asked. Gray, who also serves as one of three co-chairs of the African American Faculty and Staff Association, added that the University needs to be more consistent about showing its support for staff through job security and not just additional programming. Fry admitted that as a result of restructuring, the University will be running these programs for a smaller work force. "Our view is that over time our work force is going to be smaller and for those employees that work here in the future we want to make the experience really positive," Fry said. "What we see is a smaller work force but that work force will be really well taken care of."

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