Current Status

The University of Puget Sound has engaged Lockton Companies, a privately-held professional services organization, to partner with us on the Total Compensation and Benefits Project. Throughout the selection process, Lockton displayed not only technical competency, but also flexibility, a clear understanding of our needs, and strong communication skills, in addition to a desire to serve the mission and values of Puget Sound.

Lockton is a full-service consulting firm that provides a broad spectrum of human resources and talent management capabilities to its clients. They are engaged with clients in higher education and have experience in flexible benefits, organizational strategy and effectiveness, and compensation. Lockton has demonstrated they are well-equipped to augment our internal capacity for project work, improve our access to market data, and provide objective analyses, based on similar work at other private, independent liberal arts colleges.

Lockton will begin their work by holding listening sessions on campus with various members of our community to better understand employee experiences related to total compensation and the University's ability to attract and retain talent. They will aggregate and de-identify their learnings into a key themes document to help inform the project team's work.

For the remainder of the spring term, the project team will be focused on the following activities:

  1. Beginning development of an institutional compensation philosophy aligned to the University's mission and values;
  2. Validating the currency and accuracy of job functions in staff position descriptions;
  3. Developing a staff job architecture, including development of clearly defined job families and levels and placement of staff positions into the structure;
  4. Reviewing and, if appropriate, making adjustments to the University's list of peer institutions for compensation and benefits benchmarking; and
  5. Beginning development of the Total Compensation and Benefits Survey for faculty and staff, set to be launched in Fall 2024.

Staff Job Function Validation Exercise

We are currently in the process of validating the currency and accuracy of job functions in staff position descriptions. The review period is scheduled to end on Friday, April 12, 2024.

Resources for Area Vice Presidents, Department Heads, Managers and Supervisors
Resources for All Staff
Resources for Staff in Academic Departments