In a meeting on Thursday, university administrators approved a program to give quality-of-work bonuses to employees in information technology and human resource services and debated the university’s salary structure for the 2009 fiscal year.

A strong majority of the Professional and Scientific Council passed a motion to support the bonus program, which will reward workers who demonstrate productive and creative work, but don’t have bonus pay structured into their employment contracts.

“There are outstanding and ambitious employees who will not see another dime past their salary, and this initiative would give them the opportunity for reward,” said Carla Espinoza, associate vice president of human resource services.

Some who opposed the motion expressed concern that it would be difficult to choose which employees would receive bonuses.

The council also debated the current salary structure, in which pay raises are tied to employee performance – at least in part. Once again, employees said it is difficult to choose who should receive a raise.

“We are dealing with the issue of entitlement,” said Brenda Behling, program manager for the ISU vice president and provost. “Supervisors are experiencing stress in trying to decide on giving certain employees a 0-percent or a 3-percent pay increase. They’re not sure the grief is worth even giving a 2.5-percent raise to one individual and a 3-percent raise to another.”

In its meeting minutes, the P&S Council concluded that performance-based salary raises cannot be effective without “a well-designed performance appraisal system that can be implemented universally and uniformly across the university,” but Iowa State currently does not have any universitywide performance appraisal standards.

Some employees were worried that pay raises did not take inflation into account.

“When we make recommendations for high performance, it’s hard not to consider the cost of living among different individuals, and I’m not sure the salary study by Towers Perrin takes that into consideration when looking only at employee performance,” said Dan Woodin, information systems leader with Information Technology Services.

The P&S Council concluded that employees whose performance is satisfactory or better should receive a pay increase at least as large as the inflation rate measured by the Midwest urban consumer price index.

Monday will mark the end of the one-month comment period during which faculty and staff members have been able to comment on the results of a study done by consulting firm Towers Perrin before the P&S Council makes its recommendations to the office of the executive vice president and provost and, subsequently, to ISU President Gregory Geoffroy for the final decision.

“We have had a decent turnout at the open forums held throughout the past month,” Espinoza said. “The comments have been helpful and specific and will be summarized before submission to the provost and president.”