DeKALB – A Human Resources presentation was the main topic of discussion at the last Faculty Senate meeting of the fall 2024 semester held Wednesday.
John Acardo, senior associate vice president and chief human resources officer, gave a presentation regarding statistics around reaching goals to help NIU accomplish deficit mitigation strategies.
Three main areas Acardo focused on in his presentation were overtime, pay for extra help and position activity, with pay for extra help being the popular topic of discussion.
Acardo said NIU’s goal when it comes to helping with the deficit mitigation strategies is to be strategic.
“We want to have some integrated process with our annual budgeting process to know what departments and divisions are thinking about, restructuring, organizations, enhancements, promotions, all those things that go along with those employment lines. Also with staffing refunds and recruitments as we look to become more strategic and also focus on how we can have operational efficiency with more administrative processes becoming more automated or more efficient,” Acardo said. “We need to rethink and kind of reframe how we recruit and staff each of our organizational units with staff, and so we’ll spend some time about what that looks like, and some of those dollars to quantify, really what we’re looking at an institutional scale, about thinking strategically and how we might accomplish that throughout the course of the year.”
Acardo said one of the ways NIU can earn some cost savings is by reducing the reliance on extra help.
“Extra help, for the most part, in the vast majority, are hired to help expedite or increase efficiencies within processes that already exist. One way that we can realize some potential cost savings is to slow that process down,” Acardo said. “We recognize that that may mean things we need to stop, be paused or slow down in that regard, but it is a way that we can potentially realize some cost savings over the course of that fiscal year. As we look at extra help, there were 94 units on campus in April that were employing only one extra help position. The vast majority of them were to help increase or expedite administrative processes.”
At the end of the presentation, Acardo provided an opportunity for members of the Faculty Senate to ask questions or provide comments, where members of the Faculty Senate had a lot to say regarding the presentation.
Therese Arado, interim director of the College of Law library, expressed her frustration regarding not having administrative support.
“I lost the administrative support in my department five years ago, and it has never been brought back. Guess who does that work now? Me, as well as a couple of my colleagues. We lost our extra help person we had, who we got because we had no other assistance when this started in the summer,” Arado said. “So these changes do directly impact us, not just staff. We’re talking about ways to spread the work around for people who are already significantly at max.”
Arado also said people are being overworked and not receiving the support they need.
“People are at their max and they’re exhausted, and you hear that in people’s voices, and people keep doing their work. They keep getting this work done, but you hit a wall,” Arado said. “I know there are new people in the room, and then there are people like me, like we’ve been here for so long. I know you’re trying to get out of this, but at what point do we just break because we can’t pass it on to somebody else? We don’t need $3 million worth of new positions, but we might need $2 million worth of new positions. I can’t even imagine asking the operating staff that I work with to take on something else, and that’s why I take on things, because I can’t do that.”
The dates for the Faculty Senate meetings for the spring 2025 semester are listed in the agenda, and will occur Jan. 22, Feb. 19, March 26 and April 23.
