HR Audits for Higher Education

As the impact of globalization, technology, demographic shifts and constrained financial resources becomes increasingly pronounced in the academic workplace, where does your college or university stand in terms of its HR polices and practices in this ever-changing environment? Are your compensation and benefits packages helping attract and retain the next generation of faculty and staff your institution needs? Are you deploying best-practice systems, processes and procedures in recruiting, performance management and communications? Is your HR department making a difference or merely standing on the sidelines processing transactions?

Performance-Solutions-Group (PSG) can help answer these questions, and more, by auditing your current HR operations and benchmarking them against the best practices of other institutions of higher learning, as well as for-profit and not-for-profit companies. The result is a set of recommendations that you can use to maximize the effectiveness and return-on-investment of your human resource strategies and management.

The Saudi Experience
PSG recently provided these services to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (www.kaust.edu.sa), a client some 10,000 miles away. The university is a brand-new institution of higher learning that will open in two years on the shores of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. The official groundbreaking was held on October 21. (See the New York Times article Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert.)

In formulating its recommendations, the PSG team visited some of the top universities in the U.S. and Middle East to evaluate their HR organizations, policies and practices.

PSG’s recommendations focused on:

• Organizational structure and job families
• Compensation structure, base salary and incentive plans
• Benefits (medical, insurance and retirement), including special expatriate benefits
• Performance management and pay-for-performance practices
• Recruiting strategies
• Governance
• Other HR policies and practices, including a code of ethics.

Let PSG Help You
With our extensive experience in the corporate and not-for-profit arenas, and knowledge of best practices in higher education, PSG’s team of talented professionals can conduct diagnostics for a complete audit of your HR organization. We’ll develop the solutions and recommendations that will help you play a strategic role on your leadership team .

For more information, please contact us at (203) 987-3338 or e-mail info@performance‑solutions-group.com.