Staff and Faculty Success Progress

Key Initiatives

New employee orientation

MSU launched a comprehensive new hire orientation program for support staff emphasizing community-building and providing access to essential administrative practices and university systems. This session covers topics including MSU’s history, benefits, payroll, campus safety, parking, policies, and health and wellbeing, alongside an introduction to employee resource groups and professional development opportunities. Additionally, Faculty and Academic Staff Development revamped its New Administrator Orientation sessions for deans, chairs and executive managers. The program was expanded to allow time to focus on how to better support faculty and academic staff and navigate change.

Compensation study

MSU worked with a contractor to perform a benchmarking study evaluating compensation competitiveness across 40 positions. The goal was to define market values for base salary and total cash compensation at MSU, comparing its pay to market standards and ensuring alignment. The process involved initial planning, data review, position matching and pay competitiveness evaluation. The final report offers insights and actionable recommendations for adjustments to ensure MSU’s alignment with market pay levels.

Bereavement leave

The revised Bereavement Leave Policy extends the number of days available to faculty and academic staff during their time of hardship. It includes an expanded coverage of deaths from traditional affiliations, such as mother, aunt, brother, to a wider coverage of deaths to account for nontraditional family structures. The policy now says that bereavement days apply for the death of a family member as defined by faculty/academic staff but is generally taken to mean a person to whom the faculty/academic staff member has close familial or familial-like ties.

Inclusive recruiting and hiring practices

MSU established new mandatory online training for academic search committees that provides a comprehensive overview of the university’s hiring process and best practices to effectively recruit and evaluate candidates ensuring inclusive, consistent and equitable hiring practices. In addition, a new hiring toolkit for support staff sets a more robust standard in recruitment practices. Central to this toolkit is a dynamic search plan template engineered to foster diversity, equity and inclusion for exceptional staff. A comprehensive recruitment resource guide tailored to reach a broad spectrum of diverse applicants complements the toolkit.