Emma Maple | Staff Writer
Editorial Board Note:
“As Whitworth 2021, a visionary plan launched by the university in 2011, comes to a close this year, The Whitworthian is looking at the plan’s eight goals. Through a variety of articles in the arts and culture, news and opinions sections, The Whitworthian team will be unpacking a view of what Whitworth 2021 set out to accomplish and which of those criterion were met.”
Buried almost at the end of Whitworth’s ten-year plan lies the unassuming Goal # 7. Click on it, and you’ll find something that should be important to every university: investing in employees.
One short paragraph and three little bullet points expand on this goal. It seeks to “recruit and retain a high qualified faculty and staff, equip supervisors and academic leaders and enhance employee training and development.”
A quick visitor to the page might look at these goals, smile at seeing that Whitworth is considering its employees and move on to Goal 8. Someone with a little more curiosity may stop and think, “Pretty-sounding words. But how did Whitworth accomplish these?”
The second type of viewer might scroll down past the pretty phrasing and click on the link at the bottom: Goal 7 Key Performance Indicators (KPI). This viewer, rather than trusting the wording of the university, would find out the hard truth.
Very few of the objectives that Whitworth established for itself in this arena were accomplished – only three of the 17.
Larry Probus, vice president of Finance and Administration, said, “The quality and motivations of our employees is hugely important to the university being successful.” Given the fact only 18% of the KPI were accomplished, those words don’t seem to hold true.
The biggest factor to the lack of achievement in this area was fiscal issues brought about by COVID-19. Greg Orwig, vice president of Admissions and Financial Aid, said that quite a few KPI depended on financial resources, which at times were scarce due to COVID-19 and other financial challenges.
Another factor that hurt the goal was employee turnover. This goal was chiefly implemented and evaluated by the Chief Human Resource Officer. However, there’s been quite a bit of turnover in this department since the goal was implemented in 2010, which is ironic, considering part of the goal is to “retain” staff. Ariane Oglesbee, who has been interim chief Human Resources officer since March 1st, said, “The change in leadership could have impacted bringing the whole goal to completion.”
But let’s take a moment and pretend that every KPI that Whitworth set up for itself in this department was achieved. In this fictional world, we find that Whitworth still hasn’t lived up to its expectations, because the KPI simply don’t address key needs among the employees.
One sentence mentions that Whitworth hopes to “recruit and retain highly qualified and diverse Christian staff and faculty members.” The KPI don’t even address this issue; rather they focus on economic improvements, such as compensation studies and employee benefits programs. Orwig says, “The university specifically identified gender, race and ethnicity as domains of diversity on which we wanted to focus our energies”. Not a single KPI focuses on improvement in any of these three key groups.
The plan doesn’t even bring up something that has been a key issue surrounding employment at Whitworth: LGBTQ+ rights. In 2015, ASWU released a student resolution encouraging sexual orientation to be on the list of protected classes, but the measure was voted against by Whitworth’s Board of Trustees. Recently members of the Pride Club and Generation Action club met with administration to try again, but Generation Action Vice President Jericho Simone felt like they were just being “ping-ponged” around between different members of the administration, without receiving any answers.
Orwig said that the plan’s focus on gender, race and ethnicity wasn’t meant to exclude other groups but to provide areas of focus for the strategic plan.
Orwig notes the importance of this goal, saying, “To accomplish any of the other goals in the plan would be through the support of our employees, our faculty and staff”. Yet, we see a lack of true commitment from Whitworth administration to live up to the pretty words that we read. Instead, we see a lot of failed KPI and a failure to address the real issue.
No matter how you want to spin the story, a curious reader of Whitworth’s 2021 Vision will find that the administration isn’t seeing very clearly in regard to truly supporting its employees.
