Cornell University Division of Planning and Budget

• Workforce Planning Overview
• Objectives
• Process
• Functions Reviewed
• Accomplishments
• Key Principles Learned
• Resulting Actions

Workforce Planning Objectives

The Workforce Planning Team established the following three objectives for the Workforce Planning review:

• Clearly define roles, responsibilities, standards of performance, and accountabilities within each major administrative area and function throughout the university.
• Realize substantial and on-going financial savings as well as increased effectiveness and efficiency in support services across campus.
• Improve the competitive market pay position for staff.

The nature of these objectives requires a sustaining effort to achieve the desired outcomes.

In July 2002 President Rawlings established a goal to “make available $20 million for reallocation to institutional and unit-specific strategic priorities by fiscal year 2004-05.” He further stated that achieving the goal “will require a combination of efforts, including workforce planning, academic program reviews, and the implementation of targeted budget reductions.”

Clarify Roles, Responsibilities, and Accountabilities

A basic premise behind the workforce planning effort was that responsibilities were not well defined in several support areas. Past experience indicates that failing to adequately manage support activities across campus results in a more chaotic and uncoordinated system of support that consumes too many resources and leads to redundancies and inadequacies. In order to realize and sustain financial savings in the long
run, there was an understanding that it would be critical to have responsibilities well defined and coordinated.

A fundamental element of clearly defined roles and responsibilities in the major functional support areas is the clarity in the role of each vice president’s office, or university librarian for the libraries, relative to
unit-based functional activities. Prior to the workforce planning effort, the relationship between most central functions and the related unit-based staff was primarily informal in nature and could not consistently be relied upon as a vehicle for communication and/or decision and planning support. The most notable exception to this is in alumni affairs and development, which has been directly responsible for related activities in the endowed colleges since 1996 and has had established points of collaboration for major giving activities in the contract colleges and designated schools.