People are concerned that they need to know more about the questions to be asked in the interview and some thought that without knowing the intent of the question they would not be able to give adequate answers. There were concerns about the weighting and the appeals process and people wanted to know more about this. People have stated they want more information so that they can prepare properly for the interview. Other universities have had in giving staff more information.
Staff found the this site useful, it lists the 50 questions
http://www.bath.ac.uk/personnel/paymodernisation/about/hera.html
http://www.hera.ac.uk/about_hera/
In discussion with memebers on the AUT executieve it seems the college is reluctant to want to commit itself on the MoU. The College may be generating bad will unecessarily by delaying on a clear statement. Any increased wage costs will be insignificant cost compared with pension fund costs.
There is also a demand for more transparency, people do not believe there is anything to be gained by withholding information. It appears that verifiers will pay a key part in ensuring a role is correctly given and that there will be a need for a lot of management time to go into the process of ensuring the roles are correct. Computer staff need to emphasize the critical aspects of their work.
At the last AUT meeting it was made clear by a role analyst who is a member of the AUT that the role analysts have received very thorough training.
At the HERA briefing session in the Computing Dept, colleagues were
uncomfortable with the idea that the final score is produced by a computer program which is not properly documented in any material we have been
given.
The HERA website, in contrast to the documentation that has been distributed within the college, states that the final calculation can also
be performed manually (http://www.hera.ac.uk/about_hera/), though it
includes the debatable claim that results from the computer program will
be "more accurate".
There following suggests were made:
- any appeals procedure should include the possibility of asking for the
calculation to be manually verified, with oversight or participation of
union reps;
- in any case, there should be manual verification of a statistically
representative sample of final scores throughout the college, with full
union participation;
- the instruction manual for calculating the score, and the "software user
notes", should be disclosed to unions and individual role holders in the
interests of transparency.