PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2020

Boise State University Receives CUPA-HR’s HR Excellence Award

Boise State University’s human resources department has received the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) 2020 HR Excellence Award. This award honors transformative HR work in higher education, recognizing teams or individuals who have provided HR leadership resulting in significant and ongoing organizational change within their institutions. Thanks to the generous support of AIG, CUPA-HR is pleased to offer a $3,000 contribution to Boise State University’s scholarship fund.

Recognizing the difficulty of recruiting and retaining talented, committed employees, Boise State’s HR department developed a robust People Strategy that focuses on an inclusive work culture where everyone is valued and one’s daily work has meaning and fulfillment. Based on this People Strategy, the department recognized the need to restructure to fully align with the vision of employee engagement and to respond to a rapidly changing workforce. The HR team identified three distinct employee experiences and restructured the department to focus on those. The three experiences are:

• The Welcome Experience, focusing on the period from application through onboarding.
• The Growth Experience, focusing on the duration of time between onboarding and farewell. This experience includes projects and policies that touch on employee satisfaction, total rewards and initiatives to assist in employee development, participation and well-being, with the goal of motivating and retaining talented and committed employees.
• The Farewell Experience, designed to honor an employee’s time at Boise State. This experience includes retirement, emeritus and succession planning projects.

The People Strategy model received full buy-in from leadership. In addition to restructuring the approach to the employee experience, HR also hosted a listening tour, where they surveyed employees across campus and held live listening focus groups to identify areas in which departments can improve the employee experience.

About CUPA-HR

CUPA-HR is higher ed HR. We serve higher education by providing the knowledge, resources, advocacy and connections to achieve organizational and workforce excellence. Headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and serving over 30,000 HR professionals and other campus leaders at more than 2,000 member institutions and organizations around the country and abroad, the association offers learning and professional development programs, higher education salary and benefits data, extensive online resources and just-in-time regulatory and legislative information.

Contact Information
Erin Rosolina
Marketing Manager – Communications and Marketing
[email protected]