Jayme Uden, Ed.D., began a new leadership role at Park University as its chief human resources officer, effective March 18.

Uden offers a background in student affairs administration and a passion for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) which makes this appointment an important step from Park in a journey towards cultivating a more inclusive and engaged workforce.

In this new role, he will oversee and lead human resources strategies covering talent management, employee relations, training and development, performance improvement, compensation and benefits, organizational development, HR information systems and appropriate regulatory compliance. He will also serve as the University’s Title IX officer.

In addition, Uden will collaborate with Park’s Vision 2025 People and Culture Strategic Impact Group, which is addressing objectives of fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, communicating with clarity and transparency, and cultivating employee satisfaction and engagement.

Uden has been with Park University in a variety of student life positions since July 2011. Most recently he was the associate vice president and dean of students. In that role, he worked to ensure students had a good experience at Park. “Even if it’s in the classroom, helping out and assisting students who have concerns or complaints about things, wanting to make sure we have certain standards at Park, and that we hold ourselves to those standards, and work closely with the provost to make sure we work with faculty who have concerns too,” he added.

Uden noted that he wanted to take a different role at Park to explore new challenges as he was in his former role for the past six years. ” I didn’t think I could be the Dean forever and do everything that I was doing as there is a high burnout rate.” He added that this role included some of the same aspect in terms of managing people, just employees versus students.

One of the parts of Uden’s new role that he highlighted was the importance of understanding the organizational dynamics and drawing parallels with his previous experience in student affairs administration. He said his previous role gives him understanding of what the student experience is and how Park is set up to serve students through teachers, frontline advisors, individuals in the Student Accounts Office, and more.  “Knowing all those pieces will help me as we have to make decisions on employees when we’re recruiting positions that are empty and how we’re going to compensate and reward staff and faculty who do well … We’ll also need to incentivize them to want to stay. Most people who work at Park love it but that’s not the only thing that’ll keep people here.”

He also articulated a passionate commitment to driving meaningful change when diving deeper into his vision for advocating diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging within the workforce.

“I’ve done the work with great employees on the student affair side to try to create some experiences, bring in speakers at leadership events, look at some policies and processes that will impact diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, so I can bring that same passion to the employee side.” He added that he wants to create experiences to allow people to feel like they belong. He knows that Park has been taking steps towards a more diverse culture but hopes that with his leadership everyone can commit to that kind of workforce.

In his first several years at Park, he served as dean of students, associate dean of students and assistant dean of student life. Prior to joining Park University, Uden was an assistant director for residence life at the University of Kansas from 2006-11 and he was a residence life coordinator at Kansas State University from 2003-06.