Michael Freer
Chief Human Resource Officer Bethel University
Michael Freer is Chief Human Resources Officer at Bethel University, where he leads the Office of People and Culture and partners with senior leadership to strengthen organizational effectiveness, transparency, and employee experience. With more than 18 years of HR leadership experience across higher education institutions, Michael is known for streamlining processes, modernizing HR operations, and building cultures that support performance and trust. His work focuses on aligning people strategy with institutional mission while navigating complexity, change, and resource constraints in higher education.
Seminars
Thursday 25th June 2026
Discover: Automating the Hardest Problems in Higher Ed HR: How Bethel University Is Eliminating Manual Faculty Pay Work, Reducing Cost, and Improving Accuracy
9:40 am
- Tackling one of higher education’s most persistent operational challenges, complex faculty, adjunct, overload, sabbatical, and student worker pay, by replacing manual calculations, emails, and payroll handoffs with an integrated, rules-based HR and payroll workflow.
- Redesigning HR operations to automate end-to-end processes such as contract generation, compensation calculation, approvals, and payroll entry, significantly reducing error risk, cycle time, and administrative burden while improving transparency and trust for faculty and managers.
- Delivering material financial impact by eliminating redundant HR software and automating high volume transactional work, projecting $240k–$250k in annual software savings and $500k–$600k in total annual cost savings as additional HR and payroll processes are optimized over the next 12–18 months.
Thursday 25th June 2026
Develop: How Can HR Reduce Complexity Without Creating New Risk?
10:00 am
- Where does decision overload show up most clearly in HR operating models today?
- How do unclear ownership, manual work, and fragmented processes increase risk even when costs are reduced?
- What decisions should be standardised, automated, or governed centrally versus deliberately left local?
- How do leaders know when simplification has gone too far?
