Overview: What is TOH@UTC?
Beginning in January 2023, the Total Organizational Health initiative at UTC (TOH@UTC) is a data-driven and evidence-based effort to build and sustain a culture within this institution that protects and promotes health, safety, and well-being for all employees. Through this initiative, UTC employees are working together to:
- Enhance engagement health, and well-being
- Build a supportive workplace culture
- Strengthen the overall resilience of the institution, and
- Help UTC to become an “employer of choice” locally, regionally, in the University of Tennessee system, and beyond.
This TOH framework is based on the US Surgeon General’s (2022) framework for worker well-being along with the IGLOO model of multilevel effects within organizational settings (Nielsen et al., 2017; 2018). Data driving this project includes archival and recurring new survey data from multiple sources, archival and continually gathered data workforce-related metrics, extensive discussions and ongoing work and consultation with institutional leadership at multiple levels, and ongoing meetings and consultation efforts with employees in all divisions, areas, and departments throughout the university.
Why now?
Data gathered in 2021 and 2022 revealed ongoing worker health, safety, and well-being challenges that persisted even after the COVID-19 pandemic started to weaken. Additional external labor market and economic factors threatened to compound or complicate some of these challenges by late 2022. At this point, university leadership initiated the TOH@UTC initiative to study and respond so as to improve the employee experience and overall resilience of the university.
How is this happening?
The TOH@UTC initiative involves continually monitoring and responding to protect and promote 10 TOH-enhancing factors within the UTC work environment so that they might become consistent features of all UTC employees' experiences while working as part of this university:
Protecting UTC employees from harm means working to protect and promote their physical and psychological safety. This involves addressing environmental and interpersonal risks of physical harm, as well as working to ensure that all employees have a voice, opportunities to use that voice, and a reasonable expectation that their voice will be heard and responded to by their colleagues and leaders.
It is critically important to build and sustain strong and healthy social support networks within UTC and its many employment units (colleges, divisions, areas, departments, etc.). These types of social connections create a sense of community that helps to ensure all employees feel like they belong within their specific working groups, areas, and/or departments and that they can turn to their coworkers and supervisors for help and support whenever needed. As emphasized in a common UTC slogan: "Mocs flock together" - this applies to employees as well as students and alumni.
Employees can only achieve work-life harmony when they have some degree of autonomy and flexibility over their work-related responsibilities. This might include having some input over scheduling assignments, work location requirements, and project-related deadlines. This dimension of TOH is also supported when employees have access to adequate paid leave and the ability to manage or control boundaries they may set between aspects of their work and nonwork lives.
This dimension is linked to employees' feelings of dignity, meaning, worth, and value within the organization. Addressing these factors involves ensuring that employees understand how and why organizational decisions are made, as well as how and why what they do for the organization matters and is aligned with the organization's mission.
Ensuring employees have access to opportunities for personal and professional growth and development is essential to the long-term health and vitality of the university. Celebrating learning and growth accomplishments is also important to building an organizational culture that supports this dimension of TOH.