This brief blog post presents reminders and updates regarding the ongoing Total Organizational Health initiative for our campus (TOH@UTC). If you are curious what this “TOH thing” is all about or what is happening with this initiative for this semester, please take a few minutes to read this post. If you have questions or would like to discuss or explore anything TOH-related, please reach out to me (Dr. Chris Cunningham, the TOH@UTC facilitator) at toh@utc.edu or 423-425-4264. More information regarding this initiative is available at: https://www.utc.edu/total-organizational-health.
First, a quick reminder why this TOH@UTC initiative exists: Your campus leaders (and I) care about understanding, protecting, and promoting employee health, safety, and well-being here at UTC. This is important for our day-to-day experiences while working on this campus, but also essential to the overall health and resilience of our institution. As recent events remind us, we do not know when and how that resilience will be tested, but we are more able to effectively handle and respond to opportunities, challenges, difficulties, barriers, and threats individually and as a university when the core elements of TOH are present throughout our institution.
Specifically, the TOH@UTC initiative is focused on strengthening the following core elements or contributing factors to a positive employment experience and resilient workforce:
- Protection from harm, which involves ensuring the physical and psychological safety of UTC employees, including their risk of physical harm and their perceived ability to speak up and be heard without retaliation (i.e., psychological safety).
- Mattering at work, which encompasses one’s sense of dignity, meaning, and worth in one’s work.
- Connection and community, which reflects our perceptions of and experiences with social support at work, and our sense of community and interpersonal connectedness with our colleagues
- Work-life harmony, which describes the employee’s perceived ability to juggle and manage the demands of their personal and work lives, and which is affected by their degree of autonomy and flexibility at work
- Opportunities for growth, which reflect employees’ perceptions that they can learn, develop, and experience a sense of accomplishment through their work.
This framework is evidence-based (see the TOH@UTC website, https://www.utc.edu/total-organizational-health, for more details), and its elements have all been linked through research with a wide variety of positive employee and organizational outcomes. Here at UTC, we are seeing real progress related to development in these core elements, but that progress is inconsistent across our campus. The most recent data that speak to this are from the April 2025 TOH@UTC progress check, which you can review in our blog post from early May 2025: TOH@UTC Updates: Checking our Direction with the Spring 2025 Progress Check Evaluation – TOH@UTC. These data show that the typical UTC employee is experiencing many of the core components of the TOH@UTC initiative, with at least some of these elements remaining stable and improving over time. However, it continues to be the case that the pattern of TOH-related strengths and weaknesses is unique to nearly every work unit at UTC and that some units are not engaging with this initiative as fully as others.
More generally, our most recent campus data pertaining to TOH highlight a need to further improve the ways we build and sustain unit and campus-wide work environments characterized by psychological safety and social support. There is also a need to keep working together to ensure that we maintain a strong sense of meaning, accomplishment, and autonomy in our work, even as other aspects of our work environment, and higher education and society more generally may be changing.
Extending from all of this, here is a quick outline of our main objectives for this work as this TOH@UTC initiative continues through its third year:
- Increase the number of campus work units/departments who consistently participate in TOH-related data gathering and data-based action planning. This academic year presents a particularly promising opportunity to pursue this objective, with new leadership in several key positions across campus and a new Staff Senate (https://www.utc.edu/chancellor/staff-senate) beginning its operations to more fully represent all staff employees. This objective cannot be achieved only through the efforts of campus leaders – please take advantage of opportunities you may have to participate in TOH-related activities, surveys, and programming that is relevant to you and the role you play in this institution.
- Continue to monitor and respond to evidence of progress and change in the overall employee experience at UTC. This is done primarily within input from our recurring TOH-related data streams: the McLean Staff Engagement survey (typically administered in early Fall each year), the COACHE Faculty Satisfaction survey (typically administered every couple of years in the Spring), and the TOH@UTC Progress Check survey (administered every November and April to all campus employees). Additional data are also sometimes available through department- or unit-level sessions or workshops, as well as recurring review of talent-related metrics tracked by UTC’s Human Resources department (e.g., attrition or turnover).
- More fully formalize and integrate TOH principles into ongoing initiatives and strategic efforts that will influence employees’ experiences at UTC in the future. Although the new strategic plan for our campus is not expected to be finalized and approved by the system Board of Trustees until later this fall, there has been significant effort directed toward incorporating goals into this plan that focus on protecting and promoting employee health, safety, and well-being. Every UTC employee will have a role to play in achieving these goals, so it is important that we stay tuned as this plan is finalized and implemented later this year.
- Strengthen the shared ownership over and general practice of TOH so this initiative can benefit all employees across campus. Related to the preceding objectives, what will strengthen and sustain TOH most across our campus is if all employees are able to find ways to practice and promote TOH principles on a regular basis. There are already many examples of this happening, through a wide variety of new and recurring offerings and events that are available to campus employees. Providing a comprehensive list of these TOH-related resources would likely triple the length of this post, but the following examples provide some illustration of how these types of resources typically are connected to or help to address more than one of the core elements in the TOH framework:
- UTC’s Community Safety Training resources
- The UTC Emergency Response Quick Reference Guide
- Numerous excellent health and safety trainings offered through the UTC Center for Wellbeing
- The new UTC Staff Senate and our existing Faculty Senate
- The UTC ombuds services
- Faculty Development Grants and other development resources
- The Mocs Golden Feather Award (nomination form: https://utk.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4IOBHNYMqBCkmTY)
Our TOH-related data show us that when we maintain collective, ongoing commitment to this initiative, positive change can be fostered. We can all play a role in this by identifying strengths and areas for TOH improvement in our daily work environments, and by taking more general steps to strengthen and promote a healthier and more supportive campus community. Now is a very good time to be engaged and to help optimize the UTC employment experience. If you have questions or would like help interpreting or developing plans to respond to any recent TOH-related data for your unit or department, please contact the TOH@UTC facilitator at toh@utc.edu or (423) 425-4264.