7 ways to get involved in UTO's culture work
Culture work is UTO work.
Yesterday’s UTO Town Hall, led by Bonnie LeBlanc, demonstrated the interplay of our organization’s culture and the innovative work being accomplished across the chapters. A review of three of UTO’s 15 strategic priorities underscored the important ways in which our culture of service and innovation reaches beyond the university to provide digital equity to marginalized communities, expand identity and access management through a human-centered lens, and more.
“Culture enables us to achieve our project, product and service goals through our best selves,” stressed Cheryl Johnson, an IT Project Manager, who spoke on behalf of the Culture Ripples group.
Check out a variety of ways in which all members can be more involved in creating and expanding culture work at UTO:
1. Giving Back to the Community
Bonnie LeBlanc started the discussion with a review of the ways in which the Giving Back to the Community team works to provide opportunities for the UTO family to continually connect with the community on campus, throughout the valley and all over Arizona. From volunteer opportunities — like donating holiday gifts to families in the community and working at food drives — to participating in community runs and joining outreach programs like Girls Who Code, the team offers a variety of opportunities around environmental impact, ASU family and community, food scarcity, animal welfare, technology and more.
2. Health and Wellbeing
The Health & Wellbeing team, as shared by Chris Deaton, Farnoosh Niknam and Jean Squires, brings together team members around a shared goal of a healthier and happier life by intentionally focusing on healthier living, personal growth, and new cultural experiences. Centered on health, wellness and recreation, the team has a variety of ongoing opportunities to get involved:
3. Culture Weavers
The Culture Weavers community of practice includes numerous teamlets, each working to advance the work of culture within the UTO:
The Alignment Teamlet focuses their efforts on incorporating the Positive Core values of Relational, Authentic, Visionary and Empowered into various initiatives. Most recently they have been working on UTO 2.1 Belonging and UTO Work-Life Balance.
The Invigoration Teamlet is dedicated to working together to uplift the UTO community and help UTO employees and our ASU community know that they are valued. Some of our current efforts include developing a Professional Development page as a one-stop-shop for UTO employees.
The Operations Teamlet makes all these ideas happen!
Kasey Kautenberger and Zella Muro invited all UTO members to join them at any Culture Weavers meeting to brainstorm new initiatives within these teamlets.
4. Diversity, Equality, Inclusion and Belonging
Over the summer, UTO came together to formulate an Affirmative Pledge that has now moved into action. Kyle Bowen and Barnaby Wasson expanded upon the pledge and how it led to the creation of WG-Diversity and CW-DEIB (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion and Belonging), two working groups dedicated to making a meaningful difference in advancing diversity within UTO and the university. While WG-D shapes how we activate diversity through the positive core and leadership principle, CW-DEIB supports us all as we “walk the diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging talk” through direct actions and small group conversations.
5. Culture Ripples
Inspired by UTO’s Culture Weavers, Cheryl Johnson shared ways to get involved with Culture Ripples, an ASU-wide community of practice that serves as a generative gathering space for designing, learning and disseminating methods for creating ripples of collaboration and transparency across ASU, while transforming the technical and relational architectures necessary for democratized learning and living.
6. Responsible Innovation Chapter
Chris Richardson and Jeni White shared information about the newest culture initiative UTO’s Responsible Innovation. The RI’s guiding charter creates a five-point framework to guide all product, project or service teams with a common mindset. The framework centers on the following five themes: 1) lead with the "why; 2) be human-centered; 3) many voices make enlightened work; 4) look backward and forward; and 5) water the grassroots.
7. C3 stands for culture, creative and communications
Corinna Busciglio and Annie Davis, representing the WG-C3 team, explained that the C3 team strives for a purposeful and intentional co-creation of UTO’s culture, specifically through strategic communications, storytelling, and events. In doing so, the team delivers content outputs — toolkits and templates, community-wide events, and UTO Newsroom stories — that help actualize and highlight the everyday culture in action happening throughout our organization.
Culture work is UTO work. As such, it requires collective action, input and participation by all UTO family members to advance our core values: relational, authentic, visionary and empowered.