One way the UAB Medicine leadership interacts with the entire enterprise is through the annual UAB Medicine Faculty and Employee Engagement surveys. These are an opportunity for faculty and staff to provide honest, anonymous feedback and to hold leadership accountable in making improvements on your behalf. This year’s online engagement surveys began on Monday, May 4 and will continue through Monday, May 18.
As with past surveys, UAB Medicine will only receive an anonymous summary report. Overall results will be shared with all faculty and staff shortly after the survey closes so that we can begin acting on your suggestions and making changes at the unit, department and institutional levels.
Since last year’s survey, we’ve made improvements you as faculty and staff have noted are important:
- Developing ways to recognize and support faculty for their contributions. This year, we’ve reinvigorated the Dean’s Excellence Award to honor 10 junior and senior faculty members in the areas of service, teaching, research, diversity management and mentorship. The recipients will be announced in the upcoming weeks. The Blue Sky Innovator Awards are another way to recognize successful faculty by allowing them some flexibility in the pursuit of innovation and offering them support to fund their most creative ideas. The Pittman Scholars program established late last year recognizes contributions of junior faculty and helps retain some of our top young scientists and physician-scientists.
- Expanding electronic health records. We’ve created the UAB Informatics Institute and recruited Dr. Jim Cimino, who will work with Joan Hicks in HSIS and others across the institution to build on our existing health record to make it functional for both our clinical faculty and our academic enterprise.
- Establishing more ways to develop and invest in faculty and staff through focused training in Leadership Week and an SOM-focused LDI.
- Serving the greater Birmingham community. As you read in my last message, I established a Season of Service within the Dean’s Office as a way to engage with the community and the staff will continue this initiative on a quarterly basis. I encourage individuals and groups to find service opportunities meaningful to them.
- Diving further into how to address work-life balance issues. This is an issue at the forefront for the Joint Operating Leadership and the School of Medicine to address for faculty and staff. In last year’s survey, the leadership understood there’s a problem in work-life balance, so in this year’s faculty engagement survey, we’ve added specific question to understand in greater depth where challenges exist around work-life balance and workplace stress. The hope is that by knowing more, we’ll be able to explore better, more sustainable ways to address the problem.
I hope you all will take the chance to participate in the survey, and I look forward to seeing how your answers help institutional programs grow and evolve within UAB Medicine.