Looking into a future marked by intense competition for talent, growing numbers of employers are striving to create “workplaces of choice.” Yet, despite the consensus that health human resources are a vital piece of the healthcare reform puzzle, few health service organizations have developed comprehensive strategies to address work environment issues. The cumulative impact of […]
Quality of Work
Employees’ basic value proposition: Strong HR strategies must address work values
Today’s skill needs and tomorrow’s baby-boomer retirements are motivating employers to act strategically about recruitment and retention. Too often, however, the goal of a resilient and committed workforce is expressed in vague terms, like becoming an &’employer of choice’.
Workshop on Quality of Worklife Indicators for Canadian Nurses
Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) convened in 2002 a national workshop in Ottawa to develop quality of worklife indicators for nurses in Canada. Using a collaborative, consensus-building process the workshop actively engaged participants in identifying a set of practical quality of worklife indicators (QWI) that will make a measurable difference for professional nurses. The workshop’s major […]
What work should be
Canadians want quality. We want quality time with our loved-ones, quality consumer products, and quality service as customers. What about the quality of work?
Creating High-Quality Health Care Workplaces
Health human resources have emerged as a top priority for research and action. This paper echoes calls for a fundamentally new approach to the people side of the health care system – treating employees as assets that need to be nurtured rather than costs that need to be controlled. The question guiding the paper is: […]
What’s a Good Job? The Importance of Employment Relationships.
This report presents key findings, and practical implications, from Canadian Policy Research Network’s ‘Changing Employment Relationships’ project.
Employer of Choice: Workplace Innovation in Government.
Canada’s governments want to become “employers of choice.” Many are striving to be more flexible, knowledge-intensive and learning-based. Reaching these goals will require nothing short of a bold new human resource strategy that can promote change within each government workplace – a strategy that encourages innovative ways of organizing, managing, supporting and rewarding people. How […]
A good job is hard to find
The people rhetoric of the ‘Alberta Advantage’ is weak in practice. Needed is a more human resource-intensive economic developement strategy in the province of Alberta. This means creating workplaces where learning, innovation and skill can more fully contribute to productivity and competitiveness.
Surveying the ‘post-industrial’ landscape: information technologies and labour market polarization in Canada
A key issue in recent debates over the impact of new technologies on work is the polarization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs within the ‘post-industrial’ economy. Two dimensions skill andearnings have been of central concern. Contrary to earlier predictions of more homogenous patterns of either work upgrading or degrading, evidence of polarization reveals far more […]
Rethinking contingent work
Contingent work now encompasses more than one in five workers. It is time to move beyond describing the details of this trend by proving the changes it signals in employment relationships. This paper examines the implications of contingent work for workers, employers, unions and professional associations. Based on the author's presentation to the British Columbia […]