Author: Graham Lowe

Expect to hear a lot more about workplace health in the near future. Skyrocketing public and private health-care costs will almost certainly increase calls for workplaces to be used as venues for health promotion.
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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 years of cost-cutting, downsizing and restructuring have left Canada’s healthcare workforce demoralized, overworked and coping with working conditions that diminish both the quality of working life and organizational performance. This article offers an analysis of these work environment challenges, an alternative vision of a high-quality health care workplace, and an action for getting there.
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Across the industrialized world, governments have adopted a human resource-based model of economic development. Enabling citizens to acquire knowledge, skills and education is a necessary but no longer sufficient condition for economic success. Equally crucial is ensuring that past investments have the intended social and economic payoffs. The next generation of policy must strive to create the enabling conditions for the use and further development of human capital at the point where it can be most fully realized — within workplaces. This article focuses on the demand for human capital, assessing how well Canada is doing to maximize the returns on existing human capital investments among the highly educated.
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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’.
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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 recommendation is that these indicators be incorporated into the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation (CCHSA) Achieving Improved Measurement (AIM) standards used for accrediting healthcare organizations.
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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?
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This paper examines changes in employment relationships in Canada during the late 20th century. Despite well documented transformations in labour market structures and work contexts, we are only now grasping the significance of these trends for the relationships between workers and employers. Considerable debate revolves around the extent and nature of new employment relationships. Still, it is clear that fewer workers fit the historical benchmark of the post-WWII ‘standard employment model’. Consequently, the labour and employment policy framework fashioned during the post-war decades no longer meets the needs of an increasingly differentiated workforce. Furthermore, the current policy emphasis on learning and skills for innovation and productivity requires a fuller understanding of how trust, communication and other elements of employment relationships mediate human capital development. The ideal focus for the next generation of labour policy must be the workplace, which is where relationships among coworkers and between workers and management can either hinder or enable the achievement of major social and economic goals.
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Much of the debate about enhancing the employability skills of Canadian youth is premised on untested assumptions. This paper examines Alberta high school students’ self-reports of the employability skills they have acquired in high school courses, formal work experience programs, paid part-time employment, and volunteer work. Certain types of employability skills are considerably more likely to be acquired in some settings than in others. Most students do not see the labour market relevance of analytic skills or of a basic high school education. In addition, the skills that employers typically indicate they are seeking are not the same as the skills that students believe employers want. Such findings suggest that the different stakeholders may not be communicating effectively with each other. In particular, educators and employers must demonstrate more clearly to students the link between core secondary school curriculum and employment outcomes.
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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 are the key ingredients of a high-quality work environment in Canada’s health care sector and how can this goal be achieved?” Synthesizing insights from a variety of research streams, the paper identifies many ingredients are needed to create a high-quality workplace. We take a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, which complements other research initiatives on health human resources in three ways. The paper suggests that health care organizations can, and must, achieve a virtuous circle connecting work environments, individual quality of work life, and organizational performance.
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Participants at the National Roundtable on Learning, convened by Canadian Policy Research Networks on behalf of Human Resources Development Canada, proposed a Vision for Learning as a way to address the widely expressed concern at the Roundtable that Canada is not moving fast enough to increase learning opportunities and to remove barriers to learning. Acknowledging our past successes in education, the vision is a strong commitment that learning in the future must occur throughout a person’s life.
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