Coordinated Action Agenda for Healthy Workplaces and Supporting Evidence

The Canadian Healthy Workplace Council is calling for a coordinated action agenda to create healthy workplaces.
Recognizing that a critical mass of governments, organizations and workplace health practitioners are pursuing healthy workplace goals, the Council believes that the time is right for a coordinated action agenda to create healthy workplaces. The goals are more integrated public policy and wider diffusion of best practices in workplaces.
This document outlines the Council's action agenda and also includes 5 pages of evidence for healthy workplace action, prepared for the Council by Graham Lowe.
Policy agenda and evidence

21st Century Job Quality: Achieving What Canadians Want

This new study, published by Canadian Policy Research Networks, is urging employers and governments to focus on job quality as a means to recruit and retain the workers needed for Canada’s future prosperity. In 21st Century Job Quality: Achieving What Canadians Want, author Graham Lowe finds that the economic prosperity of the new century hasn’t resulted in an overall improvement in job quality – even though many Canadian employers are struggling to attract and keep skilled workers.

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Shaping the Future Workforce and Workplace

Keynote talk at the What Works Alberta Conference 2004, Building a Skilled Labour Force. Edmonton, February 18, 2004.

Shaping the kind of workforce and workplaces Alberta will need in 2014 requires labour market stakeholders to collaborate on creative policies and programs. Dr. Lowe provides a starting point for this collaboration by outlining how major social, economic, demographic and organizational pressures require innovative approaches to workforce and workplace renewal. He will argue that building a skilled labour force in Alberta depends on having a compelling vision of the kind of workplace that will support high skills and high performance. Dr. Lowe will challenge you to create that vision and to think about how you can achieve it.
This conference is sponsored by Alberta Human Resources and Employment and Human Resources Development Canada.

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How healthy organizations support learning and innovation

Keynote talk at The Changing Face of Work and Learning conference, Telus Centre, Edmonton. Sponsored by The Work and Learning Network, University of Alberta. For conference details see: www.wln.ualberta.ca
TALK OUTLINE: Marshall McLuhan once predicted that we would all be “learning a living” in the information age. This age has arrived, but learning in workplaces is easier said than done. The rhetoric is clear: economic policy links national competitiveness to skill development and learning, social policy promotes life-long learning, and employers are striving for knowledge-intensive business strategies. However, implementing these ideas is difficult because many work environments do not enable learning. The solution requires more than new human resource management practices or a stronger commitment to build a ‘learning organization’. A useful guide for supporting learning in workplaces is the model of a healthy organization – one that has healthy, sustainable and innovation outcomes for employees, investors (or citizens in the public sector) and communities. From this perspective, personal and organizational well-being depends on active learning.

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Men’s and Women’s Quality of Work in the New Canadian Economy

Despite much debate and commentary on the emerging knowledge economy in Canada and other
industrialized countries, there has been little in-depth analysis of how gender issues are playing
out in the process of economic and workplace change. Women’s experiences on the job are
usually examined using a limited range of measures, and scant attention has been paid to the
expectations that women and men bring to the workplace. The purpose of this report is to
provide new evidence on what women and men want in a job, and how they are experiencing the
transition to a knowledge-based economy.
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