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Dr. John Yardley

Most of us have heard the expression ‘think globally, act locally’ when it comes to greening the environment, but did you know it can also apply to improving quality worklife (QWL) for the healthcare industry?

Dr. John Yardley, Managing Director of Brock University’s Workplace Health Research Laboratory (WHRL), believes that creating local solutions to local problems is a critical element to successfully implementing corporate change programs that have relevance to the local level.

“While strategic leadership should make HR management a fundamental part of all workplace strategic plans, it’s the poor translation of those strategies into meaningful frontline effects that causes many workplaces to fail to capture the energy and initiative of their staff,” says Dr. Yardley.

In fact, Dr. Yardley believes there are two major reasons for this failure: 1) a lack of alignment within the organization on the importance of managing people well and ensuring that QWL is planned for, in addition to getting work done; and 2) a failure to enact consistent, systematic positive change in the QWL in local work environments because most change efforts are not locally focused.

A key to enacting QWL changes on a local basis is to collect information, such as survey data, in a valid and reliable way that shows an organizational map of the variation in QWL throughout the organization right to the front lines.

“This is where the expertise of our team comes in, but the results of such data collection do not provide solutions. They show the way – like a flashlight in a cave -- but those results need to be interpreted by the people who provided them.” explains Dr. Yardley.

The results demonstrate not only where an organization is doing well but also where it’s in need of intervention. The task then becomes one of learning what is needed to create strong QWL in the organization, unit by unit if necessary, because only then can appropriate solutions be effectively mapped to local problems.

“What most organizations fail to do well -- until there’s a breakdown which means they are reactive instead of proactive – is monitor and hold teams accountable for frontline QWL,” says Dr. Yardley.

Fortunately, Brock’s WHRL became so successful at the development of applied QWL research measuring tools that an incorporated spinoff HR management consulting company called Metrics@Work was created in late 2007.

While university spin-off businesses are not uncommon, it is unusual to see one emerge from the social science field, perhaps an indicator of the growing appreciation of the impact of QWL on long-term workplace success.

As President of Metrics@Work and presenter to over 160 academic and professional conferences and workshops in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia, Dr. Yardley is able to pursue his passion for helping change frontline working environments into positive, engaging, high quality workplaces.

Dr. Yardley became involved with the Quality Worklife Quality Healthcare Collaborative (QWQHC) when WHRL, and later Metrics@Work, helped the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) with its Healthy Hospital Initiative, which included the creation of the OHA-Healthy Hospital Employee Survey.

Dr. Yardley was also involved in Accreditation Canada’s move to design measures to capture QWL as part of the accreditation process in Canadian healthcare. Both of these relationships led to a connection with the QWQHC, especially since Accreditation Canada hosts the QWQHC Secretariat.

There was a natural fit between Dr. Yardley’s philosophy and the QWQHC. For example, the QWQHC’s Charter to create high levels of QWL in healthcare supports Dr. Yardley’s conviction that improved alignment is needed to simultaneously advance QWL issues and employee productivity.

“I think when a healthcare agency signs on to the QWQHC Charter it should be required to also declare that it has directly and specifically embedded HR management in its Strategic Plans, and as part of its ongoing efforts to improve it should be able to show that it’s systematically trying to improve QWL,” he says.

For his part, even though Dr. Yardley’s future involves moving out of the Brock environment, he will continue to encourage more academics and students to use the WHRL data to advance the theoretical understanding of QWL in healthcare through research.

In addition, as his career with Metrics@Work evolves, he plans to use the company as a vehicle to encourage higher levels of focus on improving frontline QWL in healthcare through the application of research.

The bottom line for Dr. Yardley is the fact that patient-centred care must be done in a collaborative way. “Patient-centred collaborative care embodies the need for high QWL, because collaboration requires trust and trust will not survive, thrive, or develop when QWL is poor,” he stresses.

For more information on Dr. Yardley’s groundbreaking work, please visit www.whru.ca or www.metricsatwork.com.