Healthy work environments: Canada’s next big idea

University of Toronto 89 Chestnut Residence,
Toronto, Ontario

Graham Lowe
The Graham Lowe Group

Employers want efficiency, productivity and adaptability. Employees want decent jobs that offer dignity, respect, personal development and economic security. Communities and citizens want ethical corporate behaviours. Unions want equity and fairness. Governments are promoting innovation and skills as the route to a better quality of life. And not least, researchers want the best evidence on healthy workplace determinants translated into practice.

While now separate, these discourses converge in a composite picture of what a healthy, productive and responsible organization looks like. This vision points the way to positive workplace change and can be a rallying point for a societal project—Canada's Next Big Idea that, over time, can shift how we think and act at work.

About presenter

Dr. Lowe, and international expert on the quality of work, is the second recipient of the Institute's Alf Nachemson Lectureship. He is President of the Graham Lowe Group Inc., a research and consulting firm specializing in creating healthy and productive work environments, a Professor at the University of Alberta, and a Research Associate at the Canadian Policy Research Networks.

About the Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture

The annual Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture honours the significant contribution of Dr. Alf Nachemson to the use of research evidence in clinical decision-making. Dr. Nachemson was a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon and researcher from Sweden, and a founding member of the Institute for Work & Health’s Scientific Advisory Committee.  The lectureship is awarded to a prominent national or international individual who has made a significant and unique contribution to evidence-based practice or policy-making in the prevention of work-related injury, illness or disability.