Thank you for voting on shared values: prize winners announced!

A big thank you to the 5,700 employees and physicians who voted on our shared values through the online survey, staff booths and values huddles within your team. Creating new values is an important first step towards building a new workplace culture – where we are more caring towards one another, encourage learning at all levels and deliver even better results for our patients, clients and residents. Thank you for responding in such a big way and helping shape the future of VCH!

What’s next?

We’re currently analyzing all of your input and comments to determine which values resonated with you most strongly. Once we have our new set of values, the next step is to understand how we will apply the values alongside our purpose and priorities in our day-to-day work. To do this, we will be inviting staff and physicians to participate in focus group sessions or a short survey where we will refine what the values mean to us, and how they translate into behaviours that will drive our collective commitment to a new culture.

• If you are interested in joining a focus group, please contact Caroline Heisler at Caroline.Heisler@vch.ca or (604) 875-5668.

The key will be bringing our values to life and embedding them into everything we do:  how we make decisions, how we lead, who we recognize and how we show up to work every day.

Values matter

Doug Longstaffe, Profession Leader for Spiritual Care and Multifaith Services at VGH, says organizational values had a significant impact at the Winnipeg hospital where he worked 10 years ago.

“We embarked on a similar path to create shared values to move the organization forward. We came up with eight shared values that were most important to us and then made a conscious effort to truly live those values every day by using them to guide our decision making for the hospital—how we treated staff, patient care, who we hired, everything. When staff began to see that leaders were truly living the values and making difficult decisions consistently based on our values, that was when the real change happened and we made the Canadian top 100 employer list,” says Doug.

Our own journey is beginning

Doug also shared how engaged his team was in choosing VCH’s shared values at their team meeting and the strong hope he feels for the future based on his past and current experience with this work at VCH.

“Our Spiritual Care team spent two hours on our values huddle and just barely finished. This is indicative of the energy people have for this topic,” says Doug. He believes that as time goes by and people see examples of how the values are driving the organization in its decision making and ways of relating to one another, the organizational culture will transform as more people see it as real and substantive—even though it will take time and much effort.

Congratulations!

Join us in congratulating the lucky winners of one of our five prizes: a Fitbit and four Amazon or iTunes gift cards. Their names were randomly drawn after they participated in selecting our shared values:

• Kathleen Gregg, Clinic Nurse, Supervised Injection Site
• Samson Wong, Health Protection System Specialist, Environmental Health
• Jocelyn Tudtud, Coordinator, Resident Care, Banfield
• Cherie DeGuzman, Clinical Educator, Operating Rooms, UBC
• Lisa Howard

Thanks again to everyone who took time to participate in this important initiative and for your ongoing enthusiasm in shaping the future of VCH. Stay tuned for more opportunities to get involved in bringing our values to life!