To dream the impossible dream…

Oxfordshire Skills for Health’s strap-line is ‘Towards a workplace learning culture’. By that we mean exactly the sort of ‘enchanted’ workplace envisioned by Working Together - Learning Together (United Kingdom Department of Health 2001), The goal is a workplace where everyone is a committed partner, fully engaged in meaningful work, understanding and controlling their own job, supervising themselves, and actively seeking to improve their performance through communicating their knowledge and their insight.

To achieve a workplace even remotely resembling this high performance ideal, an organisation must ensure

•     management that is (and is perceived to be) supportive of subordinates' efforts
•     participatory decision making
•     staff trust in management
•     freedom to communicate openly
•     an emphasis on high performance goals.

A vision of teamwork based on mutual respect is at the core of the high performance organisation. To achieve this vision, each member of the team must have a voice and that voice must be a voice worth not only hearing but listening to. Developing such voices is the goal of workplace literacy and it has been the goal of Oxfordshire Skills for Health since its inception.

Developing frontline workers’ generic skills (i.e. communication, maths and IT skills) is important, but so is working with managers to ensure an organisational culture that supports teamwork.