Learning
We value stretching our knowledge. Our team engages in frequent structured and self-directed learning opportunities, including sharpening our individual skills, deepening our Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion skills and knowledge, and learning from professionals working in primary care. This learning often happens within a small group or is shared across the team so we can all learn. We all learn from each other and value each individual’s unique expertise. Everyones’ unique expertise is valued and celebrated.
Virtual
We value being a distributed team. Our team works as virtual first, from locations across the province. When we need to get together, we do, but we default to virtual first. This means we use many different tech tools for communicating, meeting, collaborating, managing projects, analyzing data, and brainstorming. We are high tech AND highly connected which is just how we like it!
Curiosity
We value and practice professional nimbleness. We encourage each other to try new things, take on new work, explore new ideas, and develop new skills. We are all curious about different things and each have the opportunity to choose projects that we find the most interesting and challenging. And we can step into, or out of, roles and responsibilities as our interests change. We don’t define our work by traditional job descriptions and that flexibility is exciting!
Transparency
We value explicit and clear approaches to work. We use elements of Sociocracy and Holocracy in our work to to embed transparency in decision making and collaboration. We want all members of our team to be part of conversations about our direction, decisions, and how we work. We use various tools and processes to help support transparency and are always working to find new ways to do this better
Action
We value doing something small, quick and helpful now, over waiting to make big, complex changes. In our work, we try to move quickly from learning to doing and encourage our partners to consider incremental change too! We do lots of iteration – learning, trying, testing, reflecting, re-learning – which allows us to safely test out new things and then keep making them better. Sometimes that means innovations look and feel smaller but we know that the small changes add up to something bigger.
Evidence
We value evidence over anecdotes (but we know anecdotes often point to possible evidence!). We strive to seek out and create evidence to guide our decisions and recommendations for stakeholders. We use evidence in many forms – quantitative and qualitative; theoretical and lived experience; clinical and academic – to inform what we know about ideas, topics, or concepts before we start to generate solutions.
Collaboration
We value working together. We collaborate with each other and with organizations, government, clinics, individual healthcare practitioners, academics, researchers, patients, communities and Indigenous communities. We know that our work is better when it includes a diversity of experiences and thinking.
Innovation
We value practical innovation. Our brand of innovation knows that research and knowledge is most useful when it solves a real-world problem or fills a real-world gap in the primary care system. We don’t like reports that sit on shelves and gather dust – we want our projects to have a more tangible impact.
Self-Management
We value and trust each team member to manage their own time, schedule, and work. We use various tools and processes to support self-management across the team and have a high degree of mutual autonomy. Even as we encourage self-management, we also foster a culture of teamwork and collaboration so that no individual works in isolation.