Background In our region and hospital pharmacy the values are Trust, Wholeness, Openness and Professionalism. We trust that all employees wish to make a difference for our patients. We engage in an open and honest dialogue and we focus on enabling all employees to think and act for themselves. These values inspired us to introduce self-management to one of our production units employing 22 people.

Self-management (self-direction) is a way to empower employees and thereby create more passion and job satisfaction within the organisation.¹ We believe that it will help prepare our organisation to meet future development in a proactive way.

Purpose Our goal is to introduce and, with time, obtain a self-management culture in the unit. We focus on enabling the single individual but always with the goals of the unit in mind.

Material and methods Introducing self-management in a unit include changes for both employees and managers.

Focus for the leaders has been on giving more feedback to employees and setting the direction for the unit in opposition to micromanaging. It has never been the intention to cut down the group of leaders.

Employees were introduced to self-management in workshops, Kaizen meetings and in the unit’s everyday work. The employees were invited and supported to bring up topics where they as individuals or a group could see potential in self-managing.

The job satisfaction was measured every 3 months in a questionnaire and followed up on a daily basis.

Results Most employees found the changes challenging in a good way. As expected, the employees embraced the changes at different paces and identified relevant topics of different complexity.

For chosen topics, a group of employees initiated the needed changes with support from management or other departments in the hospital pharmacy. Initial chosen topics included production planning, skills development and recruitment.

Conclusion We started the process working bottom-up, thereby ensuring the employees were included in every step. The process so far has been successful and has enabled the employees to approach areas they had not previously. We are changing the culture, but the transformation is an ongoing process.

Reference and/or acknowledgements

1. Frederic Laloux. Fremtidens organisation. 1. Ed. p25 (Eng: Reinventing Organizations).

Reference and/or acknowledgementsNo conflict of interest.