Authors

• Statistics Finland. Interview and Survey Services
• Ministry of Employment and the Economy

Keywords

arrangement of working time, autonomy at work, discrimination, employees, employment contracts, job characteristics, job satisfaction, job security, local government officers, occupational training, personnel management, personnel policy, wages, working conditions

Abstract

The annual survey studied employee opinion on the quality of working life in Finnish municipalities. Main themes were psychosocial working environment, job characteristics, pay systems, satisfaction with the job, employment security, training and development, capacity to work, and bullying and discrimination at work.

First, the respondents were asked how many years they had worked for the employer they were working for at the time, type of contract, number of persons at the workplace, and what kind of changes there had been in staff numbers, working hours, contracts, and tasks during the past 12 months, and whether people had been transferred to other units. Further questions covered team work, whether there had been conflicts at the workplace, between what groups and whether the conflicts had decreased or increased over the past 12 months. Incidents of bullying and violence were charted.

Next set of questions covered the respondent's autonomy at work and other job characteristics, overtime and its compensation, flexible working time arrangements, and R's membership in a trade union or professional association. Changes over the past year in workload, physical or mental stress, in access to training etc were explored as well as pay and bonus systems, and satisfaction with pay. Psychosocial working environment was charted with a number of questions, for instance, whether employees were treated equally, was there support for trying new things and so on. One topic pertained to whether the respondents had presented any ideas to improve working conditions, products, services or working methods at the workplace and whether there had been other development initiatives. The respondents' participation in job-related training and development was investigated.

One theme pertained to job satisfaction. The respondents were asked to what extent they agreed with a number of statements relating to staff sufficiency, organisation of work, access to information, physical or mental stress etc. They were asked how likely it was that they would be dismissed or laid off, or their tasks or working hours would be changed over the next year. Opinions on the employer's financial situation, employment situation in Finland and on changes in working life were studied. A number of questions investigated how the employees' capacity to work and occupational safety had been taken into account at the workplace, the respondents' sickness absences, and estimate of own mental and physical capacity to work. Discrimination at work based on ethnic group, age, gender and type of contract was explored.

Background variables included the respondent's age, gender, major region (NUTS2), type of municipality, education, occupational status and group, industry of employment, employer type, status in employment, economic activity, weekly working hours, additional jobs, whether R worked for a municipality or a federation of municipalities and in which sector. Information on age, gender, major region, type of municipality and education level were obtained from registers. Other background variables were obtained from the Labour Force Survey 2008 telephone interviews which were often conducted together with the Finnish Working Life Barometer interview.