Authors

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

Keywords

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

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 and working time arrangements, satisfaction with the job, employment security, training and development, capacity to work, telework, 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 and type of contracts during the past 12 months. Further questions charted whether people had been transferred from other units and whether the employer had used temporary agency employees. Questions also covered team work, whether there had been conflicts at the workplace and between what groups. Incidents of bullying, harassment and violence were charted.

Next set of questions investigated the respondent's autonomy and influence at work and other job characteristics, overtime and its compensation, flexible working time arrangements, local bargaining on working time, and R's membership in a trade union or professional association. Changes over the past year in workload and pace of work, safety at work etc were explored as well as pay and bonus systems, pay bargaining and satisfaction with pay. Psychosocial working environment was charted with a number of questions, for instance, whether there was 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 would be changed over the next year. Views were probed on the employer's economic situation, employment situation in Finland and possible changes in working life. A number of questions investigated how the employees' capacity to work and occupational health and safety had been taken into account at the workplace, the respondents' sickness absences, illnesses and disabilities, and estimate of own mental and physical capacity to work. The respondents were asked about working from home (telework), doing work somewhere else outside of workplace and being in contact with clients or workplace outside of normal working hours. Discrimination at work based on ethnic group, age, gender and type of contract was explored as well as whether the respondents had colleagues of other nationality or ethnic origin.

Background variables included the respondent's year of birth, age, gender, region, type of municipality, education level, economic activity, status in employment, industry of employment, employer type, weekly working hours, and additional jobs. Information on age, gender, region, type of municipality and education level were obtained from registers. The other background variables were obtained from the Labour Force Survey 2011 telephone interviews which were often conducted together with the Finnish Working Life Barometer interview.