Working life | In Finland, remote work is done more than others, and it may lead to a development familiar from the United States

in Finland an extraordinary amount of remote work is done, and its long-term effects may not yet be assessed, says Aalto University professor emeritus Matti Vartiainen.

Remote work took root in Finland, especially in specialist work, already years before the corona pandemic, but three years ago at the latest, the vast majority of people capable of remote work were driven to home offices.

Since then, workplaces have returned in many places, but telecommuting has remained in the daily routine of working life permanently, and there is no return to the way it was in sight.

Statistics Finland according to the labor force survey, in Finland, approximately 40 percent of employees worked remotely in 2022. Even in 2018, the proportion of Finnish employees working remotely was 28 percent.

According to statistics, 11 percent of the employed worked all their working time at home, 13 percent at least half of their working time and 16 percent less than half of their working time. In addition, four percent of the people who responded to the survey behind the statistics said that they had not been at work in the last four weeks, for example because of a vacation.

According to Vartiainen, Finland is one of the top countries in Europe when it comes to remote work. When remote work was studied across the EU in 2021, an average of 22 percent of employees said that they sometimes work remotely.

According to Vartiainen, the situation varies greatly between European countries. According to Vartiainen, around 29 percent of employees in the United States currently do hybrid work. Only 12 percent of employees work from home.

Remote work when talking, you should actually talk about hybrid work. So does Vartiainen, who investigated the matter. It typically refers to a combination of work done at home and at the workplace.

However, Vartiainen does not completely agree with this definition. In his opinion, our understanding of hybrid work is often too narrow.

Actually, work is not only done at home or at work, but also in many other places, such as a cafe, train or park. Basically, anywhere.

Vartiainen would rather talk about flexible hybrid work. By that he means that hybrid work has changed working life much more widely than generally thought.

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“Remote workers work longer days. Productivity actually comes from the extra hours.”

Hybrid work According to Vartiainen, the effects can be considered, for example, in terms of productivity and employee well-being.

According to Vartiainen, there is currently a lot of discussion about the issue of productivity among researchers, companies and employees. One of the problems with measuring the issue is that most of the time, estimates of changes in productivity are obtained from the employees themselves in the form of questionnaires.

“Often the answer is that at least as well and perhaps a little better. When the matter has been investigated, it has been noticed that remote workers also work longer days. Productivity actually comes from the extra hours, and not so much from doing more or better quality work per hour,” says Vartiainen.

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Hybrid work increases the flexibility of the employee’s everyday life. The employee can have more influence on how and where he works. It is also often easier to fit small expenses or chores into everyday life.

Vartiainen talks about increasing employee autonomy.

“Increasing autonomy is often associated with higher job satisfaction and thus well-being.”

However, he reminds that the influence of the circumstances is great. Doing work at home in the middle of families with children can very well bring stress and burden instead of well-being.

Second the problem is that hybrid work flows more easily into free time. Nothing prevents you from taking care of work, even when you are in the store or at the playground with your children.

Vartiainen talks about autonomy paradoxes.

“Autonomy in itself is perceived as positive, but as a side effect, the work becomes even more intense, it easily ‘flows’ into almost full-time work, and the workload gradually occurs. As a result, negative well-being effects also accumulate little by little over time.”

Hybrid work can also be associated with a feeling of isolation.

“It was seen during the corona period, for example among students. Really strong feelings of loneliness and isolation were seen there. People miss their coworkers, social contacts.”

So it may be that not all the effects of the increase in hybrid work are known, or perhaps not even able to be assessed yet.

Specially for people in front-line positions, the time of hybrid work has brought great changes. Vartiainen talks about the dual role of a supervisor: he often does hybrid work himself and manages subordinates doing hybrid work at the same time.

It requires a lot of new skills from the supervisors.

According to Vartiainen, nowadays it is often thought that the supervisor should make the employee lead himself, i.e. be able to communicate in such a way that the employee takes his task and the related responsibility as his own.

Creating an atmosphere of trust is key in the relationship between supervisor and employee, says Vartiainen.

“It is important that there is such a psychological agreement that the employee can trust the supervisor and the supervisor can trust the employee. In that case, the ball is specifically in the workplace and the supervisor.”

All The flexibility that hybrid work brings to the labor market is not necessarily a good thing for employees.

“In the United States, hybrid work seems to increase the number of fixed-term and freelance-based employment relationships. Some of these people doing freelance work are quite happy with their freedom, but there is a growing group of people who are forced into a short-term fixed-term employment relationship,” says Vartiainen.

The job markets of Finland and the United States are very different, but Vartiainen sees in the experiences gained from the United States a course of development, signs of which can already be seen in Finland as well.

The idea could be called the encirclement of employment relationships.

In a thought exercise a small core group of the company’s most important employees is in the center of the ring. On the next ring are established assistants with longer working relationships, and on the outer ring are people who are more and more loosely connected to the company, who give it quite small amounts of their work input to do a certain thing.

“Good examples are food parcels, which are really free, but most of them probably out of necessity.”

In the United States, this has led to the fact that the employees in the outermost ring do not necessarily have pension security or work-related social networks, explains Vartiainen.

“Finland is in a different situation, at least for the time being, but in the longer term these models from the ‘Great West’ will easily spread to the periphery as well.”

Let’s get back on to the statistics. Why does Finland stand out in Europe as an enthusiastic hybrid workplace?

The guard raises two issues. First of all, there were strong foundations and traditions for hybrid work in Finland even before the upheaval brought by the pandemic. Although the proportion of people working remotely was clearly smaller than today, many companies and employees already had experience of everyday hybrid work.

As another factor, he cites the positive experiences gained from remote work during the pandemic, which continue to attract people to hybrid work, even if they could have already returned to the office.

Finnish society itself may also play a role. It is still common to talk about Finland as a society of trust, and especially in the relationship between supervisor and subordinate, according to Vartiainen, trust plays a very central role in hybrid work.

“Accordingly, all large workplaces have thought out operating methods for hybrid work, which are based on discussions between the employer and the employees. There are pretty good traditions for that in Finland.”

Correction August 14, 2023 at 1:03 p.m.: According to Statistics Finland’s labor force survey, approximately 40 percent of employees in Finland worked remotely in 2022, not 45 percent, as was erroneously stated in the story and graphics earlier.