How does our working life look like in 2025?

Working life as we know it is changing rapidly. People are finding 9 to 5 working days to be tuff and reducing their productivity. 9 to 5 working days originate from far back but are still reasonable due to the regular office hours.

Working life in 2025 is almost impossible to predict. What are our values, what does the next generation bring us, what sort of working day and technology do we have then?

Technology might be the key factor when pondering the future working life. Are we just sitting in our homes, doing everything through computing power. Everything being done by robots that we control through computers. I doubt it. That would be in no-ones interest.There will be a lot of automated actions done by computers, but in 2025 there will also be 8 billion people living on this planet. That requires some real muscle ache as well.

It is estimated that the amount of women in management professions are to increase drastically. Africa, Asia, Europe - all over the world women are more willing to take the stand and start managing. This brings a spice of it’s own when thinking about working life in 2025.

STTK has a big role in painting the sky of the Finnish working life in 2025. STTK is part of coming up with the frame-agreement - that determines how our working life will look like.

Working life in 2025 will most likely be a perfect mixture of augmented reality, remote working, locally produced food and a lot of community actions. Many tasks are done by cloud- driven communities by crowd sourcing techniques. Crowd sourcing is a big part of modern 2025 working life community and tasks are made a whole lot easier due to the huge brainpower being available on line.

Salaries and economy are closely tied to nature resources meaning that working life and the e conomy are in fact for the first time in harmony with nature. New technologies are working to produce a lot of solar energy which in 2025 is the main energy source.

Some rewarded remote managers are watching out for the employees (in Finnish: palkansaaja) from UK and the Finnish employees can have their lunch break by pausing the activities they are doing and playing some traditional Finnish lunch music while Indian engineers are correcting their work. See you soon 2025.

More work

How does more work get created? Everyone is talking about creating new jobs and that hopes are high on the good amount of start-ups and new innovations that are entering the markets. Rovio is now employing hundreds of employees (in Finnish: palkansaaja) and every start-up should be like Rovio. Not to make any profit but employ great number of people and keep on growing.

How does more work get created in a company like Rovio? It gets created by need - naturally. The need comes from a company, its key personnel and investors finding certain tasks to be not in their field of expertise. These tasks need a person who is dedicated to the task and is willing to take this task and fulfil it to its greatest potential. When this person is found, the task becomes formally part of the business. It has to be included in the strategy and has to be considered when the next board meeting takes place.

Who decides when the empty whole should be filled? Well - usually it is the CEO that makes the decision, especially in smaller companies. But how it goes usually is that CEO creates a working round for the task so that all ‘free’ employees can try to manage the task and then when it is found to be too hard the hole is being filled with a new employee.

Who would really hire an Investment Director to a start-up. No-one.

 

Jobs are created through success. Success isn’t that easy, though. There should be more incentives for growth and success. A company should be able to try and fail without getting hammered. By taking a risk of hiring an employee to a start-up, the entrepreneur commits to a greater risk than he/she will, probably for the rest of the company’s lifeline. It is not only very, very expensive to hire an employee, it is also a big commitment. Labour unions and STTK are great places to find help and answers to questions regarding employment. Hiring an employee might be the best thing that happens to you and it also might be one of the worst things that happen to you. Either way you should always aim in creating more work because that is what is keeping our economy rolling.

Nobody is rich in Finland

At least everyone thinks that there are no wealthy people here. Why is this?

We have come to find that there is one problem: Finland`s greatest natural resource is envy. We envy rich people, we are somehow reluctant to accept good feedback, we don’t live in beautiful houses, we don’t drive supercars and most of all, we don’t tell neighbors how well we are doing.

Truth on the other hand is that we have extremely wealthy and rich people living in Finland. Few of them made their fortune by working, like Anssi Vanjoki, but most of them - well they used to make it out of technology and innovations within. The sad part is that most of the money has been flowing back to technological innovations and R&D. When it should have been going to social innovations or service innovations.

Rovio is on everyone’s lips. Angry Birds is being played by most of the celebrities all the way in the USA and it just keeps growing. What makes Rovio and Angry Birds so special? It is the content created for Apple products. Apple created their products so that it would be as easy as possible to create attractive content for their devices. Rovio did just that, nothing more.

These days you hear these tech-millionaires screaming “We need more Rovio-type of companies in Finland.. forget Nokia” This is where we go wrong. Again. Rovio is a company whose success is based on creating an addictive, well done content for iPhone &and iPad – so actually we don’t need more “Rovio-type of companies”, we need more capital investments to seed-phase social innovations. We still need to focus on creating devices, yes, but we also need to start really focusing on content and service development. When we realize this and we can channel part of our capital investments to fund the social innovations, we will have a better working life - labour-unions (in Finnish: ay-liike) & STTK are happy. Who knows, in this case even the economy might kick in.

We have the knowledge, reputation, infrastructure and capital. All we need is a brave way to channel it and someone to lead the show.

Productivity is Gone

Everyone is talking about productivity. It seems to be the new black when talking about working morales, business hours or even showing up at work vs. doing work from home.

Productivity and flexibility should not be mixed. Productivity is the indicator of the amount of actual result oriented work is being done by someone. That has got nothing to do with remote working or doing well at work. Of course, everything is related to each other. Usually people who are not feeling good at their workplaces tend to be unproductive, too.

Productivity is also being measured in a more serious way. In a way that indicates the dark years ahead. At the moment we are approximately 13% below the targets on productivity regarding EVA’s survey. This means almost 150 000 ”lost” work hours. Lack of productivity can always be seen in the profitability of companies. Productivity therefore reflects many parts of society and can even be seen affecting pensions. Something should be done. Biggest ‘firefighters’ here are the labor unions. STTK frame agreement did well and is steering our economy towards the right track again.

We should work our hard to get our export rolling again. The most important thing is to keep the Finnish costs relatively low, which was made possible for the next couple of years with the frame agreement. However, we should look at, for example, Germany where Angela Merkel managed to get the biggest companies and all the employees to agree on her frame agreement. We should maybe learn something from Angela.

Productivity is so much more than numbers. Productivity is the mental state of a human being. An employee (in Finnish: palkansaaja) finds it hard to be productive when under a constant pressure. Economic crisis may be the trigger for many employees to feel stressed and unsure about the future. All companies should invest in many fields when the economy starts sliding. One of the things should definitely be the people working for the company. The cost of first letting personnel go and then re-hiring when the economy kicks in is enormous. It also has a great impact on the atmosphere at work which reflects directly productivity.

Local economical crises should be prevented

While municipalities have been able to improve the efficiency of their services, at the same time the government has burden new responsibilities for municipal administrations and its worker (in Finnish, toimihenkilö). This has caused the situation that even municipalities are able to reduce their costs by making their services more efficient, their economical or economic (In Finnish talous) situation is getting worst due to these new responsibilities.

Productivity can be raised to the certain level, but that will not bring the solution for the municipal economical crisis. The solution is neither that functions are transferred to another producer. Tax-funded public services are most likely secure the welfare of citizens in different areas equally. Privately produced services should be used only to supplement the already operating services.

The chairman of Jyty, the Finnish federation of public and private sector employees (in Finnish: palkansaaja), has warned that local government are heading in crisis, which will endanger basic welfare services. There will be most probably heavy shutdowns in many locations.

As the government program states, the municipal policy must be guaranteed equal and quality services throughout the country. The government should now break the old role and together with the municipalities find the ways to address gaps in current services and development the existing resources. It will be challenging, but it might be the only way to ensure the services.

Trade union’s view for the new governmental program

According to STTK, one of the three trade union (in Finnish: ay-liike) confederations in Finland, the key priorities of the new government program are related to fiscal sustainability of national economy and instability caused by euro-zone countries.

STTK is happy with the government’s decisions not to tighten the income taxation of salary earnings. It is the right signal in terms of the employment and purchasing power, and correlates with the goals of STTK. Tax solutions related to the capital taxation are justified by the world economical situation.

However, securing the tax income for the government is crucial in order to keep health facilities and other vital municipal services on a high level of quality and comprehensive manner to all citizens. At the same time, more security should be provided to employers working in these fields: that is essential in terms of employment.

The main task of the current government is, according to STTK, to boost the economic growth and employment. Effective actions to lessen youth and long-term unemployment are necessary. Also the resources for active labor market policies must be enabled. Government should take measures to extend working lives, improve young people's attachment to work, and to prevent work related disabilities.

One of the publicly visible actions in governmental program is to campaign against the grey economy (In Finnish talous). STTK will participate on this campaign also. The campaign will be visible in outdoor advertisements, in police cars and on the Internet in the autumn 2012.

Basic unemployment allowance and the labor market will rise by a hundred dollars per month beginning of next year. The increase also reflects in the earnings-related allowances. This is the government’s way to reduce social inequalities, and therefore is fully supported.

According to STTK, the annual savings and corridor negotiations agreed will ensure a sustainable economic policy. The global economy and the development of the European Union require agility in decision-making.

Municipal consolidations from employer’s side

The consolidation of municipalities in Finland is starting to be everyday news. From big to small, every municipality seems to find a reason to join with neighboring municipalities. Mostly the reason is because savings are seen in merging the municipal administrations, but what will happen to the municipality administrative worker (in Finnish, toimihenkilö) during those consolidations?

At 2005, the government of Finland launched the Best Project (Paras-projekti). The aim of the project was to reform the municipal service structure. Consolidations of municipalities were recognized part of this program. The personnel of municipalities agreed on this project and supported it, which granted them the five year protection against dismissal in the case of any consolidation of municipalities.

The Best Project will end in 2012, but obviously consolidations of municipalities will still happen after that. The trade union of municipal workers has argued that it would be even to have the same five year protection against dismissal also in the consolidations happening after the 2012.

As in any occupation, it is crucial that the job security is maintained. Municipal employment issues are negotiated together with employees and employers' organization, and it is essential that the employees (in Finnish: palkansaaja) remain in spite of the so-called new arrangements.

The other subject of negotiations in the moment of consolidation of municipalities is the salary. When two or more municipalities are combined, the salary differences of similar positions in different municipalities might be considerable. In these cases, the combined municipalities must agree on the harmonization of wages, and the harmonization cannot take a very long time. The same applies to differences in personal knowledge-based bonus systems: they should be co-ordinated.