Strategies for Better Employability through Workplace Development

Policy Challenges and Examples from Finland

Tuomo Alasoini Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation

tuomo.alasoini[at]tekes.fi

Working definitions

Workplace development• An activity whose aim is to promote specific desirable trends, such

as improvements in organizational performance and quality of working life, and to pave the way for innovations that renew working life.

Workplace innovation• Strategically induced and participatory adopted changes in an

organization’s practice of managing, organising and deploying human and non-human resources that lead to simultaneously improved organizational performance and improved quality of working life and that also support other types of innovation.

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Two most important aspects of quality of working life (QWL) from the employability perspective

Learning opportunities offered by the work organization → skills development

The level of discretion employees exercise over their work tasks → skills utilization

Huge differences between employees in different industries and occupational groups in Europe.

Huge differences between different countries in Europe. No clear change in Europe as a whole in recent years.

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Skills development (Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Surveys)

Does your work involve learning new things (%)

FI NL EU0

102030405060708090

100

20002010

Have you had training paid for by your employer in the past year? (%)

FI NL EU0

102030405060708090

100

20002015

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Skills utilization (Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Surveys)

Are you able to choose/change your order of tasks? (%)

FI NL EU0

102030405060708090

100

20002015

Are you able to choose/change your methods of work? (%)

FI NL EU0

102030405060708090

100

20002015

The policy rationale for improving employability through workplace development

Company-level data from various countries show that advanced management and organizational practices and the increased ability to learn and exert influence at work engendered by these practices have a positive correlation with companies’ ability to generate product and service innovations.

The production of innovations, on the other hand, is ideally an extensive organizational learning process that also fosters opportunities to develop their work, and in their work, for those who participate in it.

Workplace development can promote employability• directly by improving employees’ opportunities for skills development and

utilization.• indirectly by improving competitiveness of companies through better innovation

ability.

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Some aspects of the Finnish policy context

Implementation of government funded programmes to develop working life and promote workplace innovations since the early 1990s.

The biggest programmes so far the Finnish Workplace Development Programme TYKE (1996-2003) and TYKES (2004-10). TYKES funded 1164 projects, covering 2265 enterprises and 3872 workplaces. 207,000 persons participated in the projects.

Adoption of a broad-based innovation policy since 2008, which has meant a better recognition of the status of workplace innovations and the role of employees as part of mainstream innovation policy.

Drawing up a National Working Life Development Strategy for Finland, based on Prime Katainen’s governmental programme (2011-12). The strategy is now being implemented under the name of Working Life 2020.

Launch of a new Tekes business & workplace development programme, entitled “Liideri – Business, Productivity and Joy at Work” (2012-18).

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The Liideri programme (2012-18) in a nutshell

Prepared by Tekes, in close cooperation with researchers, developers, company reps, labour market organizations and policy-makers.

Liideri is a Finnish twist of an English word “leader”, referring here to a “forerunner”.

Liideri is a programme for the development of business, in which companies renew their operations through developing management and forms of working and actively utilising skills of their personnel.

The purpose of Liideri is to be a “next-generation” workplace development programme that represents an approach in keeping with a broad-based innovation policy and with an increased emphasis on• responding to development challenges faced by growth-oriented SMEs.• integrating business and workplace development (incl. QWL).• supporting companies to make innovative use of the digital transformation.

Three focus areas of the Liideri programme

Management 2.0 refers to management principles, processes and practices, which help an organization to promote skills, initiative, creativity and innovation potential of personnel, with a view to achieving competitive edge based on them.

Employee-driven innovation refers to active and systematic participation of employees in ideation, innovating and renewing of products and services and ways of producing them, with a view to creating new solutions that add value to customers.

New ways of working refer to work, which transcend the

boundaries of time-honoured temporal, spatial and organizational patterns and forms of work OR which in some other recognised way embody principles of management 2.0.

Digitalization as a challenge and an opportunity for employability

Digitalization radically increases the scope of activities that can be automated.

However, only few occupations are likely to be automated in their entirety; rather, in most cases, only certain activities are more likely to be automated.

There is a need to redefine automated jobs and processes and to rethink how they should be organised so that in the future • organizations can take full advantage of the automation potential; and• machines can augment human capabilities to a higher degree.

→This a classical focus area in workplace development!

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Building blocks of an employability-augmenting skills strategy in digital transformation

Designing technological solutions from a user-centred perspective.

Redesigning jobs and processes, with an eye to providing better opportunities for skills development and utilization.

Equipping people with key meta skills that have a low susceptibility to automation and that are transferrable from one job to another• Creative intelligence: ability to think and come up with solutions and

responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.• Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way

and to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.

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