Working life development
Finnish working life is developed through co-operation between experts, enterprises and other work organisations as well as staff. Development targets include work processes and methods, and modes of operation and management methods alongside learning-at-work. The related goals include making work environments and communities more inspiring and enhancing their competitiveness.
Critical success factors in global competition include humanely functioning solutions that enhance productivity. Working life development is an integral part of innovation policy, and its financing falls within the remit of Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.
Co-operation in development has been in progress on programme and workplace level since the 1990s, most recently through the Finnish Workplace Development Programme TYKES. The challenge is to make the new operating procedures, methods and experiences beneficial to sustainable competitiveness. Since value is generated for customers from products and services through co-operation and partnerships between various actors, the renewal of work processes and modes of operation extends across organisational boundaries. Renewal and productivity require experimentation with novelties and learning from experience.
At the Ministry, working life development is related to the strategic flexicurity project. Such flexicurity work includes a special implementation project for the development of the quality of working life and productivity. This project involves the construction of a systematic way of acting, as well as dissemination of information on working life development to companies and workplaces. At the same time, a working group assessing resources is seeking to ensure the continuity of working life quality development, that such development is put into practice in workplaces, that actors do not engage in overlapping efforts and that nothing essential remains undone.
The exchange of information between international institutions financing working life development is being implemented within the European Work-In-Net ERA-NET project.
