The guide is built with the help of customer insight

This text is related to an ongoing project at the Digital and Population Data Services Agency, in which the Digital guide to work ability for employers is being produced to Suomi.fi Web Service in cooperation with an extensive group of specialists The project is part of the Sustainable Growth Programme for Finland funded by the European Union.

We launched the project in mid-May 2023 with a briefing organised for different stakeholders to familiarise them with the background of the project and the implementation model. The project is based on a preliminary report conducted to survey and determine the need for a digital guide to work ability and to define the possible target groups and available services. The results of the studies carried out in the preliminary report also laid the basis for the deepening of the customer insight, implemented at the beginning of the project.

The following were among the challenges identified in the preliminary report:

• There is plenty of information on themes related to work ability, but it is scattered.
• There is no collection of guidelines or a summary of the most important services for workplaces.
• Work is undergoing changes that cause challenges in management.
• It is difficult to assess in daily work what kind of solutions would be suitable for different situations. Good practices therefore remain unused.
• Knowledge is needed about how mental health and coping can be supported at the workplace.
• Not all users have time to get trained or familiarise themselves with matters alongside work.
• The cross-organisational content network and the specialists of the network played an important role in the deepening of customer insight. The network and the preliminary report helped us to gain an understanding of the current state and needs, the possible target groups of the forthcoming guide and the themes of its content. After having specified the target group in more detail, we also verified the collected information by interviewing end users.

Support for everyday work is important

The interviews revealed that the needs for information and support focused especially on supporting everyday work and that information related to work ability is searched particularly in situations where new challenges with work ability emerge. The operating models related to the topic and their planning at workplaces were also considered important.

The guide should answer the following questions, among others:

• How do you support the coping, wellbeing, competence and performance of employees at the workplace?
• How do you recognise challenges in an employee’s work ability and react to changes in an employee’s work ability?
• How do you develop good practices in your own organisation?
• How do you comply with the statutory obligations of the workplace?
• Based on the collected information, we also formed an understanding of the approach that would be used in the guide. The structure of the guide should be practical and concrete. Considering the target groups, it is important that the guide will be a toolkit that is easy to adopt to everyday work and that it will also encourage a systematic approach to the work, emphasising a preventive approach to maintaining wellbeing at work.

Small organisation are the most vulnerable ones

Having accumulated customer insight, we realised that the size of the organisation is a key factor contributing to the challenges and needs of the workplace. Small organisations are in the most vulnerable position as the level of knowledge about work ability may be low, the internal resources limited and less support and fewer services are targeted at them in the organisation.

The guide would therefore most benefit workplaces that do not have internal, designated work ability specialists within the organisation, which means that supporting, managing and promoting work ability is the responsibility of the employer, management and supervisors of the organisation. In a situation described above, entrepreneurs and managers of smaller organisations develop operating models related to work ability alongside their own work. Entrepreneurs and managers of smaller organisations also represent the employer, so they are responsible for the implementation of the statutory employer obligations.

Currently, we are working on forming the structure of the guide and linking suitable services to the different themes. Concrete work on drawing up the first version of the guide has also begun. The digital guide for work ability is implemented using the Digital and Population Data Services Centre’s content cooperation model.

To read more about the content cooperation model, go to the content cooperation page.

TANJA TÖRNROOS