A healthy work community 

The responsibility for work wellbeing is shared between everyone in the workplace. Having healthy, capable and motivated personnel is also very beneficial for the employer.

Are people feeling well in your work community? The values and operating environment of the organisation and its management affect the wellbeing of the work community and individual employees.

As an employer, it is your responsibility to take care of occupational safety. To ensure employee wellbeing at your workplace, anticipate potential problems, set clear goals, and build trust. Also make sure that management works, and that you treat employees equally. When you manage them fairly, openly, and with encouragement, you improve the wellbeing of your work community, and your employees can succeed better in their work.

What can you do as an employer?

  • Be flexible whenever possible.   
  • Make clear agreements with your employees on objectives and roles.  
  • Provide your employees opportunities for developing their expertise, and encourage them to learn new things.
  • Make sure that your work community follows the instructions and that it is easy and safe for your employees to report faults and deficiencies.
  • Treat each of your employees equally.

You can ask the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for advice and instructions on matters related to health, safety, and terms of employment in the workplace. In addition to this, you must notify occupational health and safety of certain dangerous jobs, confirmed occupational diseases and serious work accidents.

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Maintaining work ability at the workplace

Taking care of your employees' working ability is a prerequisite for ensuring wellbeing in your work community. There are different methods and practices for maintaining working ability. As an employer, you also have an obligation to take assigned measures.

If you notice that your employee's work ability has deteriorated or the sick leave limit (more than 90 days) is exceeded, it is your responsibility to raise the issue and discuss it with your employee.

Sairauspoissaolokäytännöt työkyvyn tukena (ttl.fi, in Finnish)⁠

You can have an early support conversation with your employee to find solutions to support their work ability. It is a good idea to continue discussing the situation in the occupational health discussions, which will be carried out together with occupational health care. If you notice reductions in work performance that you cannot fix by your own means at the workplace, you can guide your employee not only to the occupational health discussions but also to an assessment of their ability to work.

As an employer, you are obliged to provide at least preventive occupational health care services for each employee in an employment or public service relationship. You can purchase these services from a public or private service provider or arrange them yourself. It is also recommended that you get occupational health care when you are an entrepreneur, even if it is not compulsory.

Occupational health care works in cooperation with your organisation to promote the health and work ability of your employees at all stages of their careers. Support for work ability is based on the practices agreed upon in your work community. The practices agreed between management, HR management, employees and occupational health care services are recorded in the workplace's work ability support model.

Työkyvyn tuki (ttl.fi, in Finnish)⁠

If your employee's illness or disability prevents them from working, you can make adjustments at your workplace. Adjustments refer to changes at work in which the job description is modified to better correspond to and support your employee's expertise and work ability.

Ways of adapting work for the employer

If your new or current employee has a disability or illness and coping with work tasks requires, for example, the purchase of tools or changes made at the workplace, you can apply for a subsidy for arranging working conditions from the TE Office or the local government employment pilot.

Subsidy for arranging working conditions

Rehabilitation may help your employee when the disability or illness complicates their work or coping at different stages of life.

From working life to family leave and back

‘From working life to family leave and back – family leave guide for employers’ contains information that you can use as an employer to facilitate the reconciliation of work and family in your work community and to promote the wellbeing of the entire work community.

The guide summarizes the key issues regarding family leave, the law regarding which was renewed on August 1, 2022. It tells you what you should consider before the employee's family leave, during it, and when the employee returns to work from the leave.

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