Strategies for Better Employability through Workplace Development

1. 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

2. 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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3. 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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4. Skills development
(Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Surveys)
Does your work involve
learning new things (%)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
FI NL EU
2000
2010
Have you had training paid for by
your employer in the past year? (%)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
FI NL EU
2000
2015
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5. Skills utilization
(Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Surveys)
Are you able to choose/change
your order of tasks? (%)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
FI NL EU
2000
2015
Are you able to choose/change
your methods of work? (%)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
FI NL EU
2000
2015
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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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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11. 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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