Browsing by Author "Laurikainen, Lotta"

This thesis focuses on workplace wellbeing. The thesis researches what employees see as important in workplace wellbeing and how the interviewees define an employee who enjoys a high level of workplace wellbeing. In my literature review I discuss wellbeing at work and how work life has changed. A major change in work life occurred after the 1990 recession which increased work requirements due to intensified competition and shorter deadlines among others. The broader concept of workplace wellbeing consists of several subsections which are leadership, work community and values, work engagement, recovery and stress-adding factors. In addition to these, I review the concept of resources through Hobfoll and Shirom’s (2001) COR theory and Bakker, Demerout and Verbeken’s (2004) JD-R model. Furthermore, work community skills are reviewed. I have interviewed five employees working at two multinational corporations which operate in Finland. I conducted the interviews one on one in a semi structured format. I have analysed the interviews using discourse analysis. Through discourse analysis, I found four factors the interviewees saw as important in workplace wellbeing. These factors are health, work community, the work itself and caring. Health means that the company has good occupational health care and employees take care of their own health. The work community was seen as important and even more important than the manager. The importance of the manager was considered less important than theory had suggested. The work itself encompassed the meaningfulness of the work and that the work was interesting, challenging and flexible. Caring meant that the employees felt the company cared about them and showed it by for example sponsoring sporting events or offering free coffee. When these four factors were present in an employee’s workplace, the worker was seen to enjoy a high level of workplace wellbeing. A prerequisite for workplace wellbeing was that the employees were in charge of themselves and utilized the wellbeing opportunities at work.