Browsing by Subject "Työhyvinvointi"

Objectives. The work of a school teacher is constantly transforming because of the rapid changing of society and at the same time the well-being of teachers at work seems to have worsened in many respects. The changes in working life also affect the job descriptions and tasks of home economics teachers. The aim of this thesis is to find out what home economics teachers with over 15 years of working experience consider to be the most significant changes in their work and how these changes have affected their well-being. The second aim is to find out what kind of support home economics teachers have received for their well-being and what kind of factors help them to endure in their work. In this thesis well-being at work is examined especially from the perspective of change, and at the same time acounting its holistic nature. Methods. A qualitative research strategy was applied in this study. The data consisted of six (6) semi-structured interviews, which were carried out as telephone conversations. The home economics teachers taking part in the research resided in different parts of Finland and had various backgrounds in terms of their professional education. The interviews were transcribed, the data were thematised, and analyses applying qualitative content analysis. “Windows of well-being” (Gerlander & Launis, 2007) was applied in interpreting the results of the research. Results and conclusions. The results imply that, the most essential changes in the work of home economics teachers seems to be connected to students. The teachers had experienced the weakening of handcraft skills and different kinds of problems increased among students. On the other hand the results indicate an increase in co-operation between schools and homes with new technology. Additionally, changes in the physical working environment because of indoor air issues seem to challenge the well-being of home economics teachers. The things that bring joy, motivate and help teachers to manage with their work are strongly connected to students, the work community and their own personal life. Attributes related to the teachers’ personalities were also emphasized in the experienced well-being of home economics teachers. The results of this research highlight themes that can be helpful and useful in supporting the well-being of home economics teachers in their future in-service training.

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.

Work well-being is receiving a lot more attention on all individual, corporate and societal levels. Well-being at work is nowadays a hot topic in workplaces and many organizations have thereby started to invest in increasing work well-being and the prevention of feeling unwell. Small business entrepreneurs are a group whose well-being at work is not paid enough attention to. This thesis examines work well-being from a small business perspective. In the beginning of this thesis, special attention is paid to the scientific literature on well-being at work. The subject of matter will be approached from three different angles. At first, work well-being will be examined as a phenomenon, what definitions it gets and what concepts it contains. After this, work well-being will be looked at from the entrepreneur's point of view, which presents entrepreneurial typologies and entrepreneurship in social context. The third aspect of the review is the specialty of small business entrepreneur’s work. This examines the impact of the special features of everyday work on well-being. The research material for this thesis will be five interviews with small business entrepreneurs. The benefit of a theme interview is in its dialogical nature. All interviews were carried out anonymously and took place in a location requested by the interviewee. Methods of discourse analysis were used in the analysis of the interviews. The review focuses on small business entrepreneurs' descriptions of well-being at work and their way of creating reality. The analysis focuses on illustrating the small business entrepreneurs’ perspective on work well-being. The analysis consists of meaning systems that were determined according to what small business entrepreneurs saw as meaningful in terms of work well-being. Within the meaning systems, deeper attention will be paid to the ways entrepreneurs describe work well-being and how they define it. The point of view of the examination was the individuality and specialty of small business entrepreneurs. The everyday life of small business entrepreneurs differ a lot from fixed pay workers and therefore work well-being is seen as a very different phenomenon. The topics of importance for small entrepreneurs' well-being at work were autonomy, risk, responsibility and the opportunity to influence.