Browsing by Subject "työyhteisö"

Everyday racism is a term used about racism in common social situations, which results in racial oppression. Previous studies have found that everyday racism is difficult to detect, and that people may unconsciously produce racism and thus maintain a hierarchical race system. Everyday racism can be categorized into (a) antilocution, (b) naming, (c) offensive gestures, expressions and gazes, (d) avoidance, (e) discrimination and isolation, and (f) physical attack (Puuronen, 2011). Institutional racism is also a part of everyday racism. Different institutional processes maintain the inequality of minority group members, which reflects on everyday racism and vice versa. This Master's thesis is a qualitative and quantitative study. Its purpose is to find out what kind of everyday racism was present in kindergartens during the term of 2017-2018 and how it has been intervened. The study was divided into three parts; everyday racism faced by workers or trainees and families who have an immigrant background and intervention on racism. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate the different forms of everyday racism in the work community and the culture of early childhood education. Thirty-two Finnish teachers of early childhood education participated in the study. The material was collected through an electronic questionnaire. Theoretical content analysis was used as the analysis method. The analysis utilized the everyday racism classification created by Puuronen (2011) to create categories from the data. The majority of the respondents, 84% had reported everyday racism in kindergartens. The most common forms of everyday racism were antilocution, naming, and avoidance. Institutional racism occurs unequal practices, which resulted in the exclusion of migrant-background families and workers outside the kindergarten community. Lack of time, limited resources and a stressed working community sustained racist practice. 28% of Finnish teachers in early childhood education had interfered in employee’s racist acts. The interventions included note taking, correcting misconceptions, holding meetings, and talking to the kindergarten’s supevisors.

Aims. According to recent studies workplace bullying has become more and more common even in teacher communities. Workplace bullying can have significant consequences on a personal and society level. In some cases, workplace bullying causes long sick leaves and as well as workplace and career changes. One of the factors that can be an exposure to workplace bullying is age and position of a new employee. This has also been the case among teachers. Previous studies have shown that novice teachers have experienced some inappropriate behavior from their colleagues or principal. The aim of this study was to examine what kind of conceptions and experiences novice teachers have of workplace bullying and of their positions in teacher communities. The purpose of this study is to describe the representations of novice teacher’s reality. Methods. The research data was gathered by interviewing seven young teachers whom have worked as a teacher for a minimum of year and a maximum of three years after their graduation. This study was qualitative study. In the analysis of this study, a method of qualitative study of attitudes was applied. Results and conclusions. Novice teachers’ conceptions regarding the phenomenon of workplace bullying was in line with previous research and literature. Most of the novice teachers had encountered at least some inappropriate behavior in their workplaces. The forms of inappropriate behavior that novice teachers had experienced was for example sexual harassment, underestimation of skills and nasty commenting, criticism and slandering. Most of the negative experiences of novice teachers was explained by the factor of their contract of definite duration and as well as by some badly behaved colleagues. Although inappropriate and unequal treatment of novice teachers was considered a relatively common practice, all novice teachers who participated in this study also had positive experiences related to their work and colleagues.

In United State of America compassion of work culture and work community has been researched for years. In Finland has been studied same kind themes of compassion, like empathy and sympathy. The Finnish project CoPassion lasted three years until it ended last year. According to results compassionate working culture increases welfare of the work community and also grows profit of the company. Nowadays working culture is busy and requires creativity, so it is important to take care of work well-being. Early childhood educators work with people, so feelings and interaction are essential and those issues reflect on children. This is qualitative research, which studied what kind of suffering and compassion experiences first year students of early childhood master’s degree have. The aim was to find out what kind of things made people suffer and what kind of feelings followed up. The other aim was to find out what kind of compassion acts had people done and what kind of feelings came after the compassion acts. The students wrote freely about “compassion”. The research consist of 20 narratives. The narratives were analysed by content analysis. The analysis found five themes: source of suffering, feeling of suffering, giver of compassion, compassion act and feeling of compassion. After the analysis the themes were organized to a matrix. The themes were organized by sources of suffering: Work, Conflict in work community and Personal life. According to the results all of compassion acts were verbal and nonverbal. In Work- theme suffering was caused by problems in work of early childhood education. There were disagreements of personal values and also feelings of inadequacy. In Conflict in work community -theme professional conflicts caused suffering. At first the aim of narrators were good, but in the end other persons attacked them because they didn’t have a same opinion. The narrators felt desperation and questioned their own professional ability. In Personal life -theme suffering was caused by narrators’ personal life, like problems in relationships. Shock, fatigue and sadness were caused by sufferings of personal life. Acts of compassion were encouragement and discussions. Acts of compassion were experienced to be essential, because narrators got feeling that they were understood. Early childhood education is ponderous work and there is lack of resources. There should be done more research about compassion fatigue or fatigue of ponderous work and how fatigue affects well-being of individual and work community. Climate of early childhood education will affect the children, who are future of Finland. How could compassion affect positively the well-being of individuals and work community?

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.