Working conditions in the midst of changes – AI, the green transition and remote work in the everyday life of employees

Every sixth employee works mainly at home

The Quality of Work Life Survey 2023 describes working life in the midst of changes. Many work organisations have had to consider ways of adjusting to advancing climate change and the environmental impact of their activities. Technologies based on AI have already emerged at some Finnish workplaces and they are expected to change ways of working even more in the near future. The COVID-19 pandemic has left its mark on working life, one of the most important being the strong increase and normalisation of remote work.

The increase of remote work is reflected in where work is carried out in Finland today. In 2023, the main place of working was one's own home for every sixth (16%) employee, while five years ago only four per cent of employees mainly worked at home.

Whereas nearly 80 per cent of employees mainly worked at their employer's premises in 2018, the corresponding share was 67 per cent in 2023.

Only around one-half (53%) of employees working remotely worked mainly at their employer's premises, others did most of their work at home or in some other remote workplace in 2023.

Face-to-face encounters have also diminished in customer work

Contacts with co-workers and customers had partly taken place virtually already before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic set the seal on the development. For example, teaching was temporarily moved completely to the web and new ways of meeting people virtually were also innovated in other contexts. Many of these practices have continued even after the pandemic.

Around one-half of employees were at least one-half of their working hours in contact with people who were not their co-workers but, for example, customers, patients, passengers or pupils in 2023.

For 19 per cent of employees doing customer work for at least one-half of their working hours, at least one-half of this customer work took place in a virtual environment through a video connection, chat or other similar application.

For only around two out of five (38%) employees working in customer work at least one-half of their working time, the interaction was always made face-to-face, by phone or email and never through digital applications.

It may be claimed that virtual customer work has increased fairly much in five years, although the figures for 2018 and 2023 are not fully comparable due to the change in the data collection method.

Men do customer work less often than female employees, but the customer work done by men is more often virtual than that done by women. The explanation can be found in the gendered occupational structure: women in customer work are working more often than men in occupations in the fields of health care and education, where face-to-face and physical encounters are still an essential part of the work. Virtual connections have, however, replaced at least part of close contacts in nearly all occupational groups.

Overall, the share of those engaged in customer work has fallen slightly in Finland over the past 10 years, which is probably connected to the growing digitalisation and self-service culture in the 2000s: services have moved from customer service offices and telephone lines to be conducted by customers themselves on the web.

Arrival of artificial intelligence at workplaces

In autumn 2023, good one-quarter (28%) of employees said that artificial intelligence-based technology, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, speech recognition, machine vision, machine translation or data analysis based on machine learning, was used at their workplace.

The use of such AI-based technology was clearly more typical in workplaces of upper-level salaried employees (40%) than of lower-level salaried employees (24%) or workers (9%). Defined in this way, artificial intelligence was most commonly used at universities (70%). The share was 41 per cent in central government jobs and 29 per cent in the private sector. The use of AI technologies was lowest in wellbeing services counties and municipalities (21%).

Around one in ten (sexes in total 9%, women 8% and men 11%) were working with AI. Twelve per cent of upper-level salaried employees considered the utilisation of artificial intelligence an essential part of their work. The corresponding share for lower-level salaried employees and workers was only a few per cent.

According to every sixth (17%) employee, changes in the ways of working at their workplace had taken place or were coming soon, for example by utilising robotics or artificial intelligence, e.g. ChatGPT. There was not much difference between women and men in this respect.

Nearly one-third (30%) of upper-level salaried employees expected robotics or artificial intelligence to change their ways of working in the near future or had already experienced such changes. The corresponding share was 14 per cent for lower-level salaried employees and seven per cent for workers.

The change in operating modes particularly concerned ICT professionals, business and administration professionals, managers and clerical support workers.

Information and communication (I), professional, scientific and technical activities (M), and financial and insurance activities (K) stood out as industries where the use of AI-based technology was more common than average.

Differences between age groups evened out concerning neck and back pain

The share of employees finding their work physically demanding has decreased in the 2000s as a result of the change in the occupational structure. Nevertheless, 73 per cent of female employees and 58 per cent of male ones suffered from various repeated musculoskeletal disorders in 2023 (sexes in total 66%).

The connection of age with aches in the neck and shoulder area and back pain is particularly noticeable. In the early years of the Quality of Work Life Survey in the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, neck and shoulder aches and back pain were clearly more common among employees aged 45 or over than among younger ones.

However, neck and back pain increased strongly among younger employees at the turn of the millennium. In 2023, there were in practice no differences by age group anymore, but repeated aches were experienced fairly evenly in all age groups.

Similar development can also be seen in sleep difficulties. The share of those suffering from sleep difficulties weekly did not vary much by age in 2023. Until the 1990s, relatively few young employees suffered from sleep difficulties, and sleep problems were clearly more common for older employees. Since then sleeping difficulties have become more common for people of all ages, but especially strongly for those aged under 35.

Although the results for 2023 are not fully comparable with earlier survey rounds, they show the change that has taken place in the mutual relations of the age groups very well.

Data on working conditions already for nearly 50 years

Statistics Finland's Quality of Work Life Surveys describe changes in employees’ working conditions over nearly five decades, starting from 1977. The results of the latest Quality of Work Life Survey for 2023 are not fully comparable with the previous time series in all respects, because the data collection method has changed. The Quality of Work Life Survey was carried out in 2023 as a web inquiry, while the data collection has previously been made with face-to-face interviews. The results of the Quality of Work Life Survey 2023 describe employees aged 18 to 67.

Finnish working life appears strong in many respects. Employees' experiences of workplace atmosphere, communality and support received from co-workers were mainly positive in 2023. Well over one half (60%) were also able to influence much or fairly much the prioritisation and scheduling of the tasks, work pace and work practices and ways of doing things in their own work.

Attitudes at workplaces seem to have become more positive especially towards fathers' family leaves. Around 90 per cent of parents of children aged under 10 thought that it was very or fairly easy for both the mother and the father to take a longer family leave.

Persons aged over 55 were planning to work longer, on average, than the previous generations, and the majority of them could have considered working even on old-age pension at least temporarily.

More than half of employees reported that a climate strategy had been made at their workplace or that targets for increasing ecological sustainability had been recorded otherwise; 60 per cent had noticed that the ways of working had already been changed to be more ecologically sustainable.

On the other hand, stress and coping problems were also common, and particularly burdened female employees. Forty-four per cent of female employees and 31 per cent of male employees felt very or fairly much harmful stress in their work due to time pressure in 2023. Over 40 per cent of female employees and 26 per cent of male employees had been burdened very often or fairly often in the past six months by the thought that they did not have time to work as well and diligently as they would like to. Sixty-nine per cent of female employees and 62 per cent of male ones had to interrupt their work often due to more urgent matters.

Various psychological symptoms were worryingly common among young adults and early middle-aged employees. Mental fatigue at work, concentration difficulties, experience of stress, unwillingness to go to work and finding serious burnout to be a clear risk were most common for employees aged 25 to 34. Weekly memory disorders were particularly familiar to those aged 35 to 44, who also felt they got too little sleep more often than others.

In both the 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 age groups, mental recovery from work was weaker, and feelings of tension and irritability were more common than among those aged under 25 or over 45. Both these age groups had, on the one hand, been on short sick leaves more often than others but, on the other hand, they had also worked while sick more commonly than others.

Read more in the publication (in Finnish):

Työolot murrosten keskellä – Työolotutkimuksen tuloksia 1977–2023.