Surfing at work not seen as a problem in Finnish offices
City departments have guidelines on email and internet use; employers not permitted to monitor staff online activities
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By Jukka Huusko
From one year to the next, Finns spend more and more time surfing the Net, but surfing in the workplace is not regarded as having an adverse impact on productivity behind the desk.
This much is at least true in the city departments of Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa, all of which have drafted guidelines on the use of email and the Internet during working hours.
The principle is that computers and the Net are used only for working purposes.
"Email and a connection to the Net are tools put at the disposal of the employee, so they should not be used for personal amusement or private business. A certain amount of extra-mural use is considered acceptable, so long as it does not interfere with doing the job", says Hannu Tulensalo, HR Director for the City of Helsinki.
The same line is taken by Auli Tanhua, who heads the human resource centre for Espoo City.
"It is not about tight regulations so much as recommendations. I have been given the impression of things that Internet use during working hours is not andy real problem in our case", says Tanhua.
In practice, city departments and offices allow brief personal Internet surfing while on the job, and also permit staff for instance to do their online banking at work.
The whole vexed subject of work versus play and possible drawbacks from access to the Net at work has been raised recently by discussions over the spread of social networking sites such as Facebook.
Facebook, which has mushroomed in recent months among Finns, allows users to stay in touch with their friends via messages, little applications known as "widgets", or through photo albums.
At the end of last week, no fewer than 118,000 Finns were registered with Facebook, and the number is rising very fast.
Not everyone is happy at the site's spread. For example in Britain many companies in the legal or banking and finacials sector have regarded Facebook as such a threat to office productivity that they have simply blocked access to the site from work stations.
Companies have calculated that surfing in the social networking metaworld costs as much as EUR 190 million a day in lost working time.
The digital media content consultancy firm BLVD in Helsinki takes a radically different view, believing that services such as Facebook do more good than harm to motivation in the workplace.
The belief is that such services generate valuable common networks, and they are also a useful forum for network marketing. Hence the company's monitoring of staff use of the Internet is limited, bording on non-existent.
The situation in Finland with regard to the monitoring by the employer of people's surfing habits is based in the legal safeguards on privacy given to the employee. Hence the employer is not at liberty to check out what each individual worker is up to in cyberspace during working hours.
According to data guru Petteri Järvinen, the entire concept of the employee's right to privacy remains quite strong hereabouts.
Järvinen notes that the situation has not been deemed to be an issue in the same way as for instance in the United States, where the basic tenet is that the employee is not to be trusted much further than they can be thrown.
If hanging out on the Net starts to take up too much of an employee's working time, then the responsibility to step in and do something about it rests with the employee's immediate superior.
Of course, employers here as elsewhere have a perfect right to block access to certain sites or portals. Nevertheless, Järvinen describes the pracices in place in Finnish businesses as mostly flexible on both sides.
"These days an employee is just as likely to be picking up and responding to work-related email at home, or taking a work laptop home with him or her to work in the evenings. And if the employee is flexible in this way, then the employer must be equally willing to bend a little", says Järvinen.
Järvinen is not concerned that services such as Facebook would become any more of a sponge on the attention of people at work than - say - reading the print or online editions of the evening papers.
"An employee's productivity should be measured using some other means than whether or not he spends time on the Net. it is results that count, and not where you go with your PC and mouse."
Rather than excessive browsing on the Internet, the biggest problems encountered in the workplace are related to overwork, the hectic pace with which things must be done, and the lack of pauses.
"The situation these days is such that working takes all the employee's attention. I've heard cases of superiors actually having to badger people to take the normal breaks", says Hannu Tulensalo, who can call on thirty years of working for the city of Helsinki.
Helsingin Sanomat /First published in print 20.10.2007
From one year to the next, Finns spend more and more time surfing the Net, but surfing in the workplace is not regarded as having an adverse impact on productivity behind the desk.
This much is at least true in the city departments of Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa, all of which have drafted guidelines on the use of email and the Internet during working hours.
The principle is that computers and the Net are used only for working purposes.
"Email and a connection to the Net are tools put at the disposal of the employee, so they should not be used for personal amusement or private business. A certain amount of extra-mural use is considered acceptable, so long as it does not interfere with doing the job", says Hannu Tulensalo, HR Director for the City of Helsinki.
The same line is taken by Auli Tanhua, who heads the human resource centre for Espoo City.
"It is not about tight regulations so much as recommendations. I have been given the impression of things that Internet use during working hours is not andy real problem in our case", says Tanhua.
In practice, city departments and offices allow brief personal Internet surfing while on the job, and also permit staff for instance to do their online banking at work.
The whole vexed subject of work versus play and possible drawbacks from access to the Net at work has been raised recently by discussions over the spread of social networking sites such as Facebook.
Facebook, which has mushroomed in recent months among Finns, allows users to stay in touch with their friends via messages, little applications known as "widgets", or through photo albums.
At the end of last week, no fewer than 118,000 Finns were registered with Facebook, and the number is rising very fast.
Not everyone is happy at the site's spread. For example in Britain many companies in the legal or banking and finacials sector have regarded Facebook as such a threat to office productivity that they have simply blocked access to the site from work stations.
Companies have calculated that surfing in the social networking metaworld costs as much as EUR 190 million a day in lost working time.
The digital media content consultancy firm BLVD in Helsinki takes a radically different view, believing that services such as Facebook do more good than harm to motivation in the workplace.
The belief is that such services generate valuable common networks, and they are also a useful forum for network marketing. Hence the company's monitoring of staff use of the Internet is limited, bording on non-existent.
The situation in Finland with regard to the monitoring by the employer of people's surfing habits is based in the legal safeguards on privacy given to the employee. Hence the employer is not at liberty to check out what each individual worker is up to in cyberspace during working hours.
According to data guru Petteri Järvinen, the entire concept of the employee's right to privacy remains quite strong hereabouts.
Järvinen notes that the situation has not been deemed to be an issue in the same way as for instance in the United States, where the basic tenet is that the employee is not to be trusted much further than they can be thrown.
If hanging out on the Net starts to take up too much of an employee's working time, then the responsibility to step in and do something about it rests with the employee's immediate superior.
Of course, employers here as elsewhere have a perfect right to block access to certain sites or portals. Nevertheless, Järvinen describes the pracices in place in Finnish businesses as mostly flexible on both sides.
"These days an employee is just as likely to be picking up and responding to work-related email at home, or taking a work laptop home with him or her to work in the evenings. And if the employee is flexible in this way, then the employer must be equally willing to bend a little", says Järvinen.
Järvinen is not concerned that services such as Facebook would become any more of a sponge on the attention of people at work than - say - reading the print or online editions of the evening papers.
"An employee's productivity should be measured using some other means than whether or not he spends time on the Net. it is results that count, and not where you go with your PC and mouse."
Rather than excessive browsing on the Internet, the biggest problems encountered in the workplace are related to overwork, the hectic pace with which things must be done, and the lack of pauses.
"The situation these days is such that working takes all the employee's attention. I've heard cases of superiors actually having to badger people to take the normal breaks", says Hannu Tulensalo, who can call on thirty years of working for the city of Helsinki.
Helsingin Sanomat /First published in print 20.10.2007
JUKKA HUUSKO / Helsingin Sanomat
jukka.huusko@hs.fi