Going to work should increase mental health and well-being - not the opposite!

Mental health in working life can be understood as a state of well-being where one can develop one’s abilities, deal with everyday challenges and stress and be part of communities at the workplace.

It should be easy, yet the challenges are massive. This is true for employees, but also for managers, who are working under an increasing cross-pressure of requests, demands and expectations from upper management to their employees.

A major reason for this is that it is difficult. Because we are different and our mental health and individual well-being are nourished by different things. Some thrive best when they are constantly challenged, while others may need challenges in smaller doses. Some thrive well with many people around them, others do poorly.

There are no clear answers as to what creates mental health and positive well-being.

That’s what makes it complex. That’s what makes it difficult.

Flexible work is the way forward, but it has to be about real flexibility, where you have influence over how you work, where you work and when you work.

Making this function requires good management, for example, but no more so than it requires sufficient self-determination. And this requires, for example, the opportunity for individual flexibility, but no more so than it requires that community and cohesion remain intact.

At Finansforbundet, we believe that the best way forward to find positive and concrete solutions to the challenges that the work and working life of the future will bring is by experimenting in the workplace.

This is also the reason we took the initiative for the “Future Work Lab” project, which is precisely about experimenting with new solutions to some of the challenges that the digital working life of the future will bring.

We are convinced that the experimentation will evolve from being something we did experimentally to being a more permanent state.