The Brainwork Survey investigates the prevalence, strenuousness and inspiring aspects of the different tasks and situations of work. The survey produces information about work content and conditions for workplaces, occupational health care and occupational safety and health operators of different industries for the purpose of planning smooth and healthy brainwork.
Description
Through the Brainwork Survey, we have examined which cognitive i.e. information-work tasks, situations and conditions occur in the modern work life. The 39 statements of the Brainwork Survey have been summarised into 14 areas of brain work. The answers depict the prevalence of different areas of brainwork i.e. does the task or situation occur in the respondents’ work several times a day, daily or almost daily, weekly, monthly or less frequently. Furthermore, the answers depict whether the brainwork areas occurring in work are seen as strenuous or inspiring. The respondents assessed this on a seven-step scale with the extremes being very strenuous and very inspiring. In addition to the different factors of brainwork, the graphs show the experience of stress and recovery on four different levels.The result figures show the different areas of brainwork. Factors 1–4 are basic requirements of information processing and depict different kinds of cognitive functions.Factors 5-10 are larger basic requirements of information processing and depict different kinds of tasks and situations of brainwork. Factors 11–14 are brainwork conditions and depict cognitively challenging situations in work. In the survey, each area has 2–4 associated statements.
The areas of brainwork can be examined for all data or just in certain age groups. The data can be viewed by industry in three subgroups; in the first the respondents are in the social welfare and health care sector, in the second they work in offices as experts, and in the third they are in maintenance/production work. The fourth group has respondents from the sectors that have not been specified further.
The menu can be used to filter the data. This filters the graphs to correspond with a particular selection.
The brainwork data contains the answers collected from over 11,000 respondents of over 90 development, service and research projects conducted by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in 2016–2019. The answers do not represent Finland’s working-age population as a whole. The majority of the respondents work in the social services or healthcare industry (63%) or in offices in different expert or information processing positions (19%). The brainwork data will next be updated with material from the coronavirus pandemic period and with new work areas from 2020–2021.
