Back in 2003, Tampere University researchers studying joblessness in the '80s and '90s determined that unemployment "could trigger a traumatic crisis". Led by senior researcher Pekka Virtanen, the team found that unemployment can derail individuals, causing them to experience anxiety, depression, poor health and even chronic disease. Unemployed men were more prone to depression that their female peers.
The non-financial impact of sudden job joss can be dramatic, says Pekka Sauri, a psychologist, author and long-time chair of the Finnish Central Association for Mental Health.
“It’s the threat to your identity, and that depends on the role that employment or working plays in your identity or self esteem. If your work is your life, when you lose your work, you lose your life,” he said.
Job loss stress acute in first three months
Kirsi Niiranen of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (TTL) said that the stress of losing one's livelihood without warning is at its most acute in the first three months.
“After that people still feel more anxiety, more depression and more stress," she said. "So if we want to help people, action needs to be taken earlier.”
In the case of the long-term unemployed, she said, even landing a job doesn’t necessarily bring relief, as being out of the labour force for extended periods exacerbates psychological or health problems.
In her book Moving on from Crisis, TTL’s head of training and education, Tiina Saarelma-Thiel lays out a number of prescriptions for employers to manage the drama of workplace restructuring in a manner that helps workers adjust to changing circumstances.
She advocates several simple programs to help workers keep it together during and after nerve-racking redundancy talks.
“One very important support measure is informational support; this means that employees get sufficient and correct info about the situation. The employer can help with psycho-social support to help manage anxieties, for example via the occupational health system, to get counselling,” she added.
She also advocated helping employees form self-help peer support networks and even introduce programs to temporarily re-hire skilled workers, for example via short-term projects.
Larger firms better at cushioning the blow
Saarelma-Thiel said that for the most part companies – especially larger firms – have made efforts to manage workplace changes smoothly. Major corporations such as Nokia have developed extensive “soft-landing” packages to ease the pain of massive job cuts. Apart from financial compensation, they include re-training options and business start-up support.
Saarelma-Thiel said that such programmes have become an important part of companies’ public relations and corporate responsibility efforts – and for good reason.
“They are also interested in maintaining a good reputation. It could be that in one year or six months they’ll need (to hire) new employees,” she pointed out.
However while employees on the chopping block in large firms can expect to be treated reasonably well during retrenchment programmes, workers in smaller firms may not be so lucky.
Saarelma-Thiel said that a lack of resources is the main reason that smaller companies may neglect departing retrenched workers’ psycho-social welfare.
“Maybe they don’t have human resource development people and perhaps not very good occupational health services. It also depends on the money side. But it’s also very important how managers speak and handle the entire process,” she noted.
However she pointed out that engaging in appropriate communications and generally managing the change process skilfully doesn’t always require cold hard cash.
New era in employment
Psychologist Sauri says workers facing unemployment can also do more to help themselves adjust to the idea a different way of working.
“It’s best to be prepared that these things happen, so you can get help. And to know that this is not just about economic fluctuations, but also about how work develops and to understand that probably there will be more short-term jobs, that people will change jobs more and become more versatile in their work identities,” he explained.
Like Saarelma-Thiel, Sauri advocated reaching out to peer networks, whether live or online, to help affected ex-workers find a sense of community.
“It’s very important to find are others in the same situation and by sharing experiences we can find ways forward. That’s the main issue here. And obviously there are public services, social services and health services which we can turn to if things get rough,” Sauri advised.
Click here for our video report on coping with joblessness.