The same pattern can be seen in many workplaces as the summer holiday season approaches. Calendars fill up, unfinished matters are cleared from desks, and responsibilities are only resolved at the last minute. The thinking is understandable, but if the situation is managed poorly, the consequences quickly become visible in the form of excessive workload, an increased risk of errors and unnecessary bottlenecks. From a company’s perspective, effective holiday planning is not merely a soft employee benefit. It is a practical way to manage work in a more controlled manner.
Workplaces often make the same mistake in the run-up to the summer holidays. The assumption is that everyone should make one final push to complete as much as possible before going on leave. In practice, this means full calendars, delayed arrangements for substitutes, rushed decisions and employees starting their holidays only after their workload has already become excessive.
In most cases, however, the holiday is not the problem. The problem is how the work has been managed during the spring.
For a company, this is not only a question of employee wellbeing. It is also a matter of management, risk management and business continuity. If holidays are not planned in good time, decision-making slows down, responsibilities become unclear and the same key individuals continue to be relied upon even when they should be away from work and recovering.
A holiday cannot fix structural workload problems from the spring
The summer holiday provides an important opportunity for recovery, but the entire management model for the spring should not be built around it. The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health has emphasised that recovery cannot be saved up for a holiday. Employees need opportunities to detach themselves from work, take breaks, rest and get enough sleep throughout the year, not only in July. According to the Institute, the positive effects of a holiday on wellbeing also tend to be relatively short-lived.
It is therefore not particularly sustainable to assume that employees can stretch themselves further during the spring because they will be able to rest in the summer. If the volume of work, allocation of responsibilities, division of duties or decision-making practices are already causing excessive strain before the holiday season, a holiday may provide temporary relief, but it will not remove the underlying cause.
In day-to-day work, excessive strain rarely results solely from having too much work. It is often intensified by changing priorities, unclear responsibilities, constant interruptions and decisions being expected at too low a level within the organisation. When these factors accumulate just before a holiday, employees do not only take a sense of urgency with them. They also carry unfinished matters and uncertainty. As a result, recovery does not begin immediately at the start of the holiday, but only after a delay.
Why is this also a legal issue?
Under the Finnish Occupational Safety and Health Act, an employer’s obligations are not limited to physical hazards. Employers must identify and assess risks and hazards arising from the work, working hours, work arrangements and working environment. This obligation also covers workload factors. If an employee is found to be experiencing a workload that endangers their health, the employer must use the means available to investigate the situation and reduce the risk.
In practice, this means that psychosocial workload also falls within the employer’s area of responsibility.
Time pressure, unclear responsibilities, an unmanageable workload, constant interruptions and inadequate prioritisation are not merely side issues in working life. They may create excessive strain that the employer is required to address. This does not mean that work may never involve demanding periods. What matters is the overall situation. If signs of excessive workload recur, the volume of work is unrealistic or tasks are routinely completed by employees constantly stretching beyond reasonable limits, the situation can no longer be regarded as a temporary peak. The employer must then assess what changes are needed in the allocation of work, resourcing, schedules or management practices.
For this reason, excessive workload before the holiday season should not be addressed solely through discussions about wellbeing. For the company, it is simultaneously an employment law, operational and financial issue.
Annual holidays must be planned in advance
The same principle is reflected in the Finnish Annual Holidays Act. As a general rule, the employer must notify the employee of the timing of their annual holiday no later than one month before the holiday begins. If this is not possible, the notice must be given no later than two weeks before the holiday. The structure of the legislation makes the underlying principle clear. Holidays are intended to be based on advance planning, not last-minute improvisation. Under the Annual Holidays Act, the holiday season runs from 2 May to 30 September.
If responsibilities, substitute arrangements, approval processes or customer-facing practices for the summer are still unresolved immediately before the holiday season, the holiday is usually not the problem. The problem is that the organisation has not prepared for a foreseeable period of absence sufficiently early.
The consequences often become visible quickly. Decision-making slows down, important matters become congested at the wrong time, and employees who were supposed to be away from work are contacted during their holidays. At worst, this creates an operating model in which the organisation is nominally on holiday but, in practice, still relies on the same key individuals.
What should employers do before the holiday season?
The first task is to prioritise genuinely. Many organisations talk extensively about prioritisation, while the practical message remains that everything should ideally be completed before the holidays. This is precisely what drives employees into an unreasonable final push.
Management should communicate three matters clearly: what genuinely needs to be completed before the holiday season, what can be postponed until the autumn and what will not be done at all. This often reduces workload more effectively than any general reminder about the importance of recovery, because employees are also given permission to focus on what truly matters.
The second task is to treat holiday planning as a resourcing issue, rather than merely a scheduling exercise. Who will be responsible for customers, contracts, approvals and urgent exceptional situations? Who will make decisions while the responsible person is absent? Who will act as a substitute, and is that arrangement genuinely workable in practice?
The third task is to agree in advance on the rules concerning availability. In which situations may an employee on holiday be contacted, and in which situations should they not be contacted? If this is not resolved beforehand, the organisation may easily shift the consequences of its own inadequate planning onto individual employees and expect them to remain flexible during their holidays.
The fourth task is to take signs of excessive workload seriously before they result in sickness absences, key-person risks or employees considering leaving the organisation. If the workload is not manageable, the problem cannot be solved merely by reminding employees to take breaks or recover. The organisation must examine the volume and allocation of work, schedules, decision-making practices and the actual ability of supervisors to manage the situation.
Ultimately, the management team should ask itself a simple question: has the organisation genuinely decided what needs to be completed before the holidays and what does not? If management does not make this prioritisation, it will in practice be carried out through employees stretching themselves. That is an expensive way to manage an organisation.
A successful summer holiday is built before it begins
From the company’s perspective, the most important lesson is simple. The summer holiday is an employee’s right and an important period of recovery, but it is not a tool for compensating for a structurally excessive workload during the spring.
At its best, managing workload before the holiday season produces results quickly. Employees do not take unfinished chaos with them on holiday. Supervisors are not left alone to compensate for shortcomings in the organisation’s systems. Employees are genuinely less available during their holidays, not only on paper. The autumn begins in a more controlled manner because the work has already been organised more effectively.
A successful summer holiday does not happen by chance. It is built by deciding in good time what is essential, what can be postponed and how employees will be given a genuine opportunity to detach themselves from work. When an organisation succeeds in this, employees are more likely to return from their holidays rested, capable and ready to get back to work. The benefits usually become visible quickly in the smooth running of work, the quality of decision-making and the overall energy of the business.
Satu Edberg
HR- ja toimistopäällikkö
+358 40 531 1542
As I write this article, I notice myself returning to the same thought again and again. Should I add disclaimers? Those just-in-case paragraphs in which I explain in advance what I do not mean before I dare to say what I actually mean. That this is not an argument against taking discrimination, racism, harassment or other serious misconduct seriously. There can and should be no compromise on those issues. Yet this very need for caution feels like an essential part of the phenomenon that inspired this article. If every discussion must begin with a pre-emptive explanation, we are already quite far into a world in which evaluating shared structures is easily perceived as an attack on an individual’s experience.
The tension between individuality and community
The idea for this article arose from Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen’s recently published book Itsekkyyden aika, or The Age of Selfishness. The book is not about working life or HR, but it provides language for a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly visible in workplaces. Individuality has long represented freedom, opportunities and rights. Gradually, it has also begun to turn into a demand. Everyone is expected to listen closely to themselves, avoid discomfort and refuse to compromise. The result is paradoxical. Shared norms used to feel restrictive, but now excessive individualism has become the source of pressure.
In working life, this can be seen in situations where shared rules are readily perceived as restrictions and an individual’s experience increasingly becomes the starting point for demanding an immediate external solution. At the same time, HR is expected to demonstrate both understanding and firmness, react quickly while following a careful process, and combine situational awareness with equal treatment. Because HR operates within the framework of employment law obligations, this is not only a question of workplace culture or wellbeing. It is also a question of the legal protection of both the employer and employees.
When therapeutic language enters the workplace
One of Keltikangas-Järvinen’s most interesting observations concerns the way in which principles associated with therapeutic discourse have spread into wider public discussion. In a therapeutic setting, all emotions are real and valid, and the professional does not impose norms or value judgments. This is a virtue in care work. Working life, however, is not a therapeutic space. It is a shared system that also contains right and wrong solutions, obligations and boundaries.
In practice, this can be seen in workplaces when an experience begins to define the act itself. If something feels bad, the situation is interpreted as being wrong. Proportions become blurred, and matters are increasingly assessed according to how they feel at that particular moment rather than what actually happened and how similar situations have previously been handled. Working life cannot, of course, be a place where emotions are ignored. However, if responsibility for emotional regulation is outsourced to the system, HR and formal processes, the system begins to become overloaded.
This can be seen in everyday HR work, for example, when an employee feels that they have been treated unfairly after a supervisor has made a normal management decision. The issue may concern work schedules, the allocation of responsibilities or feedback that does not feel pleasant but does not breach the law, a collective agreement or the organisation’s internal policies. Even so, there is often an expectation that the experience must lead to a formal investigation and a documented process. HR must balance between identifying a genuine legal protection issue and recognising normal friction in working life.
Equal treatment and the principle of reasonableness
The employer’s obligation to treat employees equally is not a matter of opinion or an operating model chosen by HR. It is a legal requirement. This means that individual solutions cannot be made in isolation from the wider context. Every exception also creates a precedent, and every precedent shapes what other employees may reasonably expect.
For this reason, HR often faces situations where an employee’s experience is genuinely negative, but no legal error has occurred. No one has breached the law, an agreement or an internal policy, yet the employee still feels distressed. The natural human reaction is to think that the experience itself must be enough and that a solution should be found quickly. However, if every experience results in a burdensome process, the consequences begin to become disproportionate. This is not because the experience should be dismissed, but because these processes have been created to protect employees from serious misconduct and arbitrary treatment.
Reasonableness is a surprisingly difficult word in this discussion. It is easily interpreted as coldness, even though it is actually a form of responsibility. Reasonableness means ensuring that consequences are proportionate to the conduct in question and that different situations are handled using different tools. Not every disappointment is an injustice, and not every uncomfortable experience is evidence of inappropriate treatment. Working life inevitably includes conflicts and frustration, and the ability to compromise is a social skill without which a community cannot function.
Empathy and fairness
At this point, it is worth challenging one of the strongest assumptions of our time. We have begun to confuse empathy with fairness. A solution that feels empathetic in an individual situation is easily assumed to be automatically correct. In working life, this can lead to situations where one individual’s experience overrides the wider context and the position of other employees. Empathy without boundaries is not neutral. It may become unfair to others. From the perspective of employment law and the workplace community, fairness sometimes also requires decisions that feel uncomfortable.
What does this mean for the workplace community?
The overemphasis of individuality does not undermine a workplace community through one major crisis. It happens gradually. When exceptions become routine and solutions appear to be made on a case-by-case basis, trust erodes. Employees’ legal protection is largely based on predictability. If practices change from one situation to another depending on who expresses the strongest experience, equal treatment is placed at risk and the shared foundation disappears.
HR has a particular and often uncomfortable role in this. HR is expected to support the individual, but its task is also to protect the functioning and fairness of the community. Boundaries are not set against employees. They are there to protect them. Without boundaries, working life becomes a continuous negotiation over rights and positions, which ultimately burdens everyone.
The disappearance of shared responsibility
Perhaps the most difficult question is whether working life is moving towards a situation where individual experience begins to displace shared responsibility. At this point, it is worth looking beyond working life for a moment. In the world of sport, it is self-evident that disappointment cannot be removed through a system. Defeats, failures and setbacks are part of development. They are not seen as disruptions, but as part of learning. The ability to tolerate discomfort, process disappointment and return to the task is an essential skill.
It is reasonable to ask why this idea feels so difficult in working life. Why has the ability to tolerate disappointment become an almost disappearing resource precisely in an environment where people work together and inevitably encounter conflicts? If every form of discomfort is addressed through external measures, the community does not become stronger. It becomes more fragile.
Defending what is shared has become surprisingly radical. Yet working life cannot function without shared rules, boundaries and reciprocity. The interests of the community are not opposed to the interests of the individual. They are a precondition for them. When this is forgotten, working life begins to reinforce the very phenomenon it is trying to correct. Keltikangas-Järvinen argues that our culture now rewards behaviour that would previously have been regarded as immature. Emotions are allowed to spread regardless of time and place, compromises are seen as weakness, and setting boundaries is interpreted as a lack of empathy.
And that brings me back to disclaimers. I cannot resist including one. This article is not an argument that individual experience is irrelevant. It is an argument about what happens to working life when shared structures begin to give way to individual experience.
Sustainable working life is created when experiences are heard, but decisions are also made on the basis of the community, equal treatment and reasonableness. There is nothing inhumane about this. Quite the opposite. This phenomenon does not yet appear in the same way in every organisation, but that is precisely why it should be discussed while structures and operating practices can still be strengthened in a controlled manner, rather than only once they begin to fail.
If you are considering how these boundaries, structures and principles of equal treatment should be assessed in your organisation, please get in touch. The Folks team can support you with both HR work and employment law matters. Learn more at: https://www.legalfolks.fi/ulkoistettuhr and https://www.legalfolks.fi/tyooikeus
Satu Edberg
HR- ja toimistopäällikkö
p. +358 40 531 1542
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Imagine a situation in which AI screens hundreds of job applications in a matter of minutes and recommends the best candidates for interview, or optimises a complex shift schedule while taking into account the needs and preferences of thousands of employees. This is no longer distant wishful thinking, but a reality in many organisations. According to research, 52 per cent of Finnish organisations use AI solutions in HR tasks. Although adoption is still fragmented, the potential is enormous: AI can make recruitment, onboarding and offboarding processes more efficient, facilitate the allocation of shifts and tasks, support performance management and produce more advanced people analytics.
However, AI is only as capable as its users. Using intelligent tools effectively requires HR professionals and managers to be trained and to understand the applicable ground rules so that the benefits can be achieved responsibly and sustainably. At the same time, more is required from employers: the use of AI raises legal, ethical and practical questions that cannot be resolved merely by producing an AI strategy document. Legislation is imposing increasing obligations on the use of AI, most recently through the EU AI Act, which sets requirements for both providers and users of AI applications.
Introducing AI: needs, risks and employee participation
An employer must address several important issues before introducing an AI system into HR management. The first step is to identify the need for which AI is intended to be used and assess the associated risks. Employment and data protection legislation in particular require employers to assess in advance how new technology may affect employees. If, for example, an AI-based tool supporting recruitment is to be introduced, this concerns the very core of processing job applicants’ personal data. The employer must identify and justify why personal data is processed, how and to what extent it is used, and what changes the AI system may require in existing practices or in the information provided to applicants. Data protection legislation requires, among other things, an assessment of risks relating to personal data, including a data protection impact assessment where applicable, before new technology is introduced, regardless of whether the technology uses AI. In practice, the use of AI systems in HR almost automatically means that risks to employees’ privacy must be identified and the necessary safeguards determined in advance. Fully automated decision-making in recruitment, such as screening job applications without any human involvement in the final decision, is generally prohibited under data protection legislation. The recruiter must therefore always retain a meaningful role in the process.
Employers also have cooperation obligations when the organisation’s operations are developed by introducing new technology. Every organisation employing at least 20 people must engage in dialogue with its personnel to safeguard employees’ opportunities to influence matters affecting them. The introduction of AI-based solutions in HR is clearly such a matter and should be discussed with personnel well in advance. Employers with more than 50 employees are also subject to an express, simplified change negotiation obligation when introducing new technology. If AI is expected to reduce the need for labour or materially alter employees’ duties, more extensive change negotiations must be conducted with personnel before implementation. All these cooperation procedures must take place at the appropriate time, meaning before procurement decisions are made, in order to meet the requirements of the Act on Co-operation within Undertakings.
The Occupational Safety and Health Act also applies to the introduction of AI in the workplace. A central principle of the Act is that employers must identify work-related hazards and harmful factors and address them proactively. AI may introduce new dimensions to traditional occupational safety considerations: what kinds of risks and strain may arise from its introduction, and how should they be prevented? Learning to use new technology may, for example, place a psychological burden on employees, while concerns about their rights may cause stress when AI becomes involved in HR processes and managerial work. Employers must assess these risks as well and provide appropriate induction, support and measures to safeguard employee wellbeing during the change.
It is already widely recognised that the use of AI presents challenges for non-discrimination in working life. Under the Non-Discrimination Act, an employer may not treat employees or job applicants differently on discriminatory grounds such as age, gender or another personal characteristic. Because AI learns and draws conclusions from the data provided to it, it may absorb biases hidden in that data. A recruitment algorithm may, for instance, favour applicants on the basis of gender rather than merit. If most people recruited in the past have been of a particular gender, the AI system may interpret this as a “model of success”. Eliminating discriminatory bias from AI is difficult because algorithms are often opaque to users and their decision-making may be difficult to explain. On the basis of the current Government Programme, a research project has been launched in Finland’s public administration to identify and prevent discrimination risks associated with AI.
The EU AI Act will gradually tighten the requirements
The European Union has also entered the field of AI regulation. The EU AI Act entered into force in summer 2024 and introduces new requirements for the use of AI. Since February 2025, organisations have already been required to ensure that their personnel have an adequate level of AI literacy. AI literacy refers to employees’ ability to assess AI-generated outputs critically and to use AI responsibly and appropriately.
Further obligations will follow from August 2026, when the core risk-based requirements of the AI Act begin to apply. The Act distinguishes between four categories: prohibited AI practices, high-risk systems, limited-risk systems and minimal-risk systems. This will be a significant milestone for employers using AI, as many systems acquired to support HR processes are classified as high-risk AI systems under the Act. A high-risk classification also brings more extensive statutory obligations for the employer using the system. Compliance with the AI Act is reinforced by substantial administrative fines, which may amount to millions of euros depending on the size of the company.
Applications used to recognise employees’ emotions are prohibited where they analyse matters such as an employee’s intentions or job satisfaction. The use of biometric identifiers to categorise individuals on the basis of ethnic origin, political opinion, religion or sexual orientation is likewise prohibited. Social scoring based on personal characteristics is also prohibited where it results in detrimental treatment, such as restricting or preventing career progression. Subliminal manipulation and the exploitation of vulnerabilities are not permitted either.
In the terminology of the AI Act, an employer will typically be the deployer of a system where it acquires a ready-made AI solution for HR purposes. However, an organisation may modify a general-purpose AI system for its own purposes, in which case the employer may become a provider under the Act. The distinction between the roles of deployer and provider is important: providers are subject to significantly broader legal obligations, including continuous quality assurance, technical documentation, system certification and detailed regulatory reporting, compared with a deployer. Employers should therefore generally prefer ready-made applications designed for HR use and use them strictly in accordance with the provider’s instructions and intended purpose.
Higher risks and greater responsibilities
What types of AI use are considered high-risk in an HR context? Automated decision-making and profiling based on personal characteristics are always high-risk. Under the AI Act, high-risk systems include those that affect access to employment, employment terms, career progression or decisions concerning performance at work. Examples include AI systems used in recruitment, decisions concerning employment conditions and career development, or the termination of employment. The same category includes systems that allocate work tasks on the basis of a person’s behaviour, personality or other personal characteristics, as well as systems used to monitor and assess employee performance during employment. These are all situations in which AI directly affects individuals and their treatment in working life. They are precisely the kinds of sensitive situations in which risks must be identified.
The dividing line is not always entirely clear. Some of the uses described above may be considered low-risk if they do not cause significant harm or pose risks to employees’ health, safety or fundamental rights and do not materially influence decisions concerning them. For example, a system that screens job applications and recommends the most suitable candidates to a recruiter would clearly appear to be a high-risk application. By contrast, an AI tool that merely classifies and transfers applications between systems without influencing whether applicants progress in the recruitment process, or that identifies anomalies in decision-making without intervening in the decision itself, would fall into the minimal-risk category. Interactive AI tools, such as virtual assistants used in HR matters, fall into the limited-risk category. In such cases, the employer must inform users that they are interacting with AI.
When an employer introduces a high-risk AI system, the AI Act requires it to fulfil several obligations. First, it must ensure that the system is used appropriately and in accordance with its instructions and intended purpose. Second, the organisation must appoint a responsible person or team to oversee the system’s operation. Those responsible for oversight must have sufficient competence, training, authority and resources to perform the task. The employer must also pay particular attention to data governance and ensure that the data entered by the organisation is relevant to the intended purpose and sufficiently representative so that the system does not produce misleading results. In addition, the user organisation must respond to risks arising during use and report any errors or biased decision-making to the system provider and the competent authority where required, and cooperate with supervisory authorities where necessary.
Transparency is another key element of the Act: employees must be informed when an AI system is introduced, and where they are subject to AI-based decisions, they have the right to receive an explanation of a decision affecting them. Last but not least, the employer must retain the AI system’s automatically generated logs for at least six months where those logs are under its control. The logs may contain information on how the system reached particular outputs or decisions. Retaining and tracing this information is essential when investigating possible disputes at a later stage.
As noted above, existing legislation already requires employers to follow similar principles in many respects. Employees may, for example, be informed appropriately through cooperation procedures, while data protection legislation already requires personal data to be processed appropriately. The EU AI Act nevertheless adds new and concrete AI-specific obligations: when using high-risk AI systems, organisations must, among other things, retain logs and ensure continuous and adequate human oversight throughout the system’s lifecycle.
Users and data at the heart of an AI strategy
Although legislation provides the framework for responsible AI use, its ultimate success depends on people. A company may create an ambitious AI strategy, but if employees lack the ability, willingness or confidence to use the system, the expected benefits may not be realised. User trust is crucial, and in decisions affecting personnel it is critical. Research indicates that concerns about employees’ rights or the purpose for which a system is used directly affect whether employees accept AI as part of their everyday work. Trust is similarly weakened by concerns that employees’ ability to influence matters may be reduced and by doubts regarding the system’s actual capabilities.
Employers should therefore invest in introducing AI as openly and transparently as possible and in providing comprehensive information to personnel. Integrating AI into HR functions is always a process of change that requires traditional change management and learning. New technology may initially place a burden on both its users and those affected by its decisions, depending on the individual’s role and readiness. Management should therefore listen to employees, provide the necessary support and, above all, communicate clearly about the change. Subsequent disagreements and potential legal proceedings are also best prevented by investing in competence and AI literacy.
Usability is central to a successful AI investment. A phenomenon known as “shadow AI” has emerged: where employer-provided tools are perceived as difficult or inefficient, employees may begin to use external AI solutions instead of the organisation’s approved tools. This may cause the benefits of the investment to be lost while creating concrete data protection and cybersecurity risks as data is processed through uncontrolled channels. In addition to ensuring adequate AI literacy, organisations must therefore provide proper user training so that everyone knows how to use the new systems. Clear internal guidance is also needed on how external AI tools, such as general-purpose chatbots and other services, may be used at work. This helps protect personal data, trade secrets and other confidential information.
A central principle of the AI era is that an AI system is only as reliable as the data it uses. In addition to considering big data, organisations must pay close attention to their own HR data. If the data is incomplete or inaccurate, the AI system will inevitably draw incorrect or imprecise conclusions. At worst, an employer may unintentionally discriminate against an employee or job applicant where historical data contains structural bias. The EU AI Act therefore expressly requires the quality and reliability of data to be ensured in high-risk HR systems. In practice, this means that HR data must be collected, updated and cleaned continuously so that AI-based decisions are based on information that is as representative, accurate and relevant as possible. This is not an entirely new principle, as Finnish employers have for more than twenty years been required under the Act on the Protection of Privacy in Working Life to process only employee data that is necessary for the employment relationship.
Conclusion
The enormous potential of AI will undoubtedly be used more extensively to support HR functions in the coming years. Although its use is not free from legal or ethical challenges, AI can at its best make work more meaningful and HR and managerial processes more equal, personalised and efficient. However, AI must be introduced and used systematically so that organisations can realise its full potential while safeguarding employees’ rights. Ultimately, people remain at the heart of all of this: the users who turn strategy into reality in their daily work. Organisations that genuinely invest in their personnel’s technical and ethical competence, as well as in user-friendly tools, will be well positioned in the age of AI.
A person wearing a white shirt stands against a brick wall. Their expression is neutral, the background is brown and red, and the image has a distinctive atmosphere.
Kaisa Salo
Counsel
+35840 168 1418
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