Strategic Research Council programmes

Transformation of Work Master Class

Challenge

How can you integrate research information into decision making? How can you get busy decision makers to pay attention to your message?

The transformation of work, along with the various phenomena related to it, is a theme that many of the research projects funded by the Strategic Research Council are studying. The projects aim to reach the same target audiences with their results, so they wanted to join forces and address their target audiences together. The master class was designed specifically for decision makers, officials and organisations with the aim of providing them with food for thought and fresh research results in order to direct working life in a sensible direction through decision making. 

Solution

Together with four SRC programmes, we organised a series of four seminars under the title ‘Transformation of Work Master Class’. We created a visual identity and structure for the seminar series, were responsible for producing all its communication, as well as for constructing and maintaining the tasaarvostn.fi website. The Transformation of Work Master Class was a continuation of the Preventing Social Exclusion Master Class series we organised the previous year.

The seminars were themed around different phenomena related to the transformation of work: Work in the Future, Young People on the Threshold of New Work, Work Teaches and the synthesis session Changing Work Changes Society and Wellbeing. The master class featured 16 researchers from 13 different research projects and 12 panelists. Representatives from a total of 21 different organisations spoke about the same theme at the seminars. We trained speakers who wanted presentation training and provided all the speakers with uniform slideshow templates and clear guidance on how to build slideshows.      

The seminars attracted about 200 attendees from almost 90 different organisations. In addition, the live stream of the event was followed by a much larger audience. On Twitter, we chose #työnmurros (transformation of work) as a hashtag that links to the ongoing discussion about the topic. On the seminar days the number of tweets increased 19-fold and reached 44% more Twitter users than normal.  

The Transformation of Work Master Class reached about 2,000 people on various channels across different sectors of society. Among others, the seminars were attended by MPs and municipal decision makers, civil servants, representatives of organisations, interest groups and researchers. 

We have also worked as partners in organising similar master classes on the future of wellbeing and preventing social exclusion. The materials and speeches of all three master classes can be found at stnmestarikurssit.fi.

Read more (in Finnish): stnmestarikurssit.fi