We are preparing to secure our operations in the worsening coronavirus situation
YTK is prepared for the impact on human resources caused by the difficult coronavirus situation. The majority of our personnel live outside the most populated area in Finland and people mostly work remotely from home.
The fear is that the new coronavirus variant will affect the operations of nationwide organisations. Concerned views on the impact of sickness-related absences have been expressed in public, and rightfully so.
At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in 2020, General unemployment fund YTK experienced its greatest wave of membership applications to date, in a time span of just a few weeks. We are not expecting a similar situation in the near future, but the rapidly spreading omicron variant may have an effect on the availability of labour force.
Auli Hänninen, Managing Director at YTK, confirms that YTK has the capacity to process applications from members even if the omicron variant would quickly affect the personnel’s sickness-related absences.
“The availability of our staff and the flexibility of our operations are at a good level. During the coronavirus pandemic, we have significantly increased the size of our staff and, if necessary, we can increase the working hours of our staff to cope with any increase in sick leaves.”
YTK is headquartered in Loimaa, and most of its staff live outside the major cities. This is beneficial in the situation where omicron is spreading rapidly.
“Another significant advantage is that YTK is not located in a congested metropolitan area, but our staff live mainly in the vicinity of Loimaa and in the southwestern parts of Finland. Vaccine coverage is very good here and there are also notably fewer infections than in Helsinki, for example,” says Auli Hänninen.
The staff continues to work mostly from home
Everything in the planning of YTK’s operations is aimed at keeping the processing times of applications reasonable. We have already been practicing this for two years of living with the coronavirus situation.
“We are committed to our promised processing time of 14 days, during which we strive to process all applications received. We have managed to maintain this timeframe for a long time, even though 2021 was also a busy year with the coronavirus pandemic and we processed a total of 739,430 applications,” says Auli Hänninen.
The YTK staff will continue to work remotely and contact with others will be kept to a minimum.
“Thanks to our extensive teleworking policy, employees placed under quarantine due to virus exposure can continue working from home, without causing work to slow down.”
