How to maintain healthy spaces in the future?

The healthy spaces -report accumulated over a thousand participations and revealed not only five concrete problems in public spaces but also lots of excellent, ready to use development proposals for solving the issues in the future.

The Foundation for Municipal Development KAKS and real estate education provider Kiinko invited the members of the Trade Union of Education in Finland, OAJ and the Union of Health and Social Care Professionals in Finland, Tehy, to a joint online dialogue to evaluate which factors prevent and which advance healthy workspaces. The healthy spaces -report is based on a national Healthy spaces 2028 -programme, of which goal is to establish a new way of acting in property maintenance where buildings’ condition, convenience and users’ opinions are mapped regularly.

All parties were satisfied with the inclusive way of listening to stakeholders’ ideas and solutions for developing healthy workspaces. “Inclusion has been the baseline of this project. We need to know what the reality in peoples’ daily lives is,” says the working environment specialist Kaija Ojanperä from Tehy.

What can be done?

Guaranteeing healthy workspaces in the future requires active and timely communications, especially, when someone notices shortcomings in the public spaces. “Inclusion has been the only way of making the users of the spaces a part of the development work. It is also important that the proprietors and professionals have been linked in the same conversations. It was noticed in the research that many of the issues could be fixed on a daily level if there was more communication between different parties”, says the CEO of Kiinko, Jarno Tuimala.

“Maintaining trust is not challenging, if there is will for trying. Issues should be managed in an open manner and with the use of proper professionals. We need a new grip of taking care of properties”, says OAJ’s working life advisor Riina Länsikallio.

The results of the report are beneficial for municipalities and workplaces. “Both the users of the spaces and the professionals had parallel standpoints and proposed solutions that help us move forward”, Jarno Tuimala comments.