9. Company-aimed measures

Collaboration between PES and companies is important. Many of the employment instruments discussed in the previous chapters depend crucially on a well-functioning collaboration between PES and companies.

As companies experience different barriers to a successful collaboration with employment services, these also become barriers to a company’s participation in the employment efforts to include vulnerable unemployed persons in the labour market. Examples of barriers are administrative burdens in the collaboration with the employment system, lack of industry knowledge and insight into specific qualification demands among caseworkers, and challenges in establishing contact with the relevant employees at the employment services (Ekspertgruppen om Udredningen af den Aktive Beskæftigelsesindsats, 2014).

Previous research has shown that direct contact between caseworkers and companies increases the employment effects of the employment instruments and also suggests that extra resources used by employment services to contact companies help the unemployed find employment faster. One explanation of the positive influence of contact with companies could be that caseworkers with direct contact with companies acquire informal knowledge that can be used to secure a good job match between the unemployed person and the company. At the same time, caseworkers with direct contact to companies may receive information about job openings before they become publicly known and thus have a head start in terms of being able to offer concrete vacancies for the job opening (Ekspertgruppen om Udredningen af den Aktive Beskæftigelsesindsats, 2014).

The previous chapter illustrates some barriers to inclusion of vulnerable persons in the labour market that the PES can help the companies and the unemployed overcome. One example is when both employees and employers lack knowledge about work accommodations. In this context, PES has an important role in providing information about opportunities for support related to work accommodations (see chapter 6). Another example is a case of SE in Sweden, where the caseworkers handle problematic situations and serve as backup in situations, where the individual faces unexpected negative health shocks. This means that the caseworker might sometimes step in and do the participant’s job, thereby reducing the burden of the company in terms of unstable labour (see chapter 8). 

Our systematic literature review did not identify any studies on collaboration between PES or other initiatives involving the company that could increase the inclusive labour market. However, in the following, we will give some examples of initiatives which have been carried out with the aim of strengthening the inclusive labour market.

Job carving may be a relevant approach in a situation where there is a shortage of jobs that the long-term unemployed with few qualifications or with reduced work ability can handle. Job carving is a relatively new approach that aims at solving an old problem: matching employers’ and employees’ needs. Job carving refers to the practice of rearranging work tasks within a company to create tailor-made employment opportunities for all people, but especially people with reduced work capacity or people who are constrained for other reasons in the tasks they carry out (Scoppetta et al., 2019a; Scoppetta et al., 2019b).

Carving is typically done by managers, together with specialised consultants (for example from PES) who help the managers identify areas in which tasks and processes can be rearranged to create new positions within firms. The carving process can be accompanied by training to fill a new position, along with workplace adjustments (Scoppetta et al., 2019b). One motivation for the companies to participate in job carving is that it may relieve the core employees from simple work tasks so they can concentrate on the tasks that require more skills. See Box 9.1 for a concrete example.

Box 9.1 Example of job carving – case from Denmark

An example of successful job carving from Denmark involves a company with three blacksmiths who struggled to recruit a fourth. Each week, these blacksmiths spent a significant amount of time on non-productive tasks, such as sweeping and cleaning machines, which led to production downtime. To address this, the company employed a recipient of cash benefits to handle these tasks for a few hours each week. This strategic move allowed the blacksmiths to focus entirely on their primary duties, significantly boosting their productivity. As a result, the company's overall output increased to the equivalent of having an additional full-time blacksmith. This example illustrates how job carving can effectively create tailored employment opportunities for vulnerable individuals while enhancing operational efficiency. 

In the period 2020–2023, NAV offices in Norway carried out a project with the aim of improving the inclusion competences of the caseworkers. Inclusion competences encompass the knowledge and skills needed to use the ordinary workplace as a goal as well as a means in labour market inclusion. In NAV, these competences are linked to the place, then train perspective, which implies that even people with significant assistance needs are given the opportunity to develop in ordinary workplaces instead of in environments outside working life (train, then place).

The project is based on the experiences of an earlier development project in NAV, where the “Hybrid Model” was developed. The inspiration came from the implementation of SE and the establishment of new positions, the job specialists. The latter are specialised in work-oriented follow-up, and they are mainly working in the field and not in the office. The caseworkers refer clients to the job specialist when they assess that SE is a relevant instrument for their client. In the Hybrid Model, the caseworker takes a more emphatic starting point in the client’s wishes and work interests. The caseworker, together with the employer, identifies and selects a mentor in the company. The new practice is closely linked to measures such as job training combined with mentoring grants, and the Hybrid Model does not imply that the NAV caseworkers exclude the traditional instruments or that they move into a job specialist role themselves. The innovation lies in the ordinary caseworker developing a more involved collaboration with one dedicated support resource (mentor, sponsor) in some selected cases in the workplace.

During 2018–2019, the PES in Sweden carried out a campaign called Gör plats! on behalf of the government. The aim was to influence norms and attitudes so that more employers want to hire people with disabilities. The impact of the campaign was evaluated by the PES. The evaluation included a media analysis and questionnaire surveys conducted among employers (de Verdier et al., 2020).

With the chosen evaluation design, it is not possible to conclude whether there is a causal effect of the campaign or not. But the findings in the evaluation indicate that the campaign had an impact on employers and the media. About 40 percent of the employers stated that they have become more positively disposed to employing someone with a disability after seeing the campaign, and the evaluators find a positive correlation between the number of registrations of interest in PES and the willingness of employers to hire with support and campaign activity. The campaign has also affected the media image of people with disabilities in working life. The media analysis shows that media reporting on the situation for people with disabilities in the labour market increased after the campaign started and that the group is portrayed more as an untapped potential than as a group with difficulties on the labour market. The analysis also shows that PES have changed their own way of describing people with disabilities, from vulnerability to resources. In around half of all occasions where PES is mentioned in the media in 2019, the group’s potential is highlighted, while this was done on only a few occasions in 2017 (de Verdier et al., 2020).

Concerning concrete company-aimed measures, the caseworker interviews contain rather limited information on effects of various types of campaigns. Such endeavours have involved the caseworkers we have interviewed to a very limited degree. If, on the other hand, we focus on the practical collaboration with employers, along with reflections on what might or might not motivate employers to hire vulnerable youth, seniors, immigrants, and people with disabilities, we have more data.

Overall, the caseworkers appear quite aware of how local labour market conditions affect their work and the likelihood that persons with various employment barriers may find a job. It is interesting to contrast a Danish caseworker who said she had a feeling that everything was possible right now because the labour market “was glowing” with a caseworker from northern Finland who said that finding jobs for vulnerable youth without education was very hard, because all companies in his area were looking for workers with professional skills or higher education. A third example of a caseworker with a very keen perception of the possibilities of finding work or training opportunities for persons with labour market barriers is a youth counsellor from mid-Sweden who recounted how several large companies in his area constitute an almost no-go job search area for such youth. These companies, according to the caseworker, practise a narrow focus on bottom-line return and are unwilling to hire persons without adequate education or full working capacity. Fortunately, small and medium-size companies in his region have other hiring practices, possibly due to having stronger local roots, hence a stronger sense of social responsibility. In these companies, it was easier to find work or start up as an apprentice despite certain lacunae in the school records, etc.

Many of the interviewed caseworkers did not work directly with companies themselves but collaborated with consultants in some other department in the PES who did. Some caseworkers, however, were directly involved in contacting companies, sometimes also in the concrete setting of certain terms of the situation. In a Danish setting, for example, if a citizen is approved for a flex job, the job centre must decide on how many hours a citizen can work and with what work intensity. The employer is only obliged to pay for the equivalent number of full-time hours (so an employer will pay for 5 hours if a worker works 10 hours at 50% intensity). However, these decisions concerning work hours and intensity cannot be taken without consideration of a concrete job, often also a concrete employer’s expectations of what a normal (100 pct.) performance in such a job is. In that sense, the job centre caseworkers involved in establishing a flex job often must have a dialogue with both the jobseekers with reduced work capacity and the employer about some of the conditions of the job. A Danish caseworker who is regularly involved in trying to find jobs for long-term unemployed cash benefits recipients describes these processes as a “delicate balance”, not least when trying to convince an employer with a job that needs to be filled out that a jobseeker with various barriers is the right person for it. She describes it as not uncommon that employers “burn their fingers when the citizen fails to show up” and that they must sometimes be the citizen’s advocate vis-à-vis the employer, who may want to dismiss an employee who is unstable or otherwise does not perform sufficiently in their eyes. 

Hence, many interviews clearly show that good collaboration with employers is of paramount importance when it comes to finding jobs for persons with employment barriers. The caseworker’s job becomes easier the more the employers need workers. In addition, an amount of mutual trust is also important. The caseworkers in the employment system must be able to trust that employers will not abuse the vulnerable jobseekers they send their way. For their part, the employers must be able to trust that caseworkers guide workers in their direction who have a reasonable chance of living up to the requirements in the job. 

One of the interviewed caseworkers had experiences with job carving. For example, there is a shortage of electricians, and the public employment service office, in collaboration with employers and educational institutions, has created a cable fitter training course where unemployed persons learn to help draw cables. This training helps the unemployed find a job where they help electricians with simple tasks.