Health and Safety in Finland: 9 Duties for a Helsinki Office
Helsinki attracts a particular kind of international entity: engineering and product teams, gaming and platform businesses, and the Nordic operations of financial and professional firms.
Those entities tend to be well run and lightly governed, and Finland's framework does not accommodate that combination well. It attaches duties from the first employee, requires an appointment at every workplace regardless of size, treats occupational health care as compulsory rather than a benefit, and expects several of your arrangements to be registered with a national body.
Nine duties.
1. Every workplace needs an occupational safety and health manager
No threshold, and this is the appointment groups most often lack.
The employer must name an occupational safety and health manager for every workplace. That person represents the employer in safety cooperation and is responsible for organising it. Where nobody has been appointed, the employer occupies the role by default rather than the obligation disappearing.
For a Helsinki entity of any size, this is a named role with defined responsibilities, not a line in a group policy. The Finnish Centre for Occupational Safety publishes guidance on employer responsibilities and obligations.
2. A representative at ten, a committee at twenty
Two thresholds close together, and both catch a growing office.
Where ten or more employees work regularly at a workplace, employees elect an occupational safety and health representative together with two deputies. Where twenty or more work regularly, an occupational safety and health committee is established with both employer and employee representation.
Salaried and professional staff have their own entitlement to elect a representative for their group, which matters in a firm whose population is mostly professional rather than operational. Terms of office are typically two calendar years, subject to sectoral agreements.
3. Those appointments are reported to a national register
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The filing obligation foreign parents almost never make.
Finland maintains a register of occupational safety and health personnel, established by its own statute. The employer reports the names and details of the safety manager, the representatives and their deputies, and committee members, together with the occupational health care provider.
This is a notification to a national body rather than an internal record, and responsibility for keeping it current sits with the safety manager or another authorised person. An entity that appointed people three years ago and has since had turnover almost certainly has a register entry that no longer describes it.
4. Every workplace needs a written action programme
A document with no direct British equivalent.
Every workplace must have an occupational safety and health action programme setting out the development needs and objectives for promoting safety and health. The objectives must be discussed with employees or their representatives, and the programme must take account of the occupational health care action plan.
Two features distinguish it from a group policy. It is workplace-specific and objective-setting rather than descriptive, and its content is subject to consultation rather than communication. A translated corporate policy statement does not meet it.
5. Occupational health care is compulsory, and it is preventive
The obligation that most changes the cost and shape of compliance for a foreign parent.
Under the Occupational Health Care Act, the employer must arrange occupational health care at its own expense, to prevent health hazards arising from work and working conditions and to protect and promote employees' safety, working capacity and health.
Two points matter. This is preventive care rather than treatment, so it is not the same thing as a private medical benefit and does not substitute for one. And its scope is wide: the people covered are those covered by the safety Act, which includes agency workers, summer workers, part-time employees, those on short fixed-term contracts and trainees.
A group treating occupational health as a discretionary benefit for permanent staff has misread both the nature and the coverage of the duty. The occupational safety and health administration publishes guidance on arranging it.
6. The workplace survey, and what it can be extended to cover
The mechanism through which occupational health care engages with your actual workplace.
Occupational health care carries out a workplace survey, and the employer must ensure it is comprehensive enough across all tasks and conditions for the provider to make proposals for improving health and safety. The employer must supply the information the provider needs about the work, work arrangements, occupational diseases, accidents, personnel and workplace conditions and changes to them.
The survey can be supplemented by a targeted survey examining particular hazards more closely, and the areas expressly contemplated include psychosocial workload factors and ergonomics.
For a software or financial operation in Helsinki, that is the route by which workload, screen work and organisational pressure get examined properly, and it is a mechanism most foreign parents do not know they are paying for.
7. Hazard assessment, held and kept current
The core duty, expressed with a specific possession requirement.
The employer must identify and assess hazards arising from work, working conditions and the working environment, and must have the assessment in its possession. It must be reviewed when circumstances change materially and otherwise kept up to date. Where the employer lacks sufficient expertise, external experts must be used, and the employer must satisfy itself that the expert is sufficiently competent.
The consolidated Act is published by Finlex, and an English translation is available through the ILO's legislative database.
8. Violence and harassment carry specific advance obligations
Two provisions that put Finland ahead of the British position.
Where work involves an evident threat of violence, the employer must prepare procedural instructions in advance, addressing the management of threatening situations and the ways in which the effects of a violent incident on employee safety can be prevented or limited. Security arrangements and equipment must be checked where necessary.
Separately, where harassment or other inappropriate treatment causing harm or danger to health occurs, the employer must take available measures once informed. Finnish guidance is explicit that this extends to harassment originating from customers, not only from colleagues.
That places Finland alongside Chile, and ahead of the position arriving in Great Britain in October 2026, on third-party conduct.
9. Agency workers, and what the user undertaking must do
Relevant because so many Helsinki entities staff partly through agencies.
Where an employer uses agency labour under its direction and supervision, it must comply with the employer provisions of the safety Act during the work. Before work begins it must define the skill requirements and special features of the work sufficiently precisely and notify them to the agency, and it must particularly attend to the worker's orientation to the work, conditions, safety measures and, where necessary, cooperation and occupational health care arrangements.
It must also notify the workplace's occupational health care service and the relevant safety representative that the work is starting. That notification is easy to miss and specific.
What a Helsinki entity needs
| Duty | Trigger | Common position |
|---|---|---|
| Safety manager | Every workplace | Not appointed |
| Representative and committee | Ten and twenty employees | Not elected or established |
| National register entry | On appointment and change | Never filed, or stale |
| Action programme | Every workplace, with objectives | Group policy translated |
| Occupational health care | Compulsory, preventive, wide coverage | Treated as a benefit |
| Workplace survey | Through the health care provider | Not used for psychosocial or ergonomics |
| Hazard assessment | Held, current, expert input where needed | Held abroad, out of date |
| Violence and harassment | Advance instructions, action on notice | Reactive only |
| Agency workers | Skill definition, orientation, notifications | Assumed to be the agency's job |
Rows one and three are the quickest to close and the most conspicuous when absent, because both are matters of record rather than judgement.
The Nordic picture, completed
Finland is the fourth Nordic jurisdiction in this series, and together they show how much variation sits inside a region groups habitually treat as one.
Sweden regulates the organisational and social working environment directly and renumbered its entire rulebook at the start of 2025. Denmark requires a written workplace assessment from the first employee and publishes inspection outcomes. Norway adjusted its arrangements for smaller employers. Finland requires a safety manager at every workplace, a national register entry, an action programme and compulsory preventive occupational health care.
Four countries, four sets of artefacts, all deriving from the same EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC and from a shared regional tradition that makes them look more alike than they are.
What travels is the methodology, the register and the review cycle. What does not travel is the appointment, the filing or the programme. Holding one group view while each entity meets its own national test is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits confirm each entity meets its own requirements rather than the regional assumption.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with locally qualified practitioners in Finland, so the appointments are made and registered, the action programme exists, and the occupational health care relationship is used for what it is capable of, while your group keeps one point of contact across every country. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with IT and software and finance and banking organisations, which describe most foreign-owned headcount in Helsinki.
Our global health and safety consultants handle the neighbouring jurisdictions that usually accompany a Finnish entity, and our international health and safety consultants can establish what is outstanding locally.
If nobody in your group can name your Finnish entity's occupational safety and health manager, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
