What is it like to work in a family business?
Made in Finland Shop is a family-owned company. The owners, Tomas and Salla, work together almost every working day. How do you do this when you are married to each other and in contact 24/7? What is it like to work with your spouse? In this blog post, we'll tell you what it's like to work in our family business.
Every day we leave together to the office, where we both have our own workstations. We both have very different working styles and our own projects, which make our work very different if we were to compare them. For peace and concentration, we can just put our headphones on and get our own space and peace. This has worked really well for us, allowing us to do our work in peace. At the end of the working day, we return home together and spend our free time relaxing and exercising. We aim to ensure that we get to see and otherwise socialise with our family and friends, which is a good counterbalance to work and being alone. However, during these exceptional times, this has reduced and we have had to test our relationship a bit.
For us, working together has functioned very naturally. At work, we are in work mode and mainly just talk about work matters, and we both have our own areas that we manage on a daily basis. We also both make our own decisions on our responsibility areas, so we are very autonomous in our work. We do discuss important decisions so that different viewpoints can be considered and thought about. However, the final decision is made by the person on whose area of responsibility the decision is to be made. It has been important for us to act professionally at work, and this has made it easier for us to be at work and to separate work and leisure time.
At home we have our own things, which allows us both to have our own time. The biggest problem we've noticed is that it's too easy to also talk about work at home; so, at times, it feels like we're working all the time. However, we are aware of this issue, and we need to be extra careful to slow down and take a break sometimes so that neither of us burns out and doesn't gamble at the expense of our health.
Many people might wonder how we don't go crazy when we are practically together all the time. This hasn't happened to us. Thank goodness! And we're happy to say that there are very few conflicts between us. This has made it easier for us to work together. Of course, changes in life situations for both of us and in the company can have an impact on this, and we have agreed together that we will keep our private and professional lives and the company separate. We also don't have children or pets, which makes our everyday life more flexible and a little more relaxed. Should this change at some point in the future, we’ll have to re-analyse the situation and think about how we organise work, business and family life. We don't have any tips or secrets on how to improve the way a couple works together or how things should be done. Things depend on the people, their life situations and the situation of the company.
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