Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

As a student during my studies, I have been told about entrepreneurs who have red numbers in their financial statements, and there is a forest machine operator shortage in Sweden. The basic idea of this thesis was to examine the underlying factors that may have caused the problems described above.
The aim of this thesis was to investigate the factors that create stress and job satisfaction as a forest machine operator. The study was performed as a comparison between forest companies own harvesting teams and entrepreneur teams to investigate if there are any differences in stress and job satisfaction between the two different types of team. The study was conducted in collaboration with SCA Skog.
The material for this study was collected by doing interviews with SCA's harvesting teams. A total of 27 forest machine operators were interviewed, divided into a total of 10 separate harvesting teams.
It was very similar between the different type of teams, which situations the operators experienced stress. Stress occurred primarily in connection with machine movals and when there were deficiencies in the logging plans. The majority of the forest machine operators experienced industry's small storages as a major cause of the high pressure present in forest machine operator profession today.
The own teams had in general better working conditions. It seems to be a lower pressure on a forest machine operator employed directly to SCA, toward being an employee of an entrepreneur, with a logging contract with SCA. One can have a calmer work pace, driver mistakes will not be as treacherous. The reason that has been discussed is that it depends on who owns the machine. Is it the multi-billion dollar company SCA or an entrepreneur with a relatively small business that owns the machine. SCA:s economic backbone means that you will have less pressure as a forest machine operator working directly to SCA.
Job satisfaction was high in general in all the interviewed harvesting teams. One detail that distinguished the teams with a very high work satisfaction, against teams with lower job satisfaction, was regular team meetings. They met and for example took a coffee break together and that gave those teams a higher satisfaction in their work.