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WORKING IN SWEDEN

Ten phrases you’ve definitely heard if you work in Sweden

Sweden's global reputation as a hub for gender equality, efficiency and work-life balance can also result in some baffling conversations for those new to doing business with Swedes. Here's The Local's guide to the ten catchphrases all foreign workers need to know.

Published: 18 February 2015 09:56 CET
Updated: 21 March 2024 15:17 CET
Ten phrases you've definitely heard if you work in Sweden
"We have to cut this meeting short because it's my turn to pick up Kalle from preschool." Photo: Scandinav/imageban.sweden.se

1. ‘Don’t call me after 3.30pm. I’ll be picking up the kids’

Swedish parents can quite happily walk out of the office mid-afternoon to pick up their children from daycare or schools without other colleagues raising an eyebrow.

Thanks to heavily subsidised daycare, mums and dads can afford to go back to work after taking their parental leave and many couples share the responsibility of picking up and dropping off their children from nursery. With more women in top roles in business or politics compared to a lot of other European countries, it wouldn’t make sense to Swedes to do things any other way.

2. ‘I’m off on paternity leave for six months’

That parental leave we mentioned adds up to 480 days per couple. Each parent has three months reserved exclusively for him or her and the rest can be shared between the couple. Should one of them decide not to take their allocation, those days cannot be transferred to the other partner and are lost.

The result? Head to any Swedish café during the week and you’ll come across the country’s notorious lattepappor enjoying a coffee break, before heading to the park with their kids. Taking time off to spend with your children is actively encouraged in Sweden and should not be detrimental to your career.

3. ‘I have to work late so I won’t be home until 6pm’

Work-life balance is second-nature to Swedes. Even those not picking up children regularly leave the office at 4pm or 5pm, depending on their start time. You won’t get promoted for staying later – your colleagues will just think you’re a bit strange or have no friends.

That said, Sweden has embraced the global obsession with smartphones and tablets (what else would you expect in such a tech-savvy country), so answering emails out-of-hours has become much more common in recent years. Collaboration is also a key buzzword in the Swedish workplace – if there is a pressing deadline, everyone will be expected to work extra hours and muck in.

4. ‘Can you ring me back? I’m just having a fika’

Swede’s love their fika (coffee and cake) breaks and will openly (sometimes even proudly) tell you when they are having one – even in the midst of a company crisis.

The Local has been asked to call back CEOs, politicians and police officers because they were busy getting some caffeine into their systems when we rung them for a comment on breaking news stories.

A key point here is that they all still pick up their phones (at least before 3.30pm). We’ve experienced less call screening in Sweden’s open society than in many other western nations.

5. ‘The managing director is in a meeting but here’s her mobile number. Why don’t you text her?’

Here’s another example of that Swedish openness. Phone numbers and addresses are widely available in Sweden. You can look up anyone’s contact details online and if you’re calling from a reputable company, you won’t be scoffed at if you try to contact a CEOs or senior public figure directly. And now you’re almost halfway through this article, you should not have batted an eyelid that the manager in this example was a woman.

6. ‘Where are you standing at the moment?

Health-conscious Swedes have embraced a trend for desks that can be raised or lowered, so you’ll often see people standing up typing at their computers, or holding meetings upright on two feet. Given that Swedes are the second tallest people in the world after the Dutch, this can be a bit intimidating for shorter foreign workers at first. 

7. ‘Where’s the CEO? He’s on dishwater duty this week’

A less hierarchical structure in Swedish businesses compared to in many other countries means that you’ll see some CEOs doing the washing up and making tea for their colleagues or even joining in with company bake-offs and sport events. Swedish companies love team-building activities, so also expect plenty of these kind of group social activities after work in bigger firms.

8. ‘I can’t work tomorrow, I’m VABing’

VAB stands for Vård av Barn (Care of Children). Parents get VAB time on at least 80 percent of their salary (paid by the state) if their children are sick and they need to stay at home to look after them. Swedes would not dream of sending a sick child to daycare for fear of spreading germs around.

Once again, both mums and dads take advantage of VAB time and employers should not judge any parents who need to take time off for this reason. Swedes will also be open about the impact this has had on their work. “Sorry I haven’t read the newspapers this morning as my kid has a cold,” a press officer for a very senior government minister once told The Local.

9.  ‘I am leaving at 2pm for a weekend in Finland’

That 5pm finishing time that’s probably making you extremely jealous if you’re reading this from London, Tokyo or New York is pushed forward to mid-afternoon at weekends in many Swedish offices as workers head off to their second country homes (not just the richer ones, “summer” houses are surprisingly affordable in Sweden) or for a break elsewhere in Scandinavia.

It can be a nightmare if you’re trying to close a business deal or get a comment or update on a project you’re working on. But if you’re a foreign worker at a Swedish company you might also get to embrace the dream, and find yourself warming up in a rural sauna before the sun sets.

10. ‘Try me again in four weeks, I am off on holiday’

It’s much more common in Sweden than a lot of other countries to take long periods of holiday. Swedes are typically entitled to take four consecutive weeks, when they make the most of those summer houses or jet off in search of sunshine in southern Europe.

This means that Sweden’s cities are quieter than usual during June and July – perhaps an ideal time to take advantage of the weak krona and invite foreign friends to come and stay, while your boss is out of the office.

Article written by Maddy Savage in 2015

For members

WORKING IN SWEDEN

Half of those blocked by Sweden’s work permit salary threshold will be graduates

A new analysis by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise has found that 51 percent of the labour migrants likely to be blocked by a new higher salary threshold will be graduates. Karin Johansson, the organisation's Deputy Director General, told The Local how this will hurt businesses.

Published: 22 April 2024 14:21 CEST
Half of those blocked by Sweden's work permit salary threshold will be graduates

When Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard received the results of a government inquiry into setting the median salary as the threshold for new work permits, she said that highly qualified foreign workers would not be affected. 

“This is an important step in our work to tighten requirements for low-qualified labour migrants and at the same time to liberalise and improve the rules for highly qualified labour migration,” she said. “Sweden should be an attractive country for highly qualified workers.” 

But according to the confederation’s new analysis, published last week, graduates will in fact make up the majority of those blocked from coming to Sweden, if the government increases the minimum salary to be eligible for a work permit to 34,200 kronor a month from the 27,400 kronor a month threshold which came into force last November. 

“The politicians’ argument does not hold up,” Johansson told The Local. “More than 50 percent of those who have this kind of salary are skilled workers with a graduate background. These are the people that that the government has said that they really want to have in Sweden. So we are a little bit surprised that they are still going to implement this higher salary threshold.” 

Of those earning between 80 percent of the median salary (27,360 kronor) and the median salary (34,200 kronor), the study found that 30 percent were working in jobs that required “extended, university-level competence”, and a further 21 percent in jobs requiring “university-level education or higher”. 

“They are technicians and engineers, and many of the others are also really skilled workers that are hard to find on the Swedish labour market at the moment,” Johansson said. 

The proposals made by inquiry were put out for consultation in February, with the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise planning to submit its response later this week. 

Johansson said that further raising the threshold risked exacerbating the serious labour shortage already suffered by Swedish companies. 

"In our recruitment survey, we have discovered that 30 percent of all planned hires never get made because companies cannot find the right people," she said. "Many companies are simply having to say 'no' to businesses. They can't expand. So, of course, it will have an impact on the Swedish economy if they now increase the salary threshold. We know that there will be fewer people coming from abroad to work in Sweden." 

Johansson said she had little faith in the exemption system proposed by the inquiry, under which the the Swedish Public Employment Service will draw up a list of proposed job descriptions or professions to be exempted, with the Migration Agency then vetting the list before sending it on to the government for a final decision. 

"The decision of who will be exempted will be in some way a political one, and in our experience, it's the companies that know best what kind of people they need," she said. "So we are not in favour of that kind of solution. But, of course, it's better than nothing." 

She said that companies were already starting to lobby politicians to ensure that the skills and professions they need to source internationally will be on the list of exemptions, a lobbying effort she predicted would get only more intense if and when the new higher salary requirement comes into force next June.  

"If you have a regulation, not every company can have an exemption. You need to say 'no' sometimes, and that will be hard for companies to accept," she predicted. "And then they will lobby against the government, so it will be messy. Certainly, it will be messy." 

Although there are as yet no statistics showing the impact of raising the minimum salary for a work permit to 80 percent of the median salary last November, Johansson said that her members were already reporting that some of their foreign employees were not having their work permits renewed. 

"What we are hearing is that many of the contracts companies have with labour from third countries have not been prolonged and the workers have left," she said. 

Rather than hiring replacements in Sweden, as the government has hoped, many companies were instead reducing the scale of their operations, she said. 

"The final solution is to say 'no' to business and many companies are doing that," she said. "If you take restaurants, for example, you might have noticed that many have shortened their opening hours, they have changed the menus so it's easier with fewer people in the kitchen. And also shops, the service sector, they have fewer staff."

To give a specific example, she said that Woolpower, a company based in Östersund that makes thermal underwear, supplying the Swedish Armed Forces, had been struggling to recruit internationally. 

"They have seamstresses from more than 20 different countries and it's more or less impossible to find a seamstress in Sweden today," she said. "It's really hard for them to manage the situation at the moment and they are a huge supplier to Swedish defence." 

She said that the new restrictions on hiring internationally were also forcing existing employees and also company owners to work harder.  

"Current employees need to work longer hours than they have done and if you're a small business, you, as an owner, will work more than you have done before," she said. 

The best solution, she said, would be to abolish the salary thresholds and return to Sweden's former work permit system, which required that international hires receive the salary and other benefits required under collective bargaining agreements with unions. 

But she said that the government's reliance on the support of the Sweden Democrats party, enshrined in the Tidö Agreement, meant this was unlikely to happen. 

"This is the result of the Tidö Agreement, and you if you take away one single piece of this agreement, I think maybe everything will fall apart. So I think it's hard. When we discuss this with the different parties, they all agree that they want to push ahead with it. But it's the Sweden Democrats who put this on the table when they made their agreement." 

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