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Mind the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the everyday life in organisations was in- fluenced quite a bit. Based on my findings, a few things are important to no- tice with FTMs. In general, organisations should support the FTMs in addi- tion to other employees to adjust to the ‘new normal’, whatever it might in each organisation mean.
Organisations should ensure that their new hires such as FTMs coming from other organisations are familiarised well-enough to their new organisations.
This is especially central, if the ‘new normal’ includes a lot of remote work.
Tacit information about the organisation, ways of operating and its culture likely are not transferred via Teams or Zoom as in interactions at the office.
This difficultness of getting into a new organisation even during the later phases of the pandemic was visible with some of my informants.
Finally, this induction to the work organisation is a key for maintaining the organisational culture. A strong organisational culture is beneficial for organ- isations especially in turbulent times, and it seems, in some organisations the culture is at risk to become weaker due to lacking human interactions in live encounters. Also, Wojtczuk-Turek et al. (2022) have pointed out this risk.
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gender, and the starting date as an FTM. Therefore, it seemed, that personal experiences and ideas about management work were actually quite heteroge- neous in the informants’ statements.
A clear limitation of the study is self-evidently the fact that all informants were highly educated people, as no blue-collar superiors were interviewed.
This might lead to a systemic skew of “the worldviews” (Laine, 2018, p. 31–
32) that were obtained in the data. All the participants of the study also rep- resented the Finnish work context, which is best described as a Nordic wel- fare state, which might be different from the context of another country.
Finally, some large companies likely have such a thorough in-house training for FTMs that their FTMs might have been missing from the group of inform- ants. This was recognised early on and therefore no conclusions of the quality or sufficiency of FTM support in companies in general were made.
5.6.2 Interviews
The interviews were semi-structured theme interviews which were con- ducted remotely with the exception of the first interview, which was a face- to-face meeting. First, due to the structured nature of the interviews, the in- formants were at least to some extent guided by it. It means, that it of course could have limited the informants’ statements. However, the informants were allowed to speak freely once a theme was introduced to them and then asked detailed questions about the topics related to their FTM experiences, that they brought up.
Also, the semi-structured form of the interviews, might have led to some in- formants not bringing up things that others did, because they did not remem- ber them or find them important. It is also possible, that the interviewer did not remember to ask some details or then the interview structure had been updated between the interviews. Another round of interviews to confirm some things would have helped in this sense.
Also, 12 out of 13 interviews were conducted remotely and not face-to-face, which might have negatively affected the feeling of trust during the inter- views. To foster trust, the cameras were always on during the interviews, ex- cept on some occasions, when the internet connection got unstable during the interview. However, in these cases, the cameras were on in the beginning and at the end of the interviews. Only one informant mentioned that it would have been nicer to meet face-to-face. This said, all informants were offered the option of participating remotely via Zoom or in a traditional face-to-face setting at the IEM department of Aalto University in Otaniemi, Espoo. A fur- ther disadvantage of remote interviews was of course the technical hiccups
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referred to earlier, which might have interrupted the informant’s line of thought or concentration to a certain theme.
Then again, since the interviews were conducted in June–July 2022, people were already very familiar with the remote operations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and they had been forced to build trust online and deal with tech- nical problems during earlier encounters. In that sense, I do not regard this remote nature of the majority of the interviews as a problem. Most likely, the remote setting was an advantage and lowered the ‘bar’ of joining the study in the first place, which could in fact add to the richness of the data collected.
5.6.3 Biases
One possible limitation of this study are biases. As mentioned earlier in chap- ter 3.1.3, I recognised a couple of biases during the thesis process and was able to avoid their effects. In addition to these biases I mentioned, I have been pondering with human biases throughout my master’s studies, which likely has increased my awareness and criticality towards my own thinking. There- fore, the idea of having biases is not something new to me that I would have needed to apply for the first time in this thesis. But of course, I only have limited experience on conducting research, which means that this thesis has nevertheless been a learning journey for me.
5.6.4 Methodological limitations
A clear methodological limitation, but on the same time an advantage, of the study is the limited number of participants i.e., 15 in total of which 13 were included in the analysis phase. On one hand, from such a small group of peo- ple, no generalisations applying to societies or populations at large can be made. On the other hand, the limited number of participants allowed a deep dive to their experiences as FTMs leading to a thorough list of possible expe- riences. This means, that the richness of the data obtained from the limited but diverse group could be harnessed. As mentioned in the Introduction, the goal of this study was to widen the understanding of the FTM process in Fin- land and to achieve this, a qualitative research setting was the perfect choice.
Another factor related to the generalisability as well as the reliability of the results is the fact that the informants were in different phases of their FTM processes. Some had been FTMs only 2 months and some almost three years.
Furthermore, the lack of triangulation i.e., only relying on the FTMs’ self- reports can affect the reliability of the results. With interviews of e.g., the FTMs' own superiors and subordinates, some aspects could have been con- firmed.
Also, this study has occurred in a certain space of time, in a certain context and only reflects the participants’ experiences and thinking at this given
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moment. As we all know, human beings are masters at learning, adapting and also forgetting. Likely on another time, some answers of the informants would be different but nevertheless I consider them as truthful and real to them at the time of the interviews of this study.
Finally, as with all qualitative research, the results of this study are “interpre- tations” (Laine, 2018, p. 37–38) of the words that the informants used to de- scribe their experiences. However, as earlier has been extensively explained, a set of measures have been taken to avoid false or unjustified interpretations as best could.