A strategy that came to life – Nokian Renkaat, Global Leadership Event

Strategy is a total waste if you keep it in the back of a safe collecting dust. That’s why it needs to be brought to life and turned into action.

When it’s time to plan for the future, most companies don’t turn to a clairvoyant with a crystal ball. Sure, you can anticipate the future, but it’s up to every company to decide the direction it wants to take. Strategy is how you get there.

The new Nokian Renkaat internal strategy work was about to be released. The whole brand and company organization model had been shaken up. The next challenge was to find a way to get people to buy into it. The Global Leadership Event brought over 120 people together at Helsinki’s Kaapelitehdas to talk about shared goals for the coming year and the results of the strategy work.

”The goal was to get supervisors to embrace the new strategy, brand and organizational model. We also wanted this to be a prelude to the upcoming changes to our work culture. Today, work is no longer tied to a desk or an office. People can work whenever, however and from wherever they want,” says Nokian Renkaat VP, Marketing and Communications, Antti-Jussi Tähtinen.

Flexibility was also a big part of planning and designing the event. We wanted to give guests an experience to remember instead of just sore butt muscles after a day spent standing and sitting. ”We asked: What kind of experience would this brand be? The whole design process was based on this idea and we wanted to give participants the chance to really experience the strategy and change hands-on,” says Tapaus Account Director, Caroline Korhonen.

You can look and you have to touch

Kaapelitehdas’ industrial atmosphere gave the event some rough edges to work with. The space was transformed into an experience where the new strategy, brand, values and work culture were brought to life.

”Sure, we could have held the event in a typical hotel seminar space. But those fancy white tablecloths aren’t really our thing,” Antti-Jussi says.

Designed to reflect the changes happening in the company itself, the seminar space was designed to move and flow, and the layout was changed many times over the course of the day. Instead of standing around bar tables and between dividers, guests spent the day socializing and sipping coffee together and sitting on gym balls.

The brand and its new values really guided the design of the space, right down to the smallest details. The catering was all done sustainably and the wellbeing of staff was supported with things like the changing layout and those gym balls.

”Values don’t mean anything until they’re put into action. It’s the little details that really stick with people, so the whole experience was really built around them,” Antti-Jussi says.

We also brought some upcoming projects straight into the event venue. ”We’ve got a large factory project in North America and test center under construction in Spain. Instead of just sharing some slides about them, we really wanted people to get to experience them first hand,” says Antti-Jussi.

An AR experience let guests literally see and experience the project from all angles. And staff got the chance to compete on a five-meter long Scaletrix test track.

What really brings us together?

Some people write their company values down on some paper, toss it into the back of a safe and then wonder why nothing changes. An internal strategy launch is huge opportunity to get people to commit to your company’s new direction, and it’s definitely worth taking.

”It’s important to us that people have the chance to be together. It’s not the office that connects us to each other, it’s spending time together, shared values and a shared future,” Antti-Jussi says.

Booking a great venue and bringing out the bells and whistles isn’t enough to create a shared experience. Authentic experiences start from way deeper than that. When you give people the chance to twist and shape the strategy with their own hands, it starts to feel like their own – and more importantly – our own.

 

The Tapaus team:

Account director: Caroline Korhonen
Planning: Marianne Kiiski, Sanna Lukkarila, Sini Kervinen, Petri Rantonen
Executive producer: Joonas Patama
Producer: Jussi Laine
Production coordinator: Mikko Suomi

Want to hear more about this event?
Get in touch with Caroline: caroline.korhonen@tapaus.fi, +358 40 556 999

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