Tieto visit- An emphatic building for activity based working style

Well now, this was our third company visit, to Tieto to see and experience their emphatic building.

I have quite a mixed feeling about this. The space is fantastic, and they have such a great views to the bay of Keilalahti! Tieto is a Finnish company developing software for various fields of industries. They are aiming for data-driven societies and to have smarter society (Tieto, 2019).

We first got a presentation about what Tieto does and their innovation process by Fredrik Jansson, they have some great and interesting projects going on with scanning combined with video to predict and maybe foresee problems. Their health care projects are surely innovative and looking into the future. It seemed to me that Tieto is really embracing intrapreneurship within the company.

I kept thinking for the whole presentation that everyone at Tieto need all the skills what we have defined at the beginning of this course: creativity, personal leader skills, digital skills and communication. Somehow the whole building is about communication and digital skills.

All the IT nerds who crunch code must know about coding, problem solving and have creative mindset (IT engineers, hmm?) Other employees just to survive and navigate in the building must have digital skills rather well developed as well. And the amount of data, that must be staggering!! Handling all that correctly, the employers must have extensive knowledge. They even have gamification included in the house app. They collect “coins” when something positive happens and you can follow as a way to get positive feedback.

After Frederik’s presentation Elina Heinonen told us about the house and gave us a tour in the premises.

This is where I started to get uncomfortable, no, actually this started when I watched the video about Frank’s day. To me something was, feeling maybe,  off from the beginning. They have created a digital model of the house and floors where the employees can choose to be visible for co-workers as they carry a Bluetooth tag with them all the time. That tag is then being followed by gazillions of scanners embedded to the walls and ceilings. (ok, toilets and such are excluded from that) and by using an app in phones and computers, it is possible to control your visibility and see if other people are available in case you have something to ask from them. This I admit, is a good feature, it creates more face2face meetings, and not only meeting through online channels such as Skype. Through the app they can book meetings and the offices available. They had also a space for visitors to work if they felt like staying, this is nice. They had also cool in-building automated features e.g. the lights are self-adjusting according how much there is light and those turn on automatically when someone enters the room. Hmm, I expected those to activate also with voice commands.

Most of employees of Tieto do not have set places or tables in the offices and they can choose where ever they like and where is space. Some keypersons or teams have their set places, but otherwise they pick what is suitable for that moment. This enforces a paperless office as well, maybe this would be only a change of mindset, but to carry computer always with me around the offices? To me that would be annoying and the fact that I like to have my own desk and have my creative chaos ? and the fact that I like to doodle on paper… I think it would be quite a learning curve for me to work in that kind of environment, but I suppose that is the future maybe anyway.

/Ritva